Douglas McCarthy, the vocalist who hectored anarchic invective with EBM innovators Nitzer Ebb and who joined Depeche Mode keyboardist Alan Wilder’s Recoil side project, died Wednesday at the age of 58.
Nitzer Ebb’s social media confirmed his death without revealing a cause of death, promising more info in the future. “We ask everyone to please be respectful of Douglas, his wife, and family in this difficult time,” the band wrote.
With a deep, gruff voice and animus toward humanity, McCarthy was an unusual dance-music star when Nitzer Ebb started notching chart hits. On “Join in the Chant,” a Number 9 dance hit in the U.S., he repeated the words lies, gold, guns, fire, church, and “muscle and hate” like a drill sergeant over bubbling synth and cold, robotic drum machines.
For their biggest hit, “Fun to Be Had,” a Number 5 dance hit, he sounded almost like a crooner, ruminating on love, until the drums kick in and he starts snarling, “What you see is what you get,” as keyboards sizzle behind him. By the end of the song his shouting aligns with the pneumatic snare, “You’ve got to know that there’s fun to be had.”
“To us, Nitzer Ebb represents a different way of looking at music — a way of trying to not just be the standard, to not just be the normal,” McCarthy told Spin in 1992. “Everything we do should be able to surprise people.”
McCarthy, who was born Sept. 1, 1966 according to Side-Line, co-founded Nitzer Ebb with schoolmates Bon Harris and David Gooday in Chelmsford, England in 1982. The name meant nothing; they’d simply cut out and reassembled letters from a newspaper. But the both the foreignness and jaggedness of the imagined words evoked the harshness of their music, an early example of “electronic body music,” a term coined by Kraftwerk’s Ralf Hütter.
Nitzer Ebb took the rage of punk and stripped it of all elements of rock & roll, other than McCarthy’s stentorian vocals, replacing guitar, bass, and drums with electronic instruments; songs like “Let Your Body Learn” owe more of a debt to disco and early industrial music, like Throbbing Gristle, than the Sex Pistols, though McCarthy’s sparse lyrics and vocals evoked anarcho-punks Discharge.
The singer credited with seeing Nick Cave front the Birthday Party as a teenager with inspiring his confrontational stage personal. “I realized we had to have our own identity,” he told The Guardian in 2019. “The takeaway basically was: ‘Fuck everyone.’”
The group’s debut album, That Total Age, came out in May 1987, a few years after groups like Einstürzende Neubauten, Killing Joke, and Swans had punkified industrial music and two years before Nine Inch Nails would reshape the scene, positioning them for a breakthrough. Although that album and follow-ups, Belief and the Flood-produced Showtime, failed to chart, singles like “Join in the Chant” and “Murderous” became international dance hits. Two tours supporting Depeche Mode, in 1987 and 1990, expanded their fanbase.
Their 1991 album, the more song-oriented Ebbhead, produced by Depeche Mode’s Alan Wilder, became their only record to chart in the U.S., reaching Number 146. One song, “DJVD,” skewered DJs who became enterprising producers, like the Happy Mondays’ Paul Oakenfold and Primal Scream’s Andy Weatherwall. The album as a whole was a reaction to the rise of industrial/alternative music.
“We began to get bored of the narrow scope that the first two albums gave,” McCarthy told Spin in 1992. “And there were so many other bands that copied that style, we felt encroached upon and wanted to move on.”
Almost immediately after Ebbhead, McCarthy started collaborating with Wilder’s eclectic electronic side project, Recoil. McCarthy sang on Recoil’s cover of the Sensational Alex Harvey Band’s “The Faith Healer,” crooning and growling in equal measure. The song became a Number 60 hit in the U.K. in 1992. Nitzer Ebb released only one album, 1995’s Big Hit, during this time and broke up that year. McCarthy would later sing on Recoil’s “Incubus” and “Stalker,” on the group’s Unsound Methods album in 1997.
McCarthy collaborated with techno producer Terence Fixmer on several Fixmer/McCarthy releases beginning in 2003 and released only one solo album, Kill Your Friends, in 2013. Nitzer Ebb re-formed in 2006, releasing a couple of records — 2010’s Industrial Complex album and 2011’s Join in the Rhythm of Machines EP — and touring. Their legacy expanded around this time, too, thanks to the inclusion of their songs on soundtracks to Saw movie sequels and Grand Theft Auto IV, which used “Let Your Body Learn.”
In 2021, McCarthy suffered complications from Covid while onstage at a West Palm Beach, Florida concert but decided to continue touring. Last year, McCarthy announced he’d be taking a break from touring due to liver cirrhosis. “For over two years, I haven’t been drinking, but recovery is a long process that can at times be extremely hard to predict,” he wrote.
Looking back at his career in 2019, McCarthy said he wouldn’t want to change anything about the past. “We worked exceptionally hard, and still do, on everything that has the Nitzer Ebb mark on it,” he told San Francisco Bay Area Concerts, “and even if there are missteps I think the purity of what we were or are trying to get is indicative of the time and place.”
