VNV Nation:We went to an industrial club in London, Myself & Mark back in the late 80s called Hardcore, and they were playing, you know, Nitzer Ebb & 242 and everything else, and you could have a brilliant time at it. That sort of carried on and I was, you know, where do you go to get music that you like. And in the early 90s I was living in Toronto, you'd go to clubs that would play Nine Inch Nails, you know, Ministry and Sixteen Volts and stuff like that, and that was the flavor of the day. They were still playing Headhunter…
Star: They still are here.
VNV Nation: Because it’s practically the Stairway to Heaven of industrial music, and 242 are very, very good friends of ours. Very, very good friends, we go, we hang-out a lot, we talk to each other, write emails, call each other, go for dinner whenever we get a change, they're lovely people. And we had conversations on their mini tour, about what it was like for us back in the late 80s, going to their shows as fans, you know, we were mental about 242. Mark was a big Nitzer Ebb fan, I was a big 242 fan. And which I think show a lot in our earlier music, but thank you Patrick for, you know, I thanked the man. But we were, we were having like little conversations about this and I said, you know, how do you feel about Headhunter, you know, being this track that people have done jazz versions of. I’ve heard every cover version of it done possible, right, because probably, obviously people are doing it because it’s an annoying song that it’s played so often, there are other things to hear. It’s just generally the habit of industrial, it’s… but they love it because they said look, think about it, we created a song that has achieved that, how many songs have been played twenty years later? Well it’s not twenty years but it’s about… it’s going on about seventeen years now, that was ’88. So it’s quiet a feat, and I gave them total credit and kudos for that. For us, I think, club was the reason was the reason we became successful, club is the arena for industrial music. Around about the mid 90s it seems that that goth and Electro scene, the goth and industrial scenes merged. The whole ministry & NIN died up, but then NIN itself is part of a forging of a culture and seemed to have a great deal of Goth about it in the image, and there was this whole Goth metal looking thing. So in Goth clubs they're playing music that industrial kids listened to, you know, they were playing Apoptygma in Goth clubs and visa-versa, they were playing some bands that Goths would listen to, and it seemed to merge on the strength and numbers. It was all about dancing, but it wasn’t just about mindless, you know, music, about, you know, screaming about my parents won’t let me out passed ten o’clock at night and stuff. It was about, there was something much more classy about it sort of etheareal-ness to things I felt. I think of, you know, the first Covenant album, you know, when Theremin came out, everybody was so astounded by the fact that the words were just, they just, they came like bullets, they came as natural conclusions to one another and it really blew a lot of people away. The same thing went with Apoptygma doing Love Never Dies, you hear… these were, in their time they were monumental tracks. Honor was this track that people said to me that was one of those, and I thought oh, OK, so I can’t see that, I look out.
Star: Well Kingdom’s following that, yes.
VNV Nation: But that came at a later time.
Star: Yes.
VNV Nation: But then I was really, really amazed by, you know, these little things happening and creating this club culture. And around about the mid 90s, everywhere in the world the club became the hottest big thing. And it was the fun night out, it was the… you partied, you sweated, you didn’t care and you had fun and everyone sang on the dance floor, which is something we don’t do anymore.
Star: If they can get on the dance floor.
VNV Nation: Maybe even get on the dance floor… I haven't seen any clubs where they have empty dance floors, but they had so many other cultures mixing in with it. You had Goa trance, you had like the kind of the hard/heavy, the hard trance stuff which is almost industrial.