‘The epitome of amazingness’: how electroclash brought glamour, filth and fun back to 00s music

Witty, foul-mouthed, camp and punky, it was the 00s answer to slick superclubs and the rock patriarchy. As its rough, raw sound returns, the scene’s eyeliner-ed heroes, from Peaches to Jonny Slut, relive its excesses

Jonny Melton knew that his club night Nag Nag Nag had reached some kind of tipping point when he peered out of the DJ booth and spotted Cilla Black on the dancefloor. “I think that’s the only time I got really excited,” he laughs. “I was playing the Tobi Neumann remix of Khia’s My Neck, My Back, too – ‘my neck, my back, lick my pussy and my crack’ – and there was Cilla, grooving on down. You know, it’s not Bobby Gillespie or Gwen Stefani, it’s fucking Cilla Black. I’ve got no idea how she ended up there, but I’ve heard since that she was apparently a bit of a party animal.”

It seems fair to say that a visit from Our Cilla was not what Melton expected when he started Nag Nag Nag in London in 2002. A former member of 80s goth band Specimen who DJed under the name Jonny Slut, he’d been inspired by a fresh wave of electronic music synchronously appearing in different locations around the world. Germany had feminist collective Chicks on Speed and DJ Hell with his groundbreaking label International DeeJay Gigolos. France produced Miss Kittin and The Hacker, Vitalic and Electrosexual. Britain spawned icy electro-pop quartet Ladytron and noisy, sex-obsessed trio Add N To (X). Canada spawned Tiga and Merrill Nisker, who abandoned the alt-rock sound of her debut album Fancypants Hoodlum and, with the aid of a Roland MC-505 “groovebox”, reinvented herself as Peaches. New York had performance art inspired duo Fischerspooner and a collection of artists centred around DJ and producer Larry Tee, who gave the sound a name: electroclash.