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.

(Gingerbread Man/Atlantic)
Despite embracing Indian and Persian sounds, Sheeran’s eighth album goes back to basics after two records of muted melancholy – albeit with some surprising undercurrents

As he points out on the opening track of Play, Ed Sheeran has now been around a long time. It’s 20 years since he self-released his debut album and 14 since he signed to a major label and set about becoming the most commercially successful British artist of his age: long enough that we’re now seeing the appearance of pop stars who claim him as a formative influence. (Singer-songwriter Myles Smith, who was just into his teens when Sheeran released his breakthrough album +, even plays one of those little acoustic guitars that have long been Sheeran’s trademark.) It’s certainly long enough that anyone with even a passing interest knows what to expect when Ed Sheeran releases a new album.

Sheeran’s success is based on a certain dependability: it doesn’t seem to matter who he works with – Pharrell Williams, Eric Clapton, Eminem, the National’s Aaron Dessner – the results always somehow sound exactly like Ed Sheeran. Whether you see that as evidence of a melodic signature so strong it rings out regardless of the musical setting or a failure of artistic imagination depends on whether you’re among those who contributed to his cumulative sales figures of 200m, or part of the vociferous cadre who view him as the embodiment of all that’s wrong with music. The latter camp gets a shout-out on Play’s prosaically titled opening track Opening, essentially an older, more battered counterpart to You Need Me, I Don’t Need You, the 2011 track that bullishly asserted his bona fides: “Not the pop star they say they prefer,” Sheeran raps.