An EBM band, a heavy metal band and an experimental industrial band walk into a bierkeller. The bartender looks up and exclaims, "Mein Gott…it's Die Krupps!"
Like fellow Düsseldorfers DAF, Die Krupps started out on an experimental, metal-clanging krautrock tip - debuting with the excellent & appropriately-named Stahlwerksinfonie - before putting down the welding tools and picking up the synths to start playing EBM (or "electro punk" as it was originally known). And then they went all metal on us, accidentally inventing Neue Deutsche Härte in the process and giving the likes of Oomph, Megaherz and Rammstein all sorts of ideas.
Sometimes the genre-mixing worked, sometimes it didn't, but both the metallised versions of the industrial songs and the industrialised versions of the metal songs seem to go down a treat in a live environment. DK are currently on their 45th anniversary tour, which n0teeth would guess puts the combined ages of frontman Jürgen Engler and keyboard player Ralf Dörper somewhere in the hundred-and-twenties.
n0teeth last saw Die Krupps at Amphi Festival 2008 in Cologne. Pressed up against the barrier going completely ballistic our energy did not escape Jürgen's notice and he thrust the mic in our face to belt out the chorus of Metal Machine Music. We'd spent the day scoffing Reibekuchen with garlic mayo, a local delicacy, and the breath on us could've felled a lesser frontman. Not our Jürgen, however. Teutonic man of steel that he is, he carried on the show without so much as a wince.
How are the machinists of joy holding up after another 17 years on the road?
Incredibly fucking well, it turns out. Mr Engler must have been taking very good care of himself because his onstage energy is unparalleled by any other industrial frontman in the biz, laying into his "steelophone" with gusto and occasionally climbing onto it to get a better look at the crowd.
The hired hands accompanying messrs Engler and Dörper were on top form too: a drummer of clockwork precision and a guitarist who strutted around the stage with his wraparound shades, flowing mane and Flying V like the most perfectly ridiculous metal cliche you've ever seen, but whose crunching riffs chimed perfectly with the electronics and percussion.
Even Yngwie Malmsteen at his most histrionic couldn't have stolen the show from Jürgen, however. You'd be hard pressed to find anyone with a more energetic and just downright likeable stage presence in industrial these days.
Newish songs like Robo Sapien (with its surprisingly massive chorus recalling Frontline Assembly in their pomp) and Industrie-Mädchen (dedicated to "the ladies) seemed to go down well - it's really just impressive DK are still writing them - but the classics went down an absolute storm. Metal Machine Music in particular was, to put it mildly, off the rails. Der Amboss ("This is a song you might know because a band in London came up with it") could almost have been written for Die Krupps.
Written in the wake of the Solingen arson attack in 1993, Fatherland was a sobering reminder of the fascist violence that continues to plague Germany and the rest of the world. Without labouring the point too heavily, Jürgen expressed regret at the song's continued relevance before launching into it. (Excessive Force went there too, with their song Pigfaced: "East German skinheads burning refugee shelters / No prosecution, Fourth Reich helter-skelter".)
No Die Krupps set is complete without an encore of Machineries of Joy, which n0teeth has had the pleasure of seeing them perform live with Niter Ebb many years ago. The poignant dedication to "our friend Douglas McCarthy" choked us up a little, and the performance would surely have done Douglas proud, as would the crowd's energy throughout the gig. We've complained about the bores who stand motionless through London EBM gigs before, but clearly the memo has finally got around that electronic BODY music is music for moving your body to.
"Ahh, so you CAN speak a little German?" Jürgen grins, after we've all shouted ourselves hoarse with the LOHN, ARBEIT call and response.
Bossman in the shop afterwards - clearly noting the flushed and beaming faces of his various post-gig customers acquiring smokes and water for their homeward journeys - asked n0teeth to scribble down the name of the band on the back of a bit of till receipt.
With any luck, this man's neighbours will never get a decent night's sleep again, as the power of Krupp steel compels him to bang on a radiator shouting "LOHN, ARBEIT!"" at all hours.