Self Destruct and the Making of Nine Inch Nails
Looking back on my first Nine Inch Nails show 30 years ago this May.
Next month is somewhat unbelievably the 30th anniversary of Nine Inch Nails Self Destruct Tour. A tour to promote their landmark album, The Downward Spiral. This is one of my favourite albums of all time, making a huge impression on me, a classic, still relevant today. This was the pinnacle moment in Trent Reznor’s career output putting Nine Inch Nails into the stratosphere.
There I was, a young teenager in my tie dye NIN T shirt, as was the fashion, emerging long hair, arriving at Wolverhampton Civic Hall, some journey for me, for the first date of the UK leg of this now infamous tour. A tour later captured in the US for NIN’s Closure two tape VHS box set of documentary and live footage. This was the most important tour they did, a tour that took them from the small venues of their only previous UK tour of six headline dates in September 1991 to appearances in significant venues and huge arenas around the world (especially in the US), touring for close to three years,1994 into 1996, ultimately including dates with David Bowie.
After a handful of US dates in early 1994, Nine Inch Nails arrived at Wolverhampton Civic Hall, hometown of Robert Plant and kings of the Christmas anthem, Slade. For Nine Inch Nails this was the first of another six UK dates, now at upscaled venues, ending with three shows at The Kentish Town Forum in London. But before those, and Glasgow Barrowlands or Manchester Academy, the Self Destruct Tour was unleashed in the UK in a venue that nine days earlier had hosted the Britpop firecrackers of Parklife and Girls and Boys with a Blur gig. A venue that any band worth its salt had played. On May 20th 1994 the skies darkened. Inside the venue the smoke rose as the lights went down. The smell of a beer stained floor, sweat, poppers, farts, and cigarette smoke. The verbal excitement rose.
Scheduled Self Destruct Tour support act The Jim Rose Circus were banned. The local council had objected to bricks tied to a man’s penis, and quite frankly fair enough, I guess. They did not appear in the UK. So up stepped the remaining support act not banned, PIG, who I would later serve at a petrol station on the M40 on my Saturday job,… oh the glamour. Back in Wolverhampton, we waited for NIN, my friend Mike, myself and the assembled crowd of alternative kids, goths and metallers. Soon intro tape Pinion sprung, intro to the Broken EP, and all about us people got very, very, excited. More smoke. Yet more smoke. Dim lights arose. Nine Inch Nails assembled on the stage in black (obviously) covered in elements of white powder akin to Fields of The Nephilim, but a lot angrier, and in shorts, which is where the Nephilim comparisons end. Goth surfers? No. This was a powerful new era for NIN, now achieving new heights, and one in which they would deliver some of the most devastatingly greatest shows of their career.
Terrible Lie kicked in and already the mosh is building, Sin thumps and into March of The Pigs, the lead single from The Downward Spiral, where the mosh pit ultimately kicks in more wildly than ever, and my friend will later visit the St John’s Ambulance for a patch up and off we go again! Every single song in this set comes across as mind blowing to my young self, pretty much as this is my gig of the decade, comparable only to seeing The Cure, which I think Trent will take just fine. This show is the raw driven energy of expression and the release of angst. Something I Can Never Have, Closer is raw funk electro on heat, Reptile, the thrash of Wish, and we are only seven songs in. The energy is visceral, there is much carnage, equipment broken, smashed, and propelled across the set, band members swerving to avoid each sacrifice throughout the set, of often trashed keyboards missing keys.
There will be three covers tonight, Suck noted as a Pigface song, appearing on NIN’s Broken EP, Get Down, Make Love by Queen, previously a B side on the Sin single, then Joy Division’s Dead Souls, which Trent and company will cover throughout the remaining years of this tour that propelled NIN’s fortunes - and for a few moments becoming the biggest band in America. Within three months of this show Nine Inch Nails would be playing in front of 550,000 people at Woodstock ’94, live on US TV. This was their moment. Trent Reznor would go from outsider to become part of the rock ‘n roll in-crowd in the most premier sense, with interest in his work from some of the most notable artists of all time, bonding with Lou Reed backstage, David Bowie becoming a friend and collaborator. Nine Inch Nails finished in Wolverhampton with Help Me I’m In Hell and Happiness In Slavery, perhaps one could view these as insight of future premonitions of the demons fame brought him in the close of the 1990s decade. Exposure to the trappings of bullshit that fame brought him as a successful artist, that he never asked for. Thankfully and importantly, this was an episode he overcame, learning to prosper again both as an artist and individual.
Meanwhile this show remains a document of the reason Nine Inch Nails are one of the most respected and greatest acts of the last three plus decades. An antidote to contrived press led movements, a band doing their own thing at the greatest level and finding success, because they connected to so many, including myself, in awe of their music and shows like this.
The Downward Spiral on Apple and Spotify.
The band’s film Closure has frustratingly never officially been released beyond its original VHS tape version, there could be numerous reasons for this including it featuring video promos banned in certain territories and guest appearances from a cast of many in candid backstage scenarios, who knows, but digital versions have been uploaded online.
Video of Self Destruct Tour on the Closure video;
bonus material
Footage of the European leg of the Self Destruct Tour is spartan.
Here is Nine Inch Nails in Ghent, Belgium, on the Self Destruct tour 1994, on May 28th, just eight days after the Wolverhampton show I attended. Enjoy.
Thanks to Set List FM and NIN Live Archive for research and especially to the NIN archive for guidance to images, of which those used are uncredited or my pictures taken from Closure I edited.