As a world rock star Franz Ferdinand and then get involved in projects like Box Codax, Lunsentrio, Manuela or The Nix A jack of all trades, Nicholas McCarthy has worked with many, many artists. But he wouldn’t play with everyone. For example, he has a rule: “I swore to myself that I would never make music with actors. It looks fake. As if they were pretending to be musicians.” That’s interesting, because for his newest band Nitch he teamed up with Niklas Mitteregger, an ensemble member of the Munich Residenztheater.
The Graz native certainly understands the fundamental suspicion of the Blackpool native. “We actors get on our own nerves,” he says. In the song “Shit actors!” The Viennese band has that Kreisky once explained exhaustively, supported by Austro theater who’s whos like Birgit Minichmayr in the accompanying video. So: no music with mimes! “It’s like when musicians paint,” says McCarthy, whose sister Anna, who is now also a famous artist, often makes his videos as well as a lot of music, which in turn is a very creative approach for him.
The Ni-tsches sometimes get into philosophizing about things like this – you think that two people have found each other. And the generation gap between Nick (49 years old, with a purple fur hat) and Niklas (32, hip millennial) quickly disappears – in friendship and a shared passion for music. Because yes, “Niklas was a musician before the theater,” says McCarthy. “But I never published anything,” says Mitteregger.
How and where did it happen between the two? “No idea,” Mitteregger can’t remember at all. “Somewhere between Graz and Liverpool,” suspects McCarthy, who grew up in Bavaria, studied double bass in Munich and played in cult bands like Camera cinema and embryo played in Glasgow Franz Ferdinand became famous, runs a studio in London, but lives in Bad Endorf. In any case, they already knew each other before they appeared on stage together at the Residenztheater: McCarthy, together with his old friend Pollyester, had written the songs for “Ronja Robber’s Daughter”, which Mitteregger, fresh into civil service, then played as Borka’s son Birk with a “bell-like voice in the falsetto” chirped.
As Birk, Niklas Mitteregger played alongside Enea Boschen in the play “Ronja Räubertochter” and sang Nick McCarthy’s songs.
(Photo: Adrienne Meister)
“It was a fun experience,” says McCarthy. And because the children’s performances ended early and they had nothing left to do all day, they continued with the music. McCarthy was pleased that he had found someone with his taste. In other bands, the punky Seventies style was more in demand, in the band with his wife Manuela Gernedel the soft one, but with Mitteregger he was able to live out his preference for English, danceable, playful, melodic songwriting with synthesizers and drum machines.
Somehow Maurice Sumen, head of the most important German subculture label Staatsakt, heard about it. They sent him the first track, “Mutant Funk”, and he wanted more. And somehow “Is ok” was broadcast up and down on Radio 1 in Berlin and on FM4 in Vienna in 2022, although they had neither advertised nor made a video for it. McCarthy had never experienced such a self-starter, even though he was part of it Franz Ferdinand had already landed some world hits like “Take Me Out” and “Darts of Pleasure” 20 years ago. “It doesn’t surprise me: digestible, beautiful, harmonious,” says Mitteregger about his own debut song. He’s right: a very casual singalong, even in casual Austro pop. Falco sends greetings. Picture bookYou’d better watch out!
It’s been a long time: Nick McCarthy (left) together with Alex Kapranos in “Franz Ferdinand” in 2005. After global fame, he left in 2016.
(Photo: Bertrand Guay/AFP)
Verdruss rarely sounded as sexy as on their first EP “Nieder mit der Welt”. There’s beautiful anger at everything and at yourself in it: “And what I know, I don’t want it, and who I am, I don’t know. Down, down, down with the shitty old world,” it says in the title track. In “So Beautiful”, which McCarthy lets his composition dance in a robotic arabesque manner, Mitteregger groans his way up into the mountains in outdoor gear: “From space you can still see me shining neon green”, you argue, you want to go home again, but “home is “It sucks again.” Mitteregger wrote the text while hiking, the Grantler grandees Kreisky probably take their hats off to it.
In “End of the World” a relationship is at an end: “Do we want to talk? I don’t know. It’s cold outside. Will you take me there. What’s the point?” This leaves – like Falco’s “Jeanny” once – a lot of room for interpretation, and that’s how it should be: “It’s always little things that lead to war, we approach the topic symbolically, in the end it’s always about love, about leaving “, explains Mitteregger. “Gassi” wanders aimlessly along like a fast trickle, with the bag of excrement in his hand, destroying whatever lies on the way full of no-future ennuie. They want exactly the opposite: “How do we stand our ground in a world where things are going to shit right now,” says McCarthy, very much the class fighter who is typical of London’s working-class districts. The label writes of the “perfect mix tape for the Wir- sind die-Brandmauer demo”. In fact, that would be right up your alley: “We’d love to play at demos.”
They have a lot planned, even if Mitteregger soon has to rehearse his role as the young Rudolph Moshammer in “The Bavarian Dream”. Above all, they want to put out feelers for creative partners. They want to cross-pollinate in sessions with artist friends, in the style of the UK all-star group The Gorillaz: in McCarthy’s Sausage Studio in London, in the Mastermix Studio Unterföhring, and in their own studio in the Fat Cat in the former Gasteig, where they have already recorded more than enough songs for the album that will be released in the fall three, four days and nights a week. Just in one of the former rooms of the music college where McCarthy studied double bass. That evening, Michael Parker, sound engineer who has already set up headlining shows for Frank Ocean and Skrillex at the “Coachella” festival, stops by. “This is all for the next wave, it has to stay fresh,” says McCarthy.
But now Nitsch are playing their very first concert in Munich’s Black Box in the Fat Cat. Nick McCarthy is looking forward to it. Because he can now play the electric guitar again, in previous projects he had often “played the bad card as a keyboard player as a piano composer, which is boring live”. They are currently rehearsing with the new live band, sitting on the drums – cheers for this little sensation! – Maria Moling, the South Tyrolean all-purpose weapon from Hubert von Goisern, Princess and once Ganes and Me&Marie.
The free concert with the second act Feh (a band by LaBrassBanda-Drummer Manu Da Coll) is the start of a non-profit series in the Black Box with musicians who have found a temporary home in the Fat Cat. The “laboratory” and the former lecture hall of the music college will soon be used by the independent scene, especially theater people (if you have ideas for this: [email protected]). The back box, however, is exactly the right thing for Nitsch, a cool, dark room for bright ideas; they want to pack it full of people right up to the gallery: “Like a cage fight, like a cockfight in Thailand, and people fall off the balcony.” , Mitteregger fantasizes. He wants to live the band now, he doesn’t want to impersonate the singer: “I think that’s certainly not an issue with his own songs.”
Nitsch und Feh, Tuesday, March 12th, 8 p.m., Black Box at Fat Cat (Gasteig), fatcat-muc.de