The other week Trent Reznor announced that he was bringing Nine Inch Nails back to life and I for one was very pleased. I've been a fan of NIN for nearly half my life now and I was pretty saddened when he called it quits a few years back. I'd had the good luck to see NIN nails a few times in the years in between and I loved seeing them play live. I went to Southside Festival in Germany in 2009 almost solely because NIN and Faith No More were playing - it was to be the last-ever NIN tour and was also the first of the FNM reunion shows and I wasn't going to miss either (as it happened they both played Leeds Festival that year too, but my friends and I were working on the bar and I was worried our shifts might clash with the bands we wanted to see. As it was, I missed the Pumpkins and NIN but caught FNM. Some solid 1990's headliners there). I danced like a madman to NIN at Southside because ultimately that's the thing I love most about the Nine Inch Nails - they're such good songs to dance to. I know it might sound like an odd statement, but Trent Reznor knows how to write a pop song, and that combined with guitars and industrial noise turns out to be a winning combination.
I bought a second hand copy of The Downward Spiral when I was 15 despite having never actually heard Nine Inch Nails. I'd read endless things about them (they were all over Kerrang! back then because The Fragile had not long been released). It was different to almost all the other music I was listening to because of the electrical edge to it. At that age a keyboard was seen as a sign of weakness in a band (although for a brief period a DJ in the ranks became very cool!). However, I loved the album and 13 years later I still do. I gradually picked up the other albums but Pretty Hate Machine stayed out of my collection for a short while and was the last NIN album I picked up of the ones out at that time. Kerrang! had called it "largely electronic" which I think put me off for a while; I thought perhaps I wouldn't enjoy it at that age, and maybe I was right. Certainly not finding a cheap copy probably put me off for a bit. Three years later I bought this copy in a long-closed but not-forgotten record shop in Southampton called FM Music (along with RATM's People of the Sun EP and Siamese Dream on double orange vinyl. I was clearly feeling wealthy that day - I'd been eyeing up all three of those records for ages).
By the time I heard Pretty Hate Machine I already knew other versions of half of the songs from the live album And All That Could Have Been and the absolutely incredible version of Something I Can Never Have on the accompanying Still cd (if you haven't heard it, I can't recommend it enough. That version consists of just Trent and a piano in a room with this beautiful echo). However, I knew the originals were going to be quite different, and I was glad I hadn't bought it much sooner because I'm not at all sure I would've got it. As it was, I enjoyed it, although still not as much as Broken or The Downward Spiral (my favourite NIN record varies regularly, but it's either one of those two or With Teeth). The singles and Terrible Lie are still brilliant songs and pretty much every time I hear them I think about throwing myself around to them at the front of the NIN shows I saw. Head Like a Hole is one of those truly great openers (I've never made a list of top Side One Track One songs like in High Fidelity, but Head Like a Hole is a contender).
Pretty Hate Machine went out of print and for a while finding a copy wasn't an entirely trivial task for a few years. It's since been reissued twice, but at the time I was pretty glad to find this copy. I don't have a huge amount of NIN vinyl but I certainly plan to flesh out my collection at some point. Decent copies of the older albums tend to be a bit pricey, but I'd be pretty happy if the other albums were sat on my shelf next to this one.
Format: 12", insert
Tracks: 10
Cost: £11 new
Bought: FM Music, Southampton
When: 03/05/03
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: no
