MM: Though you unsurprisingly never did another cassette for M&E after EMI, when the “Acoustic Costumes” CD came out on Nightbreed Records in 1998, we still got to list it on our M&E Distro Direct catalogue and maintain something of a connection. I’m thinking this must have been about the time you became pregnant with your daughter, Lena? Is she as gorgeous as her mum? Oh, hang on, that almost definitely constitutes fawning! Anyway, as I’m just about to go down that route myself (apart from the being pregnant bit, Sam took care of that for me), you’ll probably understand why I’m going to ask how family life affected things for you and how did you still find time for making music, live work et al?

IG: We didn’t do another release on cassette simply because we had little time. We had done the Hugo Club Night tour when I was already pregnant and it was so exhausting. I really needed a time out then. You usually don’t play loud music and sing and move on stage when you’re pregnant, get little sleep and no good food. But I did. And after one month I returned home and said to myself, I better take it slowly, because I lost weight instead of gaining and that was too dangerous. I decided to stop all activities for a while, which was a good decision. The health is more important than the career, believe me. Also, we were asked to do more jobs for Hugo Boss and other brands at that time with marketing stuff and promotions and so we funded our own advertising agency in 1998 and we work for it since then. Our daughter Lena loves music too and plays alto sax – because she likes Lisa Simpson! She wanted to play saxophone just because of a comic character – how about that!? She also tried some English vocals on a track our Swedish singer/rapper did, which is really funny, because she was only 9 years old then and could hardly speak any English. You can hear her on “You had it coming/YHIC” from our last album, we put it on there. She loves England and she’ll visit London this summer with a friend – we can’t go, we just pay, hahaha.

MM:  According to your website (www.sabotage2qc.net), the 11th and final Sabotage CD was “Concrete” (Inception Records, 1999), which is sadly one I don’t remember at all. I was going through something of a dark spell in my personal life at that time. Following the most horrendous couple of years in 1996-97, the depression that had plagued me most of my life really took hold. After being diagnosed with Cyclothymic Disorder in ’97, something I foolishly tried to keep to myself at the time, I spent seven years on medication that really screwed with my memory, my ability to concentrate and my drive to get things done. Although it did ultimately make me better, it came too late for M&E, and I lost touch with so many friends from the network through those years. So, as I seem to have missed the end, how did it come about for Sabotage and were there any further albums that I don’t appear to know about?

IG: I’m sorry to hear that, but relieved you’re ok again. I know a lot of artists and friends have gone through bad times and not everyone finds a way out again. So I’m glad, you did. Concrete, that album was the last one and it was just a kind of farewell thing then, because we had changed personally and musically and we wanted to do new things. We already thought about a new concept and then the new project NUDE was already born. Nude standing for pure, clean, honest, no fake – kind of thing. I was really bored with the electro scene at that time. Especially in Germany. I liked Fatboy Slim, The Prodigy, nearly all artists from Skint Rec./UK at that time that played during raves, for example, we toured with Grooverider for Hugo Boss, so I had no relation to the dark German electro scene anymore. No one there really wanted to try out new stuff, they were so stuck into their own scene and would not look left or right. So we focussed on our daughter and the agency rather than doing more Sabotage stuff. We were a lot into art things also at that time and met Mark Chung (ex Neubauten) who is still our co-publisher by the way.

I think we know who wears the trousers in THIS band, huh?

MM: As fortune would have it, my life and has really turned around over the last five years or so and, with my batteries duly recharged, I’ve begun to rediscover a lot of those lost friendships. It was Carsten “Herr Ebu” Olbrich who told me that you and Marc were still active in