Interview: Stephen Mallinder

As a member of Cabaret Voltaire and more recently Wrangler and Creep Show, Stephen Mallinder has been active on the nonconformist fringes of popular music since 1973. One of the most charismatic voices and perceptive commentators to emerge from the industrial music era in the UK, he has also been a radio presenter, academic and writer.

I chatted with him about his early encounters with electronic music, Dadaist art and the writings of William Burroughs, Cabaret Voltaire’s gestation in a Sheffield attic in the 1970s, and how they loved the rhythms of funk as well as the energies of punk. We also discussed the electronic music community that emerged in Sheffield in the post-punk era, the politics of Cabaret Voltaire and how Black American styles like New York electro and Detroit techno had a cathartic impact on their sound in the 1980s.

When was the first time you encountered electronic music?

It was ‘Sparky’s Magic Piano’ [children’s story], which I heard when I was a little kid. There used to be a Saturday morning show on what was the BBC Light Programme called ‘Children’s Favourites’ on Saturday morning; I suppose it would have been things like Burl Ives records - to this day, Burl Ives’ voice sends a scary shiver down my spine, I don't know why. I found his voice in those songs in his voice quite eerie. And there was something called ‘Sparky’s Magic Piano’ that they would play on the ‘Children’s Favourites’ radio programme, when I would have been about five or six years old. I was totally fascinated by this. Basically it was about a little kid learning to play the piano, and the piano talks to him. It was this weird electronic voice that was somehow ‘not quite right’, and it fascinated me. It sounded like a vocoder voice. I also remember the first ‘Doctor Who’, in the sense that there was quite a buzz around it when it started - I would have been about eight, nine years old.

‘Doctor Who’ started in 1963...

It wasn’t so much that I was going, “Wow, I really love electronic music.” I think what I was probably drawn to the idea of the future, and I think electronic music got bundled up in the idea of possibilities and other worlds and me being a little kid living in Sheffield. My father died when I was quite young. So I was left to my devices in some ways, and I've got a massive family. It wasn’t like I was ignored or anything, but I kind of chose my own pathway. 

So I think what happened without having a dad, I never thought about this before, it kind of opened up this kind of vacuum and I think for me, my sisters became important, my cousins became important - grownups other than a father figure, I started to explore what they were into. So through my sisters who were really into the Stones and The Beatles, I was exposed to music, and I was exposed to television. And I think that that instilled some ideas of otherness and escapism.

Although I would have wouldn't have been conscious of it that time, there was obviously the Cold War at that time too, nuclear weapons as well as space travel. It was probably very subconscious in how all of it worked on me…

Obviously there was Joe Meek as well, I should say - early memories of ‘Telstar’ and John Leyton’s ‘Johnny Remember Me’. I think that without knowing who Joe Meek was, I was influenced by that as well.

What were the common interests that brought you together with [original Cabaret Voltaire members] Chris [Watson] and Richard [Kirk]?

Richard and I had known each other about three years probably before I hooked up with Chris as well. We were all into music. I think Eno was our common bond in terms of electronics and processing and technology. He was like a lightning rod for a lot of people. Bowie as well – but to actually see someone with the VCS3 [synthesizer] on stage as you did with Eno… Before Eno, the technology was inside studios, so these weird techniques happened in another world, but Eno brought it on stage, he showed that this was a tool that people could use. We were 17, 18 years old, and all of a sudden, these things start to become significant.

Where were you picking up all your ideas about Dada?

My plan was to go to art college but I ended up applying to university and going a couple of years later, I didn’t go straightaway. But I was really into art, I’d done art A-level. So I was aware of those kinds of things. I used to do my own art from being quite a young teenager. It was just what I was into, going to galleries and stuff. Richard was the same although a year younger than me. So I think we came at it from there. And I was very much into abstract expressionism and pop art and all that, and I think there was just that moment, you know, when you turn another page and all of a sudden, there’s surrealism and there's Dada.

We were fascinated by the idea of Dada and its irreverence. It wasn’t just an art movement, it was about the exhibitionism, it was about the spectacle, it was about the statements, it was about the shock of it all. When you're a teenager that from that post-war generation, when teenagers were rebelling and so forth, Dada resonated with you because everyone wanted to make a statement and everyone wanted to throw things in front of people’s straight sensibilities, and so Dada fitted into that.

The thing with [William] Burroughs thing, probably came in its initial stages from [pre-punk band] Doctors of Madness, who used to come on stage with a reading of The Naked Lunch. Pre-punk, there are bands like Doctors of Madness or Hawkwind who had relevance to what was going to happen in a couple of years. There was also Bowie talking about Burroughs and talking about cut-ups. So your antenna are up, all of a sudden - cut-ups, David Bowie, Naked Lunch, William Burroughs. And you just pick things up. We were pretty autodidactic about it. Anything that was interesting, one of us would jump on it, that's how it was. And then Richard went to art college although I think was only there for a few months, he eventually got kicked out for not turning up, which is what you did at art college in those days. And then obviously, you get into films and Bunuel…

What was the set-up for the early music you were making as Cabaret Voltaire [from 1973 onwards]?

We worked in Chris’s loft [at his parents’ house], which was a really tiny space. We picked bits [of equipment] up as we went along. It was a real kind of junk shop aesthetic, because synthesizers cost a fortune in those days. Me and Richard had a junk shop bass and guitar. Chris was a telephone engineer so he had some practical soldering skills and I got him to build me a fuzzbox from Practical Electronics magazine. We got a Copicat delay unit, and Chris built a really primitive synth. Richard had a clarinet, I think because he couldn’t afford an oboe like Andy Mackay of Roxy Music had.

It was extremely raw, messy. We’d buy secondhand tape recorders we’d find in [classified advertising newspaper] Exchange And Mart, I remember having to carry up to the loft an ex-government reel-to-reel tape recorder which weighed an absolute ton. Those tape recorders were used as more of an instrument, and we’d make little loops and bounce them around. So it wasn’t so much electronic but more experimental and built around magnetic tape as a tool to manipulate sound.

It wasn’t like a band, it was this kind of workshop, really. We had a layered approach where, we'd get a sound and then someone would go, “OK, I'll try something on top of that. So it was this sort of experimental process in that way.

What kind of music were you listening at that point?

Richard and I were soul boys when we were younger. That’s how we met. When we were younger teenagers, we’d go to soul clubs, underage soul clubs, dancing to soul, early reggae and ska. So in terms of listening to music, there was still a hangover from that soul stuff. We were into the Velvet Underground, Roxy Music, Can and Kraftwerk in the very early period, Ralf and Florian, all that was quite experimental. Neu particularly was obviously a massive influence as well. So early German stuff, some reggae - King Tubby, probably by about 1977 or something like that we were very aware of what he was doing.

But we were also getting into more experimental music, which again came from other bands. So we learned about Terry Riley and La Monte Young and all that kind of stuff, but that would have come through Lou Reed, then you’d get into Edgard Varèse and Pierre Schaeffer and all that. So it was a kind of journey really. But also the early sort of punk things were starting to emerge at that time.

There used to be a night at The Black Swan - it was a really rough pub in the centre of Sheffield, but they used to have bands on Sunday nights, and it wasn't too oppressive that night. So you’d go and see whoever was playing, whether it be Be Bop Deluxe or whatever, the pre-punk stuff like Ian Dury, Kilburn and the High Roads. I remember me and Rich going down to the Black Swan one Sunday night and seeing the Sex Pistols, and it was The Clash’s first-ever gig [on June 4, 1976]. So we were kind of connecting with that zeitgeist as well. All these things were emerging, you know?

Some of the pictures that were taken of the three of you in Chris’s loft [around 1975], you’re quite dressed up in that kind of slightly Roxy Music kind of way. What was it like in Sheffield at that time for young people into alternative culture who dressed up like that? Was it a bit challenging?

We were up against that usual kind of Northern macho stuff. But with working class, Northern pop culture, you know, we didn't care - I used to go into pubs with a pair of shocking pink trousers on or whatever, and you took your life in your hands, but that was kind of part of the fun of it, really. So it was quite a northern culture. But within that, it felt like, it felt like the more cerebral kind things, maybe the more druggie things were more interesting, so we’d go and see Gong or Tangerine Dream if they came to the City Hall. There wasn't really that much going on and that's why you did go to see Gong or Magma or whoever or it might be because that was the only thing that would have been happening for a month and it was better than doing nothing.

Looking back now, the 1970s was quite a turbulent time in British history, with strikes, power cuts, states of emergency, bombings in Northern Ireland and on the mainland - do you think that you channelled that into the music in some unconscious way?

Oh yeah, most definitely. I was not active, but I was political from about the age 14, 15. And the Irish troubles were very much part of that. I was quite politicised by the Troubles and the Six-Day War. It very much a class-driven decade. And that’s why I went and studied history and politics. I did contemporary history, it was very much from a Marxist perspective. So I was kind of surrounded by that kind of politics I did my degree in Sheffield, didn’t go away because I was making music, I turned down a place in Manchester so I could stay here. So I was surrounded by politics and studying with people who were very political. So I became very aware of that. Richard, for his part, his dad was a member of the Communist Party, so we were both quite politically aware.

But Cabaret Voltaire always focused on more general ideas of control and surveillance rather than specific politics, unlike many bands in the punk and post-punk era.

I think the thing that was interesting with us, I think we had a rather wider view on it. We thought party politics was very localised and almost a bit parochial in some respects. We saw bigger connections with what was happening in Vietnam, race riots in America, all these kinds of things. And we weren't working, so we weren’t in trade unions. I think if we had been working, we probably would have been political in a way that would have been channelled. But as we were students, artists, we felt we had a much sort of broader take on things.

Being northern and working class, we were very aware of inequalities. If we’d have been a punk band I suppose we would have been writing songs about this but we were very abstract and had a much broader take on things so it wasn’t about the British government, it was about wider forces of control and it felt as though it wasn't just about the Heath government or whatever, it was much broader, about forces of control and particularly the growing role of the media in these things. So we became very media-aware. I think that’s partly because of who we were, but I think it was also just the time we were living in - we were conscious of changing technologies. So with the idea of the cut-up as well the idea of montage and bricolage and all that kind of stuff, all of it fed into how we worked, using found sound or recordings from radio and TV.

After you got your Western Works studio in Sheffield, did feel that you were part of some kind of alternative community of progressive-thinking musicians in the city, that there was a real network there?

In the first instance, it didn’t, because we didn’t know anyone. We didn't know anyone at all. You know, we started doing stuff around ’73 and there was no one around really at that time. There were no bands. Things happened a few years later.

The three of us had come together and started doing these things, but there was no one else. There was no band culture in Sheffield. There was nothing and we had no model. But then, obviously, punk started to happen. In the early punk period in Sheffield there was a fanzine called Gunrubber, which was run by Paul Bower and Adi Newton who was in Clock DVA. They were really young, they were only about 16, 17 when they started it.

So punk was really important because people started to emerge around it. Gunrubber, Paul and Adi, and then Martyn Ware [of The Future, The Human League and later Heaven 17]. They were part of a little theatre group [Meatwhistle], those guys – Martyn Ware, Glenn Gregory. So over a period of probably about 18 months, these people started to emerge and then it started to feel as though there’s something there. And Paul was very significant, not only starting Gunrubber, but he had the sort of first ever punk band in Sheffield called 2.3. And it was through him that we found Western Works, which was actually the Young Socialists’ headquarters. But they hadn’t paid the rent, and so they just fucking legged it.

Paul was kind of connected to that group. And he went, “There's two rooms, you want to split them with me? We can have one as a rehearsal room, do you want the other room?” And we went yeah, alright. And so we just moved into this old industrial kind of space. If you look at the early Cabs photos that were taken  in there, that's why they still all got the posters on the wall for the Young Socialists and marches and all those things, because that was where they printed all their posters. So we kept all the posters on the walls.

So that at that point, that would have been about ’76, ’77 when that happened, people were starting to emerge a little bit. But for the first few years, it was just me and me and Richard going up to Chris’s loft twice a week, going up in the evening after Chris had finished working

So this is when this alternative musical community started to coalesce.

I think people don’t really know why Sheffield started to get its electronic vibe. I mean, not being egotistical, I think we were a reference point.

I was going to suggest that…

But no one mimicked us. Although there was one band used to do piss-take cover versions of our tracks; we knew them so we didn’t mind. But everyone else found their own way.

Also, we have to acknowledge that by this time, four, five years after we started, cheaper Japanese technology started to come into the music shop. We would still be buying tape recorders and processing things and all that. But we gradually built up the synths now that cheaper synths were in shops, and people like The Human League got them.

As well as the Sheffield electronic community, Cabaret Voltaire also became part of this national community with people like Throbbing Gristle, 23 Skidoo and Eric Random.

I think the TG thing was quite early. We became aware of TG from Second Annual Report [in 1977], I think. So these connections outside Sheffield were happening before or at the same time as the Sheffield things were. I think we’d been in touch with Gen [Genesis P-Orridge] and we went down to Beck Road [in Hackney, where P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti lived] a few times. So that was happening at the same time as the Sheffield thing was emerging, we made contact with them quite early on. I think it probably came through just finding weird records and thinking, “Fucking hell, what are these guys up to?”

People used to write to bands at that point - you’d see an address on the sleeve, and you’d write to them.

We all became kind of pen pals. We used to go down and see TG because you could just get on the train, but I remember, through them, we would write to [American industrial musician] Monte Cazazza in the States. I used to write to Gavin [Friday] out of the Virgin Prunes.

There was this kind of community. I suppose people would say it was the origins of post-punk but I think really it was happening before that and although people liked the energy and attitude of punk, lots of people like ourselves really didn’t like the format of punk. It was still guitar, bass and drums, following an established format, and we were more interested in challenging the established format. And I think there were other people feeling that as well.

This is kind of a precursor to when you started challenging the established format of what became called industrial music, when you started picking up on what was going on in electro and the Black American music of the early eighties. I remember one interview with Richard in which he said Black American music was much more interesting than so-called experimental music.

Well, it wasn't a case of Rich and I were soul boys and then we made electronic music and we abandoned what we were listening to before – dance music was always part of it, dub was always part of it. Fela Kuti, Hamilton Bohannon, they were always still part of it. Sly Stone, who was using a drum machine…

Electro was great because it was a new generation playing with technology, fucking around with drum machines like we were. The early stuff that [Afrika] Bambaataa and other people were doing, using technology in an interesting way, with a groove, was really fascinating for us because the energy and the spontaneity and the visceral element of dance music was always massively part of what we were into. So therefore it did resonate with us.

The series of albums you made for Some Bizzare in the eighties – was this you thinking you were making pop music? Or were you aware how strange they actually sounded?

We didn’t feel as though we were being wilfully obscure or oblique or weird for the sake of it by that time, you know, because we’d moved on from trying to shock with sounds like in the early days. So, at that time, the electro thing and doing ‘Crackdown’ and all those things were a natural progression for us. We thought we were doing what we wanted to do, without making a compromise, and that we could take people with us.

It was still strange, abrasive, sometimes menacing music.

We could never change that, I think. We also worked with remixes. We wanted to find a wider audience through the clubs, so the 12-inch remixes were very important, and if we had that rhythmic element it did allow some of that menace and some of that darkness to remain within the music.

The early, weird Chicago house and Detroit techno - did you see kindred spirits in that music immediately?

I think so. Particularly Detroit and what was going on there. You know, with Derrick [May] and all those [techno] people, we felt as though there was something kind of hard-edged about it. And that’s what we liked. Chicago [house] had a different vibe to it. But we worked in Chicago, we did an album in the end in Chicago [1990’s Groovy, Laidback and Nasty].

I didn’t really get a lot of the kind of baggy ecstasy stuff even though I used to go down to Shoom and I knew [Shoom club DJ] Danny [Rampling] and I knew the Boy’s Own [fanzine] lot, so I was connected to that. But I think we still wanted to retain a connection to Detroit and to American music and New York music - Todd Terry and people like that. Because I remember at the time we were working with Marshall Jefferson and getting Derrick May to do remixes and there was an NME journalist who had a go at us and said we should be working with the Happy Mondays. But that wasn’t us, that kind of felt a bit ‘rock’. We didn’t particularly identify with that. We felt as though a lot of Black American music had much more of an edge to it.

One last question - as Richard is no longer with us [Richard H. Kirk died on September 21, 2021 at the age of 65], how would you describe him in terms of how he worked creatively?

Richard’s work wasn’t considered in the sense that he wouldn’t conceptualise - his process was quite simple and quite straightforward. He was very spontaneous and also had a real understanding of what sounded right. He didn’t overcomplicate things, Richard never overcomplicated things. And he didn’t go in for a lot of embellishment, or a lot of revisiting things either. If the track was done, we’d bang it down and that was it.

We never really had arguments about making music ever. It was because I trusted Richard and he trusted me, in the sense if he did it or I did it, it was good enough, you know? When we first started fucking around in the loft [in 1973] until right at the very end, when we did the last tracks for [1994 album] The Conversation, we had a really kind of fundamental understanding.

It’s the spontaneous stuff that we loved - music should capture a moment. It was always about the energy of any particular thing, whether it was an extreme kind of noisy piece or whether it was a more complex rhythmic thing, it was about the feel of it and the sound of it - and when it felt right, it was right.

Interview by Matthew Collin for ‘Dream Machines’ November 5, 2021.

Photo from Cabaret Voltaire's ‘Just Fascination’ video.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Interview: Stephen Morris

Interview: Steve Hillage and Miquette Giraudy

Interview: Don Letts