Stephen Mallinder on Cabaret Voltaire
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.
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