Fact #193677
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“Playboys of the Western Works” by Johnny Black. Masterbag, June 1982.
Noise, n. A stench in the ear. Undomesticated music. The chief product and authenticating sign of civilisation. (The Devil’s Dictionary)
The sign on the door says ‘Cabaret Voltaire - The Outer Limits’. The door opens into Cabaret Voltaire’s home-made studio and video workshop, The Western Works, located in a cavernous, derelict, Sheffield cutlery factory. Just round the corner The Yorkshire Ripper was arrested. Just up the road is a factory making fallout shelters. Through the wall is the room where Human League practised, but behind this door is the nerve centre of Cabaret Voltaire, described by the NME as “the quintessential late-70s electronic garage band”, an epigram I’d have reserved as an epitaph for The Silicon Teens.
The original Cabaret Voltaire was a nightclub, located variously in Paris and Zurich at the beginning of the century, within whose portals the ideals of the Dada anti-art movement were transformed into living theatre. The present Cabaret Voltaire evolved originally as an attempt to express Dadaism in modern musical terms or, as Stephen ‘Mal’ Mallinder puts it, somewhat more succinctly, “We’re just a pair of con- men, really.”
Cabaret Voltaire are capable of lifting your heart and derailing your senses, one of the few bands who can do something with music - they can burn souls like Uri Geller can bend forks. (Mark Ironmonger - Shelter)
Whichever interpretation is true, and probably both are, Cabaret Voltaire have been setting Dadaist cats among the futurist pigeons since long before the word futurist was adopted into the language of pop. When Ambrose Bierce conceived his Devil’s Dictionary, he probably didn’t have Cabaret Voltaire in mind but ‘undomesticated music’ is as accurate a description of the noise they make as any I’ve read.
Tape loops meander among the saxophones and synthesisers, mumbled vocals lurk in the impenetrable rhythmic undergrowth, waiting to catch the unwary listener with a cunningly contrived couplet. It’s all in there bar the kitchen sink, which is located in the Western Works studio about three feet behind the eight-track mixing desk.
The Great Sheffield Skinhead Experiment
“We all used to be skinheads, which is how we first came to know each other,” says Mal. “We were brought up on soul and reggae, danced to it in clubs, which probably explains our preoccupation with rhythm. At that time being a skinhead didn’t have the overt racism it has now. I never knew anyone who got into Paki-bashing or anything. I suppose we’re what you could call an experimental skinhead band, but I really don’t like to put labels on it.”
Mamman Dada (1887-1919), the father of anti-art, didn’t like to put labels on it either. In fact, his most celebrated piece of anti-art involved visiting Parisian department stores, accompanied by other Dadaists, and ostentatiously setting about the work of removing the labels from jars of fruit, tins of nuts and anything else he could lay hands on then, in full view of the astounded staff, eating the labels. He even enjoyed the irony of the fact that this activity led to his arrest by the gendarmerie, and treasured the head-and-shoulders mug shot of himself, which he liberated from police files, because it showed his face with a number beneath it instead of a name. “We always admired Mamman Dada,” explains Richard H. Kirk, the other full-time member of Cabaret Voltaire, “and we were pissed off with the stuff that was going on in the early seventies, so in about 1972 we started fooling about using tape
recorders as compositional tools, our method of musical notation, because none of us could read or write music.”
Cabaret Voltaire are the loving engineers. The myth that they are machines or megalomaniac electricians should be dispelled. (Neil Rowland - S. File)
In those days the third member of the group was Chris Watson who has recently been seduced by the offer of a steady job at Tyne-Tees Television but, according to Richard, “the musical roles in the group have never been very defined. We all do a bit of everything, so when Chris left it wasn’t crucial. It forced us to re-think our live performances but I think it is working out better.”
In the early days they listened to the German groups and their first live gigs in 1975 provoked violent responses from the confused audiences. Demo tapes made in 1976, however, attracted more favourable attentions and they found themselves touring with The Buzzcocks and eventually becoming the first British group to sign with the newly established Rough Trade label, as well as securing releases on Cherry Red and Factory. With a trace of surprise in his voice, Richard announces, “You know, it dawned on me the other day that we’ve been doing this for almost ten years.”
I Was Working As A Cocktail In A Singles Bar...
Passing through the door of the Western Works, you begin to wonder if this is a recording studio or the secret headquarters of a militant left wing subversive group. Solidarnosc badges are pinned to the curtains, Young Socialist posters compete with each other for wallspace. The recording equipment is covered with sheets and the ancient frayed carpet contrasts sharply with the gleaming video gear, tape decks, ioniser and unblinking eye of the television set.
Cabaret Voltaire have perfected the art of self-indulgence, resulting in pure entertainment. (Sara Jones - Zigzag)
“We’ve no desire to push people who buy our records into our way of thinking,” says Mal, a trifle defensively. “We’re not overtly political, but you can’t ignore politics. In a sense I can understand the fuck-it-all-let’s-just-dance attitude, keep drinking the cocktails, but we’d be cheating ourselves if we adopted that attitude.”
With a sense of timing worthy of Eric Morecambe, the members of 23 Skidoo barge joyfully into the midst of the studio, creating merry mayhem with the flow of the conversation and offering glasses of ready mixed cocktails to Mal and Richard. It transpires that Skidoo are playing Sheffield tonight and decided to pop in on our heroes to pass an otherwise uneventful afternoon. After briefly discussing the possibility of amalgamating both groups in a super-group to be called 23 Voltaire, some of them take to the streets again while the remainder settle down to watch a rough copy of what will eventually become a 90 minute Voltaire video.
Cabaret Voltaire are a pop group who play with sounds like they’re a box of building blocks, who scrape, carve, scatter, squeeze noise with critical discrimination (Paul Morley - The Face)
Mal is perched atop a convector heater, slightly to the side of the TV screen and we attempt to continue as before, although my eyes continually stray to the action on video. I manage to ask him about their use of tape loops in their music, his answer is all but obliterated by images of violence, clips from old TV shows and newsreels and shots of the group in performance.
“In a sense we’re journalists. We make tapes in the street, or take them off the radio and TV, so we report on the things going on around us in a realistic, concrete way, except that bu putting these things in a musical context, it can give them a greater impact.”
Sound Into Double Vision.
The band’s compulsion to document the ambient soundscapes around them prepared the way for a natural progression into video. From the beginning, their stage presentations have used slides but, says Richard, “for the last six months or so we’ve been making our own videos, and we’ve just set up our own mail-order video label, Double Vision.”
Judging by the rough cut I saw, their first release will resemble an Adam Ant video about as closely as Eraserhead resembles Saturday Night Fever.
“We want to get away from using video as simply a marketing device,” explains Richard. “We recently took our camera into a motorway service station and started filming the food, but the manager almost had a heart attack and threw us out.” Lasting 90 minutes and costing £15, their first Double Vision release includes material shot on their recent excursion to Japan, an excerpt from Peter Care’s “Johnny Yesno”, for which they wrote the soundtrack, and music from every period of their existence.
The video venture is seriously limiting the space available in the Western Works, even though they now also rent the room next door, but the existence of the Works is vital to Cabaret Voltaire. “There is a danger, when you have your own studio, that you can become too self-indulgent,” Mal admits, “but this place is so small that it limits what we can do and forces us to use our imagination.”
Half of their current release, “2X45”, was recorded here, virtually live, last October, while Chris was still in the group, with the balance done in Manchester after his departure. “It was originally to be a 12-inch single, but we ended up with too much worthwhile material,”
apologises Richard. “We also recorded a real album, shortly after Chris left, but we haven’t yet mixed it down, so it won’t be available until later in the summer.”
With Chris gone, the core of Voltaire is Mal Richard, with assistance from drummer Alan Fish, plus contributions from other associates including guitarist Eric Random and drummer Nort when required. One thing that keeps the group sharp is the fact that they’re never totally happy with what they have achieved. In Richard words, “we think every new release is the best we’ve done, but if we didn’t think we had the potential to do better there would be no sense in carrying on.”
Having existed for ten years without a monster hit troubles them not a whit. “One commercial record is like a millstone round your neck,” says Richard. “One hit, then it’s fuck art.”
Art, n. This word has no definition. (The Devil’s Dictionary)
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Noise, n. A stench in the ear. Undomesticated music. The chief product and authenticating sign of civilisation. (The Devil’s Dictionary)
The sign on the door says ‘Cabaret Voltaire - The Outer Limits’. The door opens into Cabaret Voltaire’s home-made studio and video workshop, The Western Works, located in a cavernous, derelict, Sheffield cutlery factory. Just round the corner The Yorkshire Ripper was arrested. Just up the road is a factory making fallout shelters. Through the wall is the room where Human League practised, but behind this door is the nerve centre of Cabaret Voltaire, described by the NME as “the quintessential late-70s electronic garage band”, an epigram I’d have reserved as an epitaph for The Silicon Teens.
The original Cabaret Voltaire was a nightclub, located variously in Paris and Zurich at the beginning of the century, within whose portals the ideals of the Dada anti-art movement were transformed into living theatre. The present Cabaret Voltaire evolved originally as an attempt to express Dadaism in modern musical terms or, as Stephen ‘Mal’ Mallinder puts it, somewhat more succinctly, “We’re just a pair of con- men, really.”
Cabaret Voltaire are capable of lifting your heart and derailing your senses, one of the few bands who can do something with music - they can burn souls like Uri Geller can bend forks. (Mark Ironmonger - Shelter)
Whichever interpretation is true, and probably both are, Cabaret Voltaire have been setting Dadaist cats among the futurist pigeons since long before the word futurist was adopted into the language of pop. When Ambrose Bierce conceived his Devil’s Dictionary, he probably didn’t have Cabaret Voltaire in mind but ‘undomesticated music’ is as accurate a description of the noise they make as any I’ve read.
Tape loops meander among the saxophones and synthesisers, mumbled vocals lurk in the impenetrable rhythmic undergrowth, waiting to catch the unwary listener with a cunningly contrived couplet. It’s all in there bar the kitchen sink, which is located in the Western Works studio about three feet behind the eight-track mixing desk.
The Great Sheffield Skinhead Experiment
“We all used to be skinheads, which is how we first came to know each other,” says Mal. “We were brought up on soul and reggae, danced to it in clubs, which probably explains our preoccupation with rhythm. At that time being a skinhead didn’t have the overt racism it has now. I never knew anyone who got into Paki-bashing or anything. I suppose we’re what you could call an experimental skinhead band, but I really don’t like to put labels on it.”
Mamman Dada (1887-1919), the father of anti-art, didn’t like to put labels on it either. In fact, his most celebrated piece of anti-art involved visiting Parisian department stores, accompanied by other Dadaists, and ostentatiously setting about the work of removing the labels from jars of fruit, tins of nuts and anything else he could lay hands on then, in full view of the astounded staff, eating the labels. He even enjoyed the irony of the fact that this activity led to his arrest by the gendarmerie, and treasured the head-and-shoulders mug shot of himself, which he liberated from police files, because it showed his face with a number beneath it instead of a name. “We always admired Mamman Dada,” explains Richard H. Kirk, the other full-time member of Cabaret Voltaire, “and we were pissed off with the stuff that was going on in the early seventies, so in about 1972 we started fooling about using tape
recorders as compositional tools, our method of musical notation, because none of us could read or write music.”
Cabaret Voltaire are the loving engineers. The myth that they are machines or megalomaniac electricians should be dispelled. (Neil Rowland - S. File)
In those days the third member of the group was Chris Watson who has recently been seduced by the offer of a steady job at Tyne-Tees Television but, according to Richard, “the musical roles in the group have never been very defined. We all do a bit of everything, so when Chris left it wasn’t crucial. It forced us to re-think our live performances but I think it is working out better.”
In the early days they listened to the German groups and their first live gigs in 1975 provoked violent responses from the confused audiences. Demo tapes made in 1976, however, attracted more favourable attentions and they found themselves touring with The Buzzcocks and eventually becoming the first British group to sign with the newly established Rough Trade label, as well as securing releases on Cherry Red and Factory. With a trace of surprise in his voice, Richard announces, “You know, it dawned on me the other day that we’ve been doing this for almost ten years.”
I Was Working As A Cocktail In A Singles Bar...
Passing through the door of the Western Works, you begin to wonder if this is a recording studio or the secret headquarters of a militant left wing subversive group. Solidarnosc badges are pinned to the curtains, Young Socialist posters compete with each other for wallspace. The recording equipment is covered with sheets and the ancient frayed carpet contrasts sharply with the gleaming video gear, tape decks, ioniser and unblinking eye of the television set.
Cabaret Voltaire have perfected the art of self-indulgence, resulting in pure entertainment. (Sara Jones - Zigzag)
“We’ve no desire to push people who buy our records into our way of thinking,” says Mal, a trifle defensively. “We’re not overtly political, but you can’t ignore politics. In a sense I can understand the fuck-it-all-let’s-just-dance attitude, keep drinking the cocktails, but we’d be cheating ourselves if we adopted that attitude.”
With a sense of timing worthy of Eric Morecambe, the members of 23 Skidoo barge joyfully into the midst of the studio, creating merry mayhem with the flow of the conversation and offering glasses of ready mixed cocktails to Mal and Richard. It transpires that Skidoo are playing Sheffield tonight and decided to pop in on our heroes to pass an otherwise uneventful afternoon. After briefly discussing the possibility of amalgamating both groups in a super-group to be called 23 Voltaire, some of them take to the streets again while the remainder settle down to watch a rough copy of what will eventually become a 90 minute Voltaire video.
Cabaret Voltaire are a pop group who play with sounds like they’re a box of building blocks, who scrape, carve, scatter, squeeze noise with critical discrimination (Paul Morley - The Face)
Mal is perched atop a convector heater, slightly to the side of the TV screen and we attempt to continue as before, although my eyes continually stray to the action on video. I manage to ask him about their use of tape loops in their music, his answer is all but obliterated by images of violence, clips from old TV shows and newsreels and shots of the group in performance.
“In a sense we’re journalists. We make tapes in the street, or take them off the radio and TV, so we report on the things going on around us in a realistic, concrete way, except that bu putting these things in a musical context, it can give them a greater impact.”
Sound Into Double Vision.
The band’s compulsion to document the ambient soundscapes around them prepared the way for a natural progression into video. From the beginning, their stage presentations have used slides but, says Richard, “for the last six months or so we’ve been making our own videos, and we’ve just set up our own mail-order video label, Double Vision.”
Judging by the rough cut I saw, their first release will resemble an Adam Ant video about as closely as Eraserhead resembles Saturday Night Fever.
“We want to get away from using video as simply a marketing device,” explains Richard. “We recently took our camera into a motorway service station and started filming the food, but the manager almost had a heart attack and threw us out.” Lasting 90 minutes and costing £15, their first Double Vision release includes material shot on their recent excursion to Japan, an excerpt from Peter Care’s “Johnny Yesno”, for which they wrote the soundtrack, and music from every period of their existence.
The video venture is seriously limiting the space available in the Western Works, even though they now also rent the room next door, but the existence of the Works is vital to Cabaret Voltaire. “There is a danger, when you have your own studio, that you can become too self-indulgent,” Mal admits, “but this place is so small that it limits what we can do and forces us to use our imagination.”
Half of their current release, “2X45”, was recorded here, virtually live, last October, while Chris was still in the group, with the balance done in Manchester after his departure. “It was originally to be a 12-inch single, but we ended up with too much worthwhile material,”
apologises Richard. “We also recorded a real album, shortly after Chris left, but we haven’t yet mixed it down, so it won’t be available until later in the summer.”
With Chris gone, the core of Voltaire is Mal Richard, with assistance from drummer Alan Fish, plus contributions from other associates including guitarist Eric Random and drummer Nort when required. One thing that keeps the group sharp is the fact that they’re never totally happy with what they have achieved. In Richard words, “we think every new release is the best we’ve done, but if we didn’t think we had the potential to do better there would be no sense in carrying on.”
Having existed for ten years without a monster hit troubles them not a whit. “One commercial record is like a millstone round your neck,” says Richard. “One hit, then it’s fuck art.”
Art, n. This word has no definition. (The Devil’s Dictionary)