The band that did the durable work after the band that did the structural work.
The Bureau's case for filing Cabaret Voltaire as Artist Nº 0002 is the simplest possible. Throbbing Gristle filed first because they did the structural work: they named the genre, they named the label, they made the slogan, they ended themselves with one of the cleanest completion statements in popular-music history. Cabaret Voltaire filed second because they did the durable work: they made the records, they kept making them, they evolved through three distinct phases without losing their identity and they supplied most of the musical materials the genre used. Throbbing Gristle were five years; Cabaret Voltaire were twenty-one.
The band came together in Sheffield in 1973, around the friendship of three university students, none of them initially conceived of as musicians. Stephen Mallinder was a working-class kid from the city, with an interest in dub reggae, William Burroughs and the social-anthropological aspect of pop culture. Richard H. Kirk was a slightly intimidating presence with a clarinet, a tape recorder and the sense, characteristic of every Sheffield electronic musician of the period, that the city's industrial soundscape was already a music. Chris Watson was the technical hand: he had a working knowledge of tape, contact microphones and signal processing and the disposition of someone who would, twenty years later, become one of the BBC's foremost wildlife sound recordists, which is what he eventually did.
Their first public performance, in May 1975, was at a small Sheffield venue and ended in violence; the audience attacked the band, the band attacked the audience and the police were called. The Bureau notes this date because it predates the first Throbbing Gristle performance by sixteen months. The credit-priority calculation, however, comes out differently than that fact would suggest, for reasons the Bureau has gone to some trouble to explain elsewhere: Cabaret Voltaire were a working band before there was a genre; Throbbing Gristle made a genre and then provided the working band. Filing-by-priority would have put Cabaret Voltaire first; filing-by-causation puts Throbbing Gristle first. The Bureau files by causation.
Western Works, the studio Cabaret Voltaire built in 1977 in a converted weaving shed in Sheffield, is the band's most overlooked contribution. Throbbing Gristle had Industrial Records as a label and the studio in their Hackney house as a workspace; Cabaret Voltaire had Western Works as both. Records by Clock DVA, Hula, Chakk, In the Nursery, Cabaret Voltaire themselves and a long list of Sheffield-adjacent acts were made there between 1977 and the studio's eventual closure in 1994. The argument that Sheffield's electronic-music tradition exists independently of Cabaret Voltaire is, in the Bureau's view, an argument about what the word "independently" means; almost every Sheffield record before about 1986 went through that room.
We weren't trying to be a band. We were trying to make recordings. The band thing was an inconvenience that came with the recordings. Stephen Mallinder, in conversation, c. 1985 · paraphrased from an NME piece
The band's records divide cleanly into three phases. The first phase, 1977 to 1981, is the cassette and Rough Trade era: tape-collage, Burroughs-influenced cut-up, dub-influenced repetition, processed vocals and the kind of menacing low-tempo minimalism that the genre was built on. The masterpieces here are Mix-Up (1979), The Voice of America (1980) and Red Mecca (1981); the last of these, in particular, is in the Bureau's contested-but-defensible view the central document of the band's first phase. Watson left the band in 1981, amicably, to pursue field recording as a profession. The Bureau treats his departure as the closing of the first phase rather than its dissolution; the band was the same band, with one fewer member.
The second phase, 1982 to 1985, is the Some Bizzare era. The records take a turn toward danceable rhythm, programmed bass, drum machines and what would, in retrospect, be recognised as proto-EBM. The Crackdown (1983) is the record of the period; Micro-Phonies (1984) is its more popular ; The Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord (1985), with its unfortunate but accurate title-citation of an American far-right paramilitary group as the subject of the record's critique, closes the period. The records were on Some Bizzare, distributed through Virgin and were heard by an audience an order of magnitude larger than the audience for Red Mecca. The Bureau's view: the records are good in their own terms and represent the most successful evolution any first-wave industrial act produced, but the period is sometimes treated by retrospective critics as compromise, which it was not. It was, simply, a different kind of work.
The third phase, 1986 to 1994, is the Virgin era and after. The records turn further toward house and techno (Code, 1987, contains some of the earliest acid-house-influenced production by a British band), and then toward an ambient-influenced electronic-music territory that pre-dates the term ambient-techno by some years. The final original-era release, The Conversation (1994), is a generous double-CD of mature electronic music that no one in 1981 would have predicted Cabaret Voltaire would make. The band's dissolution, that year, was undramatic: Mallinder relocated to Australia for academic work, Kirk continued solo and under various aliases (Sweet Exorcist, Sandoz, Electronic Eye), and the Cabaret Voltaire name was kept dormant. Kirk eventually revived it as a solo performance project in 2014, performed under the name through to his death in September 2021 and recorded a final-period album, Shadow of Fear, in 2020. Mallinder did not return.
The Bureau's editorial position, in summary: Cabaret Voltaire are the genre's most underrated act among critics who care about it and the most overrated act among the small number of academic readers for whom the band stands in for the entire Sheffield electronic-music tradition. They are, in fact, neither. They are a working band that produced fourteen studio LPs across twenty-one years, anchored a city-wide musical economy, recorded other artists, ran a studio, kept their books in order, paid their tax bills and finished what they started. This is filed second because filed first went to the band that announced more loudly what the work was for; the durable work, in any tradition, is generally the work that does not announce itself.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Early Middle Ages · last revised c. the Anthropocene