A Short History of Cabaret Voltaire

The electronic music scene in Sheffield, England has been thriving since the middle of the seventies. The band that started the ball rolling was Cabaret Voltaire. At the time the straight ahead sound of punk was exploding all around Britain and the electronic scene in Sheffield could be seen as an alternative to punk's growing blandness. However many of the early Sheffield bands were definitely inspired by the basic punk ethos of DIY and they certainly had a punk attitude. The scene has spawned some notable other acts like the Human League, Pulp and the Warp record label.

Cabaret Voltaire was a trio of non-musicians. There was Stephen Mallinder, Richard H. Kirk and Chris Watson. They were inspired by Holger Czukay of Can and his looping, editing and sampling techniques and also by the garage bands of the 1960's. Bands like the Seeds. The trio began with the use of drum machines, early analog synths, reel-to-reel tape decks, and occasionally bass and guitar. The words in the songs came courtesy of obscure films. The song 'Sluggin For Jesus', for example, had a voiceover taken from a TV evangelist. The band had an obvious art foundation with their name coming from a Dadaist periodical and their approach to music making from modernist experiments with form.

At first, Cabaret Voltaire songs were definitely not songs in the traditional sense. They were released through Factory, Rough Trade and the Genesis P-Orridge run Industrial label. One trick they used was to take the normally quiet sounds in the background of the mix and move them to the foreground. So making a negative-image soundscape. These sounds were looped and spliced together with odd rhythms so to exact a physical dimension to the music. It definitely sounded like it should be dance music, but was a little difficult to dance to. Maybe it inhabited a grey are, somewhere between song and dance. Maybe not.

When the 1980's came around Cabaret Voltaire had started using the drums and the bass to provide a more traditional backbone to their tracks. Songs like 'Breathe Deep', for example, was positively funky, though with Mallinder's vocals being saturated with effects it certainly wasn't a easy listen. They released the single 'Yashar' in 1983 and it could be seen as a pre-cursor to the ethno-techno scene that was starting to break through. The song was a mix of Detroit electronica and traditional middle eastern vocals. Coldcut and M/A/R/R/S ran with the idea later in the decade. The song 'Sensoria' was perhaps a highlight of Cabaret Voltaire's back catalog. It was very definitely a club anthem, well it was a couple of years after it was released, as the types of clubs that played such stuff didn't exist when it was first released. The band's experimentation can be heard in the music of Nine Inch Nails and the industrial sound of Skinny Puppy, as well as acid house, rave and ambient music. This was the thing with Cabaret Voltaire, as it is with many originators. They became more famous, more influential and more appreciated years after they started, when the rest of the world had caught up with what they were doing.