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Tone Glow 241: Cabaret Voltaire
Cabaret Voltaire are an English industrial and electronic music act from Sheffield that was formed in 1973. Originally featuring Stephen Mallinder, Richard H. Kirk, and Chris Watson, the latter would leave the group in 1981 before the others continued as a duo in the following years. During the 1970s, Cabaret Voltaire wielded DIY electronics and tape loops to create dense sound collages, eventually playing shows and presenting their experimental music in public spaces. They eventually got signed to Rough Trade and released their debut album Mix-Up (1979). While Cabaret Voltaire was lumped in with other industrial and post-punk bands at the time, the traces of funk influence on Red Mecca (1981) and 2x45 (1982) would lead to their fuller embrace of dance music during their time on Virgin Records. On the label they released The Crackdown (1983), Micro-Phonies (1984) and The Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord. They then signed with EMI and released CODE (1987) and Groovy, Laidback, and Nasty (1990). The former album has been newly remastered and its deluxe edition is being released by Mute. The latter saw the group recording in Chicago, a reflection of their interest in American house and techno music. Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Stephen Mallinder on July 28th, 2026 via Zoom to discuss his love for pop music, finding inspiration from film and TV soundtracks, and working with Adrian Sherwood on CODE. Subscribe Joshua Minsoo Kim: I interviewed Andrew McKenzie of The Hafler Trio a few years ago. He mentioned someone named Alan Cook and that you guys practiced in his father’s attic. I remember he was a firefighter and got fired, and then he was a cop and got fired. What can you tell me about him? Stephen Mallinder: Ah yeah, Alan’s died. Alan was Chris Watson’s best friend. He was just a friend back in the day and I had not seen him for many years because I had not been in Sheffield. He was always around in the early days of the Cabs. Good fun, good sense of humor. Odd that he was a policeman, but I think he did it with a sense of irony more than anything else to be honest. He was just a friend, and there’s not much more to say, really. Can you recall the earliest instances you had where you understood the importance of disrupting norms, of eclecticism in the way you approach life? Most of that comes in the formative years. For all of us, it was when we were teenagers. I always did art from a young age, and I think Richard [H. Kirk] would say the same. It came from that period, and it was one of discovery, particularly early 20th-century art: Max Ernst, Kurt Schwitters, people like that. They were people who had incorporated the mediums of the age into their work, and I think we were very similar in that sense. With music heroes, you’d read interviews with David Bowie or Kid Strange from Doctors of Madness, who would talk about William Burroughs. It was things like that. It became a journey. When each of us were teenagers and discovering art from the classical, figurative notions of art… art as a mixed media and discovering people like Duchamp was a big inspiration. We worked in a very montage type of way of juxtaposing different elements, and that came from the early-20th century movements, Dada being one and then Fluxus being something more contemporary. Joseph Beuys and Nam June Paik interested us, for example, and they got us on the path to what we were doing. I’ve got a Warhol behind me as we talk (moves body to show artwork). The age we lived in was one of consumption and money, so to parody that was powerful. Whatever your feelings on Warhol now are irrelevant—in that moment in time, people like him and Lichtenstein were great at parodying it. There was the mad stuff, too—Jackson Pollock was an influence because we connected with how he’d find order in chaos. When did you first engage with artmaking in this collagic fashion? When I was doing art, I played with sculpture and painting and did cut-up things from magazines like we all did, but I was also using tape recorders, and that’s where the Cabs came in—translating ideas of montage and juxtaposition but from using tapes. All three of us individually messed with tape recorders when we were younger, but that’s not unusual in the sense that we came from a period when reel-to-reels were in people’s houses. I had a Grundig tape machine, and I discovered the process of making tape loops early on, cutting up Beatles and Beach Boys pre-recorded tapes to make loops from them. Can you talk about your interest in pop music and how that’s evolved over time? It’s always been a part of the music, sometimes in the background but sometimes in the foreground, especially if we’re talking about the CODE (1987) reissue. What does it mean to you? How does it square with the rupturing of pop music you were doing both early on and throughout the Cabs’ career? We were all children of post-War, so we grew up in that baby boom period. Pop music was air and water to us—we breathed it, we were surrounded by it. My sisters were into it, my cousins were into pop music. My sister used to go see The Beatles and The Stones. There’s a danger in thinking you can’t hold those two thoughts together, that if you rupture and disrupt something, that you don’t also have an understanding or even an affection for it in the first place. We were aware of the power of popular music, and that provided reference points for what we did and still do. Though, I don’t know what popular music means now because we live in such a weird, digital, post-temporality world. We love the idea of sound, but we also love the idea of shaping sound into a form without polishing it or taking the edges off. We wanted weird sounds that someone could connect with. We didn’t want people to dislike the music we made, but we wanted them to question what they were attracted to. We were no different from any other band in that sense—we were aware that there was power in writing something that someone could whistle. When you can make those kind of hooks out of weird sounds, they’re even more powerful. I still love pop music in a sense, and what I’m thinking about when I’m saying that is The Flying Lizards. They had a song called “Money,” which is a cover version. It’s something everybody knows and can hum and sing along to, but when you deconstruct it, it’s made of really extreme noises and stripped-back rhythms. So I have no problem with pop music, I just don’t like that it doesn’t progress things in most cases. But that’s always been the case, and it’s an industry thing. Somebody has success with something and every major label tries to grab what they can. If all of a sudden there were a very popular female singer, be it Lulu or Sandie Shaw in the ’60s, each company would rush to get their own version, and it doesn’t mean that the original wasn’t fascinating. I grew up on the sounds of Phil Spector and Joe Meek. They made pop music but it was really out-there, tripped-out music. People think that if it’s labeled “pop” that it’s facile or cheap or of no value, but there’s always diamonds in the muck and rubble of pop culture—there always is. We weren’t songwriters, so we couldn’t really write like that. We were never people who could do verse-chorus-verse-chorus. I mean, we did, but we always managed to mess it up and do it in our own idiosyncratic way. What I do like is using sounds as leitmotifs, which is part of popular culture, and we worked with that. We would use a tape or found sound in “I Want You” or “The Voice of America” and those voices became leitmotifs that recurred throughout the track. They became a hook without us adhering to the structure of a pop song. So, we were just a warped mirror of popular culture, and I’m quite happy with that. I don’t wanna blow up pop music—I like using it, manipulating it, parodying it, and challenging people to see what they like about it. We were pop music as much as anyone, really. You wanted people to interrogate what they like. Do you have an example of when you really noticed that this was happening, that you were successful? I know early on that people were a bit confused when you were opening for other acts. I think we intimidated a lot of people. They were frightened to talk to us (laughter). In other respects, we’ve always been very approachable. All the interviews we’ve done in the past… we were never cryptic, we were always transparent. Same with this interview here. I don’t really have a manifesto (laughter). I like the fact that I’m talking with you and I’m kind of making things up as I go along because you’re also making me question why I did the things I did—and that’s the sign of a great interview. We’d have that with people at gigs as well. Richard would withdraw in later years, but even so, he did interviews and was frank in his views. What we do has always been bundled up with politics and socioeconomic things. The music we made was meant to trigger those conversations as much as anything else. The titles, the found sounds we incorporated—they were always there as a catalyst for conversation. And not in a vicious way, but they were provocations. We had a song called “Baader Meinnhof,” and you can figure out why we did that. We did a track called “Do the Mussolini.” Why did we do that and what does it mean? We were never a band you should take at face value. We brought in levels of ambiguity with everything from the Three Mantras (1980) to “Don’t Argue” (1987). There was a playfulness, and you’re allowed to laugh at what we do and throw it back at us too. There’s a danger when people take things too literally, but we never had a manifesto going, “This is what it is and this is what it means. If you don’t agree, fuck off.” No, for us it was like, “You find your meaning in this.” How are you navigating audience expectations then? Are you thinking about it much at all with the recordings or when playing live? Or is it mostly just you doing what you want and then the music ends up having its own existence and fans can do with it what they want? We never pandered towards audience expectations. We do it for ourselves and see if it entertains, amuses, or provokes. We’ve done our job if we get there. But with that said, I’m doing shows that reflect the back catalogue and the whole history of the band, and while every track isn’t an upbeat track, we want everyone to enjoy it. The Cabs at their peak, we had club hits, though they were warped club hits. As long as things are dynamic, it’s fine. People worry when they see a piece of art because they think it has a single meaning. They treat it like a puzzle with one answer. I like to think that what we do is allow people to feel what they feel. We’re probably gonna do “Thank You America” in America, and if you take that at face value… (laughter). That song was done with a massive sense of irony, and during that period we were thinking about Reagan. I do like to think that 99% of people into Cabaret Voltaire get the irony (laughter). I mean, of course there are ethical issues too, and we’re aware of identity politics and not offending particular groups of people. I’m really happy that our audience is so broad, that our audience now is so young and gay and trans. I hope people know there’s nothing mean-spirited in what we do, but at the same time we are critical of power, and these forces of power and control—and specific aspects of media—can be universal experiences for all. We want to speak for a diverse range of people, and there are common things that we all have faced as well. Obviously you have a lot of songs about America. “Don’t Argue” starts with an excerpt from a video by the US War Department, and that one is interesting because there’s so many notable people involved: Frank Capra directed it, Dana Andrews narrates it and he was just in Laura (1944) the year before, and Dr. Seuss wrote the text. I’m curious what sort of things you were thinking about at the time. It’s 1987, and this is when Thatcher gets reelected as well. Can you talk to me about the political nature of CODE and what was on your mind? The title is a bit of a giveaway. We were aware that we were on the cusp of a digital technological period. In a single word, “code” alluded to the world we felt we were moving into; we weren’t predicting it, we were just aware that it was happening. In the past, songs like “Spies in the Wires” (1984) were relevant to all that. “Sex, Money, Freaks” was about wealth and indulgence and consumption and greed. We were aware of human nature moving into this hedge fund manager-type world. Thatcher was certainly moving Britain towards this—it was about the movement of wealth, and how technology was going to facilitate that. We were conscious of this. For us in Britain, me and Richard had a fascination with America because we grew up with American culture and television, but we were critical of it as well. The song “Don’t Argue” was about the idea of bearing arms and how that was really starting to define America. It was starting to filter through into culture and television, and it’s where America and the world is at right now. Like, there was someone who just killed someone at a Pride march. People are using vehicles as weapons. The notion of us moving towards this violent social order was something we felt during the late ’80s and it feels like it’s accelerated since then. I’ve read interviews where you said you like to experience art that’s engaging with the current moment, whether that’s contemporary politics or contemporary technologies. Electronic music has evolved so much since Cabaret Voltaire started, and I’m curious how your own relationship with it has changed over time, and especially what it was like during the 1980s. We were never in awe of technology. We never went out and bought lots of stuff. We preferred analogue technology because it retained a human warmth and emotion to it, like when using Roland synths and sequencers. So in terms of sound technology, we loved that, and at the same time we were aware of how digital technology… we did CODE to the precursor of the sampler really coming out. It was emerging then. We were sampling in our own way using machines in the studio, and we were aware of the value of samplers, but there’s a difference between that and synthesizers. We weren’t the type of people who jumped onto new technology, and we didn’t fetishize it. We weren’t like Kraftwerk where technology represented who we were. And people who came after us really indulged in all new technology, but we never did. We liked the idea of limitations and restrictions. When we did CODE, we went into another studio, but after that we returned home to our own studio, which had much more minimal technology. We were never slaves to technology, no. Given your fascination with America and the music you’ve made, I’m curious how carefully you were following the early developments of hip-hop. We were into it early on. I was really into D Train, Peech Boys, The Gap Band, and Roger Troutman so it was a really big thing when Grandmaster Flash came out. We were connected with [producers] Arthur Baker and John Robie who did “Planet Rock” and “Looking for the Perfect Beat.” We worked with John for “Don’t Argue” and I did a track with Bambaataa [“Radical Music: Revolutionary Dance” (1988)]. We were really into all that early stuff, like Mantronix, almost to our detriment. When club music exploded, people in England—like the NME—were saying, “You should be working with English people like Happy Mondays and The Stone Roses! Why are you working with people from Chicago and Detroit?” But we grew up on that! We grew up on Black American music—Richard and I were young soul boys. What’s the first band I ever saw? Booker T. & the M.G.’s. I remember seeing Steve Cropper. I shook hands with Martha Reeves when she was on stage, and this was when I was 14 or 15 years old. We grew up on Funkadelic and George Clinton, y’know? We were aware of how that technology was being used in Black electronic music on songs like “Atomic Dog” (1982). When someone like Schoolly D popped up it was like, okay, I get this. How do you feel like your interest in all this music fed into what you were doing? It goes back to what I said earlier, which is that we could hold more than one idea, one thought, one wish in our head. Music connects people, it brings ecstasy. There’s a great book by Barbara Ehrenreich about ecstasy [Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (2006)] and this idea about communal, collective experiences. With club music, it’s this idea that you can have this spiritual connection that’s grounded in rhythm. That’s what we were always interested in. And while it wasn’t everything we did—we liked to be weird, experimental, noisy, heavy—we grew up with Fela Kuti and Hamliton Bohannon. It was just second nature. And we didn’t force it into the music of the Cabs; it was just intrinsic to who we were. Especially reggae and dub with artists like Prince Far I and Lee “Scratch” Perry and King Tubby. I never saw a difference between these reggae artists and musique concrète, though reggae was a little bit more part of genre. Pierre Schaeffer was more from the art world. We love the collision of the art world and the dancefloor—that’s what we always wanted to do. What were some of the most formative experiences you’ve had on the dancefloor? Richard and I first met when we were about 14 years old at a club in Sheffield called The Ark. It was an underage club and it played ska, reggae, and soul music. We were only kids. It was there and the football terraces—those were the roots of Cabaret Voltaire. The art side is one, but we used to go to blues parties, which were these illegal parties in Jamaican people’s homes, in their cellars. We were strongly connected with all the Sheffield club scene too, people like DJ Parrot and Winston Hazel. During the mid-1980s, we toured with these two electro and funk DJs, and that was just what we did—the dancefloor was always a really big reference point for us. I’m curious if you could talk to me about Sheffield and how the city changed throughout the Cabs’ existence. I know at one point you rejected the notion of there being an electronic music scene in Sheffield even though you had something like your Western Works studios. Is there something distinctly Sheffield about your music? Or in other words, how do you feel like your music was reflecting the changing nature of Sheffield during the ’80s and ’90s? We didn’t go out to make the sounds of the city—we were trying to make the sounds of the future—but it’s inevitable that the city became a part of it. Once you get to the late ’80s, it also becomes a characteristic of the city—the first real release on Warp Records was when Rob [Gordon] and Winnie did the Forgemasters. They took their name from a factory in Sheffield and Warp was born out of the industrial roots of the city. We didn’t see ourselves as particularly industrial; we thought it was such a cliché to say, “Oh, you sound industrial. You make sounds of the steelworks.” But still, I do think it was part of the subliminal sound that we did. As time went on, it became part of the cultural makeup of the city and the city reinvented itself through sound and music. It was us, Clock DVA, The Human League, Heaven 17, all the Warp stuff. And then you get the later stuff with Jarvis [Cocker] and Pulp. They didn’t make electronic music, but they represented that cultural base of the city just as we did. I don’t think you can separate the music of Sheffield from the city itself anymore. I’m quite honored to think that we were part of the building blocks of the city’s sound. And Sheffield is now part of the global cultural map, and it might not be a particular sound, but there is a cultural imprint. There’s a strong camaraderie with a lot of Sheffield stuff, too. Or maybe that’s just me because I get along with everybody (laughter). You said that you wanted to make music for the future. What does it mean to do that? We’ve been talking about CODE, but before that you had Micro-Phonies (1984) and The Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord (1985) which felt like important stepping stones to make the work on CODE, and that album in general just feels like an important inflection point for the Cabs. When I said we were making music for the future, it wasn’t that we were soundtracking the future, but that we were opening up to a palette of sounds in a way where, in their presentation, they’d feel like you hadn’t heard them before. And while what we did on CODE had its building blocks on Micro-Phonies and The Crackdown (1983), those two albums had their building blocks on The Voice of America (1980). We had minimal amounts of technology, but we rinsed everything out of it to find sounds that hadn’t been heard before. We didn’t just want to deal with the sounds of the guitar. If we hit the guitar string, we wanted it to sound like something that nobody had heard before. And it did reflect this sci-fi nature; as much as we were brought up on brick and iron and concrete and steel, we were brought up on television and film and Star Trek and Doctor Who. They were all mixed into our origins. It was embryonic stuff. We were looking towards those things as soundtracking our own lives. Did movies influence the way you approached music? We weren’t particularly into a lot of guitar bands—we were into rhythm, so the rock stuff wasn’t appealing—but TV and film soundtracks were really important to us. Things like A Clockwork Orange (1971) and stuff that John Carpenter was doing. I don’t think we thought too deeply about it because nobody really talked about sound design and scoring—it was a mystery world—but we were aware of how sound could become part of something brutal like in The Hills Have Eyes (1977) or how there could be a mix-and-match thing like in Andy Warhol’s Lonesome Cowboys (1968). Talking about Warhol, stuff like the Exploding Plastic Inevitable… I loved the idea of playing live and doing film, so our sound became more soundtrack-y in that way. We were mashing together the idea of visuals and sound. We weren’t aficionados about that, but we’d watch TV and such, like The Outer Limits. I wasn’t a Doctor Who fan, but I understood the point of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and the amazing stuff that was done by Daphne Oram and others. We knew that TV was at the forefront of pushing all this strange music to the masses. I’m curious if there are things that Richard was able to do that you weren’t able to do, and vice versa. This doesn’t have to be literal things, but maybe just ideas and perspectives. In some respects, Richard and I were like a two-headed person. We took on certain roles, like I’d play vocals and bass and percussion, while Richard was very much able to find the higher end of things—the guitar and synths. Our influences were the same, but how they manifested was different. In rewriting everything [for live performances], I’m increasingly aware of how Richard was an incredible guitar player and that nobody acknowledged this. He could paint pictures with the guitar. He had no training whatsoever and was resistant to any musical approach to things, but he was absolutely amazing. In many respects, a lot of what we did was interchangeable: we both engineered, we both recorded, we both played. Because I was doing the vocals, I ended up doing a little bit more of the songwriting, which meant I became more aware of the language of pop music. That was my whole thing—to shape words around things, around samples that we’d use. Your respective work was really different. Your solo album Pow Wow (1982) also sounds different from a Cabs album. “1-37,” for example, is really spare. Richard did his own music at the time and his stuff was really dense and claustrophobic while mine was much lighter and had air in it. Pow Wow was very much a result of the stuff I was listening to at the time. I was really into Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, and Jon Hassell. There was a lighter, slightly more exotic take on things. Richard’s album a few months later [Time High Fiction (1983)] was more intense and I do think that it reflects our personalities—he was more intense than me. My works were always built on rhythms, and it’s kind of an unconscious thing I’m drawn to, and it’s usually the thing that draws me in and informs how I work. That makes a ton of sense. I can hear how a song like “In Smoke” is your attempt at fusing Get Up With It (1974) and Jon Hassell. Is there anything about CODE that stands out to you that you want to mention? The Virgin albums—Micro-Phonies, The Crackdown, and The Covenant—have been reissued and that was all good, but the two EMI albums—CODE and Groovy, Laidback, and Nasty (1990)—have almost been buried. I think it was mainly for the fact that we didn’t get the rights back until a few years ago. It’s nice to see them come back into the light a little bit and get a chance to reflect. Our period with EMI was weird. They threw a lot of money at us and they expected us to be successful but we never were. We never recouped the money. That’s the music industry though—so what? But the making of the records for both CODE and Groovy were so fun. CODE in particular was fun because we were working with Adrian Sherwood, who’s such a like-minded spirit. There was On-U, African Head Charge, the Keith LeBlanc stuff. While we were doing the album, Mark Stewart was in the studio every night—he was doing Mark Stewart and the Maffia at the time—and he was nicking all my food and beers (laughter). Keith LeBlanc was coming down too, and the whole On-U lot would turn up selling me something. Someone always had something in the boot of a car. Working with Adrian was an absolute joy—he’s a brilliant guy. He was the third wheel for us because he thought exactly like we did—we didn’t have to say anything. Those tracks and their themes have stood the test of time, and we were able to do great remixes as well. The advantage of the money that EMI gave to us was that we could work with François Kevorkian and people like that. We have great memories of it, and Richard would too—I miss him. Bill Nelson being on the album was great as well. It’s an album that has a lot of attitude. I’m glad it’s out in the world again. Is there anything that you felt was particularly unique about working with Adrian compared to other producers? And I mean this beyond just obviously seeing eye to eye on everything and having shared tastes. All producers have their own thing, it’s funny. With the two albums we had with Flood [Micro-Phonies and The Crackdown], and he actually just messaged me the other day, he was technically an engineer. That’s what he was great at, and he was able to shape those albums. Marshall Jefferson and the Chicago guys on Groovy were very musical and funky. Adrian on the other hand was a sonic alchemist. He was about sound, he was about the bass, he was about the real highs and the real lows of sound. Our producers all offered us something different, and that’s why we were happy to work with them. Flood could help us do things that we wanted to do, and at the time we weren’t used to bigger studios. Adrian was able to create sounds that we thought of in our heads. And Marshall and Fon Force were able to shape Groovy into a “musical track” kind of record. Do you have any stories to share about Keith LeBlanc? The year before he made Major Malfunction (1986), which is such a crucial album in understanding the link between industrial music and hip-hop. Keith did stuff on CODE but I don’t know if it got credited. He was one of the great drummers. Him and Doug Wimbish were there, and we’re talking Sugar Hill here—these were the people behind the label’s rhythm section. We were all quite good friends because we had lots of social connections, and it was just great. I mean, Keith was a massive part of music history. Are there specific things you learned on CODE that shaped how you approached Groovy and other stuff around this time? There’s the Acid Horse release on Wax Trax where you did the remix for “No Name, No Slogan” (1989). We learned a lot about how to work in the studio, and that helped with doing Groovy because Marshall was maybe less familiar with being in big studios than we were; it was helpful that we were comfortable in that world. When we did Groovy, the studios were only available at night in Chicago because they were used during the day for commercial projects. We’d start at 6 in the evening and work until 6 in the morning, so if we didn’t sleep, we’d have the days to ourselves. And that’s how we did that remix. We were working with Black Chicago musicians at night, and then Al Jourgensen and Paul Barker and Chris Connelly during the day. We’d see Al after he came off a night shift in the studio, and I don’t know how we managed to do all this, but we did. We hung out, partied a bit, and that’s how it was. Do you remember any parties you went to in Chicago? I remember going into Lil Louis’ club. We were with Marshall so we’d go to the Black clubs. We lived this kind of dualistic life, and American music was a little like that, with Black music and white music. We were able to straddle the two worlds, so sometimes we’d go to Cabaret Metro and then we’d go see “Jackmaster” Funk or hear Lil Louis play a 30-minute version of “French Kiss.” It was mad, it was great times. There’s a question I end all my interviews with and I wanted to ask it to you. Do you mind sharing one thing that you love about yourself? (laughs). I’ve got a great collection of trainers, or “sneakers” as you say in America. To say anything else would be arrogant. And these are quite a favorite (shows shoes)—Nike Safaris, original ’80s ones. Whatever you say about me, you can never knock my sneakers. Cabaret Voltaire’s newly remastered version of CODE is out via Mute. The album can be purchased at the label’s website and at Bandcamp. 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