Cabaret Voltaire

Decoding Society

Events move faster as they recede from the present. Time collapses. Moments elide. Midway through 2001, in a scarily accurate reconstruction of Manchester's Hacienda club, created for Michael Winterbottom's film on the life and death of Factory Record s' legendary social space, 24 Hour Party People, Richard H Kirk stands gazing at the stage, where two young actors are busy being Cabaret Voltaire for the cameras. Judging by the sparse crowd of kids watching, the scene reflects a moment from Fac 51's earlier existence (the nightclub was assigned its own number in the Factory catalogue), when it was still less of a building than a barely inhabited floor plan, a design waiting to be executed. Back then, Cabaret Voltaire were completely at home in its hedonistic severity. They were actually the first group ever to perform live there, playing the club's opening night on 21 May 1982. Associations and connections have shifted in this historical recreation of the Hac's early days, however. The song that the movie version of Cabaret Voltaire are shown performing is "Sex Money Freaks", a track taken from their 1987 album Code. By the time of its release, the nature of electronic dance music and the people responding to it, especially in the Hacienda, had altered radically. Cabaret Voltaire suddenly found themselves strangers in a strange land they had originally helped uncover, and their reputation suffered accordingly. The innovative and genuinely subversive dance beats Cabaret Voltaire laid down during those missing years between 1982 and 87 have been dropped out of the picture.

Now, with the appearance of Conform To Deform, a four CD box set containing rare and unreleased material predominantly culled from this period, plus The Original Sound Of Sheffield 83-87, a compilation of original Cabs 12" mixes available for the first time, that critical deficit can finally be addressed. A whole squad of studio innovators, including Derrick May, Orbital's Paul and Phil Hartnoll, Tom Rowlands of The Chemical Brothers, and Warp Records founder Steve Beckett, have already come forward to acknowledge Cabaret Voltaire as an influence. "I think we conceptualise after the record has come out," Stephen Mallinder observed to journalist Paul Morley back in November 1980, when the group was still a trio comprising himself, Chris Watson and Richard Kirk, and the Hacienda had yet to be built. "A lot of the things that we've done make a lot more sense after we've done them." Film sets, however authentic, are just the stiff ghosts left by lived experience. As the camera travels across the Hac's fabled dancefloor to where the real Richard H Kirk stands among The Cabs' recreated audience, this is perhaps a good moment to remember that history is only ever rewritten. Nothing is as you left it.

Time was when Cabaret Voltaire's very name stood for the artless chaos that conceals art. As an independent group operating through Rough Trade from 1978-82, 'The Cabs', as they came to be known, conformed pretty well to the stolid pluralities that punk had coalesced into. The NME could even praise them as "an original punk band made good", but the sense of relief that accompanied such an assertion could come a little too close to the surface on occasion. It seemed impossible to write a profile of Kirk, Mallinder and Watson without mentioning how approachable they were, so completely unlike their image as aloof grey manufacturers of musical elitism. If the group came across as friendly and unassuming, their music during this period did not: a bleak expression of overload, distortion and decay, such releases as Voice Of America (1980), the three-part "Sluggin' Fer Jesus" (released on Crepescule 12"s between 1981-83) and Red Mecca (1981) gave noisy celebration to the corruption of meaning: the sound of signals feeding back on themselves.

Cabaret Voltaire had successfully exploited the faultlines opening up in musical form due to the increasing availability of cheap electronic keyboards, rhythm machines and processors, but it was difficult to grasp what that achievement entailed. The subject kept slipping away, partially because the equipment The Cabs were using could not answer for itself. The raw exposed aesthetic of punk, its wilful drive towards demystification, could never fully accommodate the boxes, leads and connections behind modern electronic music. Besides, as Kirk and Mallinder had both come to realise by the time Chris Watson decided to quit the group in 1982, cutting edge sound technology meant dancefloor technology. "The technological breakthroughs and the most radical music," Richard Kirk recalls, "were both coming out of the dance scene." Fancy gizmos like the sequencer, the harmoniser, the Claptrap and the digital delay were all about making funky things to play with, offering the perfect expression of how art and dance were perceived as being mutually exclusive opposites. "Fuck art, let's dance", the T-shirts on sale in Soho's Old Compton Street used to read, but first, they implied, let's make a deal.

When Cabaret Voltaire's The Crackdown came out on Virgin in 1983, it was clear that things had moved on. Kirk had already observed that, with Watson's departure for a full time job as a TV sound recordist, Cabaret Voltaire was "less a group and more like a business partnership" - and they now had the corporate logo to prove it. Designed by 1980s typographic visionary Neville Brody, Cabaret Voltaire's elegant 'CV' chevron meant business. Simple, direct and easily identifiable, it was a sure sign that something had changed. Encouraged by stylish entrepreneurial berserker Stevo, whose company Some Bizzare had mastered the art of the early 1980s music deal, Kirk and Mallinder had refined their strengths, redefined their roles and started to strip back their sound. It was Stevo who offered to broker a contract with Virgin Records that would allow the Cabs access to 24 track recording facilities in London, the services of a good producer and possible crossover into the rapidly growing dance market. He would also come up with the funding CV required to set up their independent video label, Doublevision. All he asked in return was that the vocals, formerly strained and filtered into harsh declamations when run through the desk back at Western Works, The Cabs' home studio in Sheffield, become a little more prominent and a little less processed.