Sugarbeat@Cabaret Voltaire, Edinburgh, February 29 2008, 10pm-4am
This is entertainment.
Richard H Kirk is talking about how his old band inspired the names of not one, but two night-clubs. The fact that Cabaret Voltaire, the electronic pioneers formed in Sheffield’s industrial ruins in the early 1970s by Kirk with Stephen Mallinder and Chris Watson themselves took their name from the Zurich speak-easy opened in 1916 as a hotbed of Dada activity adds even more weight to their avant-hedonist club-land credentials.
CV’s best known work, the primitive bubblegum garage-band squelch of ‘Nag, Nag, Nag’ became the anthem of the Wednesday night London beautiful peoples’ hang-out of the same name on the back of the Electroclash wave in 2002. With a DJ set being something of a conceptual gag, not to say coup, for Sugarbeat on the third anniversary of Edinburgh’s Cabaret Voltaire, the rest of the world, it seems, has finally caught up with Kirk.
“We did our bit,” he says of CV’s influence. “It was a bit of a challenge, but it’s nice that people remember. Things are quite different now to when we started, when very few people seemed to be making music. We were ahead of the pack, to the extent that our first ever live show in 1975 got quite ugly, and ended in total mayhem. That’s when we knew we were onto something.”
Cabaret Voltaire were founded on a Burroughsian cut-up aesthetic applied to repetitive beats long before mainstream sampling and scratching utilised the same pick n’ mix sense of collage for the dancefloor. As arthouse-experimental and grim-up-north intellectual as they were scarifyingly mean-and-moody, mind-mashingly euphoric, paranoid, funky and sexy-as-hell, more often than not in the same track, their extensive back catalogue can now be seen as the missing link between Can, Kraftwerk, Giorgio Moroder and Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry on the one hand, and Chicago and Detroit Housemeisters such as Derrick May and Marshall Jefferson, who adored them, on the other.
“A lot of people at Rough Trade were quite snobbish about dance music,” according to Kirk. “But we couldn’t see any point in repeating what we’d already done. We could either go up our own arses and become more esoteric, or else open up and become more accessible, but keep hold of the core values what we were about. The Chicago and Detroit scenes were looking to that, and which helped evolve what became house music.”
With Kirk’s ex colleagues either working as a sound recordist for David Attenborough (Watson) or else providing noises for a Shaun Ryder spoken word album in Australia (Mallinder), Kirk has kept the CV flame alive via a series of re-releases and remixes. For his own material, like some secret agent forever blending into the background Kirk has slipped quietly underground. operating under more than thirty aliases for almost twice as many releases. Beyond Al Jabr, Blacworld, Future Movie Cops, Outland Assassin and Ubu Rahman, his two most prevailing identities date back to CV days.
As Sandoz, two albums of reggae-inspired digi-dub have appeared on Soul Jazz Records. In the guise of Sweet Exorcist (a name lifted from a Curtis Mayfield song), Kirk’s 1991 ‘C.C.E.P.’ album was the first long-player released on the Sheffield based Warp label, future home of Aphex Twin, Boards Of Canada and a slew of artists in debt to Cabaret Voltaire.
“No-one knew who the fuck I was,’ Kirk says. “Even at the time we’d been going for twenty years, and it was great to do something without that baggage. That anonymity really appeals to me, and was what dance music was all about when it started. But there’s a sense of mischief there as well. A lot of the names do have quite distinct sounds.”
‘C.C.E.P.’ was preceded by Sweet Exorcist’s 1990 single, ‘Testone,’ also on Warp and still a Ministry of Sound favourite, it was released at much the same time as CV played Edinburgh’s Calton Studios. A recording of this makes up the third CD of ‘Conform To Deform,’ 2001’s archive box set of CV material culled from the band’s major label years.
This highlights a very different Cabaret Voltaire from the band’s first Edinburgh ‘appearance’ at the 1975 Edinburgh Film Festival, when, due to a mix of budgetary restraints and a trip to Europe, CV’s ‘performance’ came via a package containing a reel of Super 8 footage and a 15 minute tape of its soundtrack.
“We never got that package back,” says Kirk. “If anyone’s got it we’d love to see it again. Just about every other recording from day one is in the archive. That’s the one that got away.”
These days, Kirk releases material solely through his website (www.richardhkirk.com). His last two albums, ‘Burning The Words Part 1 and 2,’ released under his Vasco de Mento disguise, were released in August 2007. Given that surveillance, control and technology were key themes of Cabaret Voltaire, such means of dissemination were inevitable.
For a hint of where Kirk’s head’s at just now, as well as Fela Kuti and Ladytron, he confesses a penchant for the back-alley after-hours dubstep of Burial’s recent album.
“We were all big fans of Dub,” says Kirk of his former band’s influences. “All this stuff based round a monstrous bass-line. But people shouldn’t expect me to play four to the floor stuff or minimal techno or any of that. At my age it’ll be hard enough not being mistaken for an off-duty copper.”
This is fun.
An edited version of this was published in The List, February 2008
This is entertainment.
Richard H Kirk is talking about how his old band inspired the names of not one, but two night-clubs. The fact that Cabaret Voltaire, the electronic pioneers formed in Sheffield’s industrial ruins in the early 1970s by Kirk with Stephen Mallinder and Chris Watson themselves took their name from the Zurich speak-easy opened in 1916 as a hotbed of Dada activity adds even more weight to their avant-hedonist club-land credentials.
CV’s best known work, the primitive bubblegum garage-band squelch of ‘Nag, Nag, Nag’ became the anthem of the Wednesday night London beautiful peoples’ hang-out of the same name on the back of the Electroclash wave in 2002. With a DJ set being something of a conceptual gag, not to say coup, for Sugarbeat on the third anniversary of Edinburgh’s Cabaret Voltaire, the rest of the world, it seems, has finally caught up with Kirk.
“We did our bit,” he says of CV’s influence. “It was a bit of a challenge, but it’s nice that people remember. Things are quite different now to when we started, when very few people seemed to be making music. We were ahead of the pack, to the extent that our first ever live show in 1975 got quite ugly, and ended in total mayhem. That’s when we knew we were onto something.”
Cabaret Voltaire were founded on a Burroughsian cut-up aesthetic applied to repetitive beats long before mainstream sampling and scratching utilised the same pick n’ mix sense of collage for the dancefloor. As arthouse-experimental and grim-up-north intellectual as they were scarifyingly mean-and-moody, mind-mashingly euphoric, paranoid, funky and sexy-as-hell, more often than not in the same track, their extensive back catalogue can now be seen as the missing link between Can, Kraftwerk, Giorgio Moroder and Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry on the one hand, and Chicago and Detroit Housemeisters such as Derrick May and Marshall Jefferson, who adored them, on the other.
“A lot of people at Rough Trade were quite snobbish about dance music,” according to Kirk. “But we couldn’t see any point in repeating what we’d already done. We could either go up our own arses and become more esoteric, or else open up and become more accessible, but keep hold of the core values what we were about. The Chicago and Detroit scenes were looking to that, and which helped evolve what became house music.”
With Kirk’s ex colleagues either working as a sound recordist for David Attenborough (Watson) or else providing noises for a Shaun Ryder spoken word album in Australia (Mallinder), Kirk has kept the CV flame alive via a series of re-releases and remixes. For his own material, like some secret agent forever blending into the background Kirk has slipped quietly underground. operating under more than thirty aliases for almost twice as many releases. Beyond Al Jabr, Blacworld, Future Movie Cops, Outland Assassin and Ubu Rahman, his two most prevailing identities date back to CV days.
As Sandoz, two albums of reggae-inspired digi-dub have appeared on Soul Jazz Records. In the guise of Sweet Exorcist (a name lifted from a Curtis Mayfield song), Kirk’s 1991 ‘C.C.E.P.’ album was the first long-player released on the Sheffield based Warp label, future home of Aphex Twin, Boards Of Canada and a slew of artists in debt to Cabaret Voltaire.
“No-one knew who the fuck I was,’ Kirk says. “Even at the time we’d been going for twenty years, and it was great to do something without that baggage. That anonymity really appeals to me, and was what dance music was all about when it started. But there’s a sense of mischief there as well. A lot of the names do have quite distinct sounds.”
‘C.C.E.P.’ was preceded by Sweet Exorcist’s 1990 single, ‘Testone,’ also on Warp and still a Ministry of Sound favourite, it was released at much the same time as CV played Edinburgh’s Calton Studios. A recording of this makes up the third CD of ‘Conform To Deform,’ 2001’s archive box set of CV material culled from the band’s major label years.
This highlights a very different Cabaret Voltaire from the band’s first Edinburgh ‘appearance’ at the 1975 Edinburgh Film Festival, when, due to a mix of budgetary restraints and a trip to Europe, CV’s ‘performance’ came via a package containing a reel of Super 8 footage and a 15 minute tape of its soundtrack.
“We never got that package back,” says Kirk. “If anyone’s got it we’d love to see it again. Just about every other recording from day one is in the archive. That’s the one that got away.”
These days, Kirk releases material solely through his website (www.richardhkirk.com). His last two albums, ‘Burning The Words Part 1 and 2,’ released under his Vasco de Mento disguise, were released in August 2007. Given that surveillance, control and technology were key themes of Cabaret Voltaire, such means of dissemination were inevitable.
For a hint of where Kirk’s head’s at just now, as well as Fela Kuti and Ladytron, he confesses a penchant for the back-alley after-hours dubstep of Burial’s recent album.
“We were all big fans of Dub,” says Kirk of his former band’s influences. “All this stuff based round a monstrous bass-line. But people shouldn’t expect me to play four to the floor stuff or minimal techno or any of that. At my age it’ll be hard enough not being mistaken for an off-duty copper.”
This is fun.
An edited version of this was published in The List, February 2008
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