Shadow of Fear When Richard H. Kirk decided to reclaim the name of his old band Cabaret Voltaire forty years after he co-founded the original trio in Sheffield with Stephen Mallinder and Christopher R. Watson, things seemed to have come full circle. Here was a band whose mesh of multi-media electronic experiments had been sired in the midst of northern English inner city post-industrial decline. Taking their name from the Dadaists nightclub in Zurich, over their original twenty year existence, their cut-up sonic constructions fused dub-kosmiche propulsion and fuzzed-up punk garage moved from underground paranoia to clubland mind-melding for the techno age. Six years since a now solo Kirk performed under the Cabaret Voltaire name for the first time since 1992, the release of the Shadow of Fear album this month seems to chime dangerously with the times. Arriving in the thick of the Covid-19 pandemic, the aftermath of the American election and the UK’s looming departure from the E
An archive of arts writing by Neil Cooper. Effete No Obstacle.