Anticipation to see British electronic-music pioneers Cabaret Voltaire perform has been building among some Americans for almost 50 years. Luckily for these diehards, the band—led by 71-year-old bassist/vocalist Stephen Mallinder—are touring North America for the final time this year, with a Portland date at Roseland Theater on May 8.
Coming together in British industrial hub Sheffield during the mid-’70s, Mallinder, guitarist/winds player Richard H. Kirk, and synthesist Chris Watson desired to make weird, unprecedented sounds, despite having no conventional musical skills. Regardless, these disciples of the absurdist, early-20th-century art movement Dada were hell-bent on disrupting normal entertainment protocols and spotlighting the cursed forces of government surveillance and propaganda, mostly with DIY electronics and tapes, as documented on Methodology ’74-’78: Attic Tapes. Reviewing this 2003 comp in XLR8R, I wrote, “Cabaret Voltaire [forged] bizarrely bleeping abstractions akin to Gil Mellé’s Andromeda Strain soundtrack and elaborating on the timbral mutations pioneered by Tod Dockstader and Morton Subotnick.”
Cabaret Voltaire soon went on to release Mix-Up, Three Mantras, and The Voice of America, and, alongside Throbbing Gristle, created the nascent industrial sound that’s influenced thousands of malcontents over the last 45 years. Beginning with 1981’s zenith, Red Mecca, and moving through 2X45, Fools Game/Gut Level, The Crackdown, and Micro-Phonies, Cabaret Voltaire incorporated funk, electro, and EBM elements into their skewed and paranoiac sound, turning dance floors into zones of suspense, tension, and disorientation. Later albums such as Code and Groovy, Laidback and Nasty gravitated toward house and techno for hedonistic clubbers.
For many listeners of a certain age, though, it was instant classic “Nag, Nag, Nag”—a single that also appeared on Rough Trade Records’ 1980 compilation Wanna Buy a Bridge?—that converted them into Cabaret Voltaire fans. The track barreled like a Nuggets-style garage-rocker, albeit adorned with the nastiest distortion that cheap analog synths and guitar effects pedals could muster. Like the contemporaneous music of Chrome, it sounded as if it were emanating from a more sinister planet than Earth. “Nag” exemplifies the band’s knack for generating a unique vocabulary of tones.
In a Zoom interview with Mallinder, I asked if he views that track as a breakthrough. “Yeah. We were able to play with the formulas of music in which we dropped what we did into almost like a mold of music more than we’d done prior to that. It had a very distinct structure to it. It was electronic, but also it was punky and had a garage-rock feel. We made quite abstract tracks and were quite improvisational and loose. I won’t say that ‘Nag, Nag, Nag’ had a formula, but it had a structure to it. That’s why it crossed over more.”
Mallinder’s vocal style during Cabaret Voltaire up through 1982 is a distinctively mangled grunt suggesting he’s under chronic pressure. Was the aim to create a man-machine persona representing someone struggling in a world of increasing state-sponsored repression, or was this just how the music inspired him to sound?
“A little of both, really. We started off with the voice as an instrument. We’ve been through lots of different phases of music. We try to stay consistent with the things we began with, although Richard’s gone [Richard Kirk, who helmed the band from 2014 onward after the band took a 20-year hiatus, died in 2021]. Part of that was the voice played the role of an instrument as much as it did a means of communicating. The words and the themes were important, but the way that the voice actually did that was important, too. Also, I like the idea of the voice as a message and a messenger and playing with the ideas of propaganda: the loudspeaker notion of the voice.”
For this tour, Cabaret Voltaire’s first US jaunt since 1991, Mallinder has enlisted drummer Benge (aka Ben Edwards), keyboardist/guitarist Eric Random (who was Nico’s music coordinator during her last years), and I Speak Machine synth wiz Tara Busch, who will perform Watson’s parts from stems he created. “Chris can’t do the American shows because travel is difficult for him,” Mallinder says. Busch has played with Gary Numan and Nine Inch Nails, so she has chops and cred galore. Benge collects janky drum machines and has worked with Mallinder in Wrangler. Random played on key Cabaret Voltaire releases 2X45, Gut Level, and Live in Sheffield 19 Jan 1982.
With this crack lineup, Mallinder didn’t simply want to replicate CV’s recordings. “[I strove] to rewrite and recreate the original sounds so we could place the songs in the 21st century. The other thing I wanted to do was make sure the setlist was chosen for the visual component, so we could work with the films that we had.”
Even though Watson left the band after Red Mecca, he participated in the group’s 2025 UK comeback gigs and contributed to their sonic palette for North American shows, which will encompass songs from 1978-1990 including “The Set Up,” “Nag, Nag, Nag,” “Seconds Too Late,” “Crackdown,” and “Easy Life.”
“Eric and I are anchoring the parts that Richard and I did. [Benge and I have] worked together the last 15 years. He’s the drummer in the band, but he also helped me build all the stems. We did all the arrangements.”
Mallinder says that this tour’s setlist will “cover the spectrum,” though nothing from the final records he did with Kirk, as they wouldn’t work without him. He says “the songs have been reinvented—not with new sounds, but with the new playing of sounds. For those people who wondered what it would be like if Chris had stayed in the band, what he would have contributed, this time you’re going to hear it. It’s also a question of what works for us to do in the live set, because we don’t want to use samples. It’s got to be a reinvention.”
It must feel strange for Mallinder to be performing Cabaret Voltaire songs without Kirk. Will there be a tribute to him during the sets? “I always make sure that Richard gets fully acknowledged. It is weird doing it without him and I miss him. It feels like his spirit is there. It’s a sad thing, but at the same time, we agreed with Richard’s partner not to splatter his image everywhere. I don’t want it to look like some in memoriam thing.”
Despite the US being in dystopian-nightmare mode, Mallinder’s excited to come over. “I’ve not played in Portland or Seattle before. I just hope people get it and it works and that people are challenged by it, but are also up for a fuckin’ dance, as well.”