Cabaret Voltaire’s essential industrial reading list
When tracing the roots of industrial, synth-pop, and wider electronic music, Sheffield’s Cabaret Voltaire is a name most paths will lead to.
Formed in the early 1970s, long before punk had struck its insurrectionary lightning bolt, founding members Stephen Mallinder, Richard H Kirk, and Chris Watson were just another bunch of kids fascinated by Brian Eno’s synthesisers shimmering all over Roxy Music’s retro-futurist glam and Doctor Who’s eerie soundscapes from childhood.
Toying with DIY electronics gear to create lo-fi tape loops and sound collages, Cabaret Voltaire honoured their namesake moniker—a reference to the 1910s Zürich club that birthed the anti-establishment Dada art movement—with their “music without music instruments”, coupled with their embrace of artful provocation, resulted in many an early show descending into violence triggered by their wry unorthodoxy.
Punk tore apart all conventions and expectations, affording the city’s budding synthesists, such as Clock DVA, The Human League, and an embryonic ABC, to unleash their weird electronic music to a less prejudiced audience. Before long, Cabaret Voltaire was signed with the upcoming indie label Rough Trade Records and issued the grinding electronic fizz of their pioneering debut ‘Nag, Nag, Nag’ single in 1979.
Forging a foundational sonic template for the industrial wave along with Throbbing Gristle and New York’s Suicide, Cabaret Voltaire would embrace the emerging pop trends around them as they soldiered through the 1980s, subsuming synthpop, techno, and later house styles into their askance aural filter.
Anyone with a fascination for industrial’s roots will know there’s a keen literary and academic well of influence alongside the musique concrète works that pointed electronic music’s way, with dystopian fiction and Beat works as essential as Karlheinz Stockhausen or the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Speaking to writer V Vale for 1983’s Industrial Culture Handbook, Cabaret Voltaire—then reduced to a duo after Watson’s departure—reeled off a selection of books and recommended reading that offered a clue to their creative process and thematic obsessions.
As with many post-punk inspirations, some key names are of no surprise. William Burroughs’ and Brion Gysin’s The Third Mind cut-up experiment, Hubert Selby Jr’s violent nightmare Last Exit to Brooklyn, A Scanner Darkly’s psychoactive paranoia beamed straight from the frayed brilliance of Philip K Dick, and JG Ballard’s subversive examination of suburban menace in The Unlimited Dream Company all offer gateways to the industrial world’s go-to authors.
Elsewhere, a peer into the murky world of cabalistic esoterica and the darker aspects of history pepper Cabaret Voltaire’s reading shopping list: Robin Lumsden’s compendium of Nazi SS regalia, occultist Aleister Crowley’s ‘autohagiography’ collections of 1920s memoirs, Dr Iwan Bloch’s 1931 study of the infamous Marquis de Sade, and reporters Henry Gris and William Dick’s exposé into alleged Soviet experiments in KGB parapsychology. For a lighter but no less stimulating read, two books on the pop art maestro Andy Warhol make the curation, as well as Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers, his second and last novel before taking off as a musician.
“I think reading should be a natural process,” Mallinder stated. adding, “I think there’s a certain elitist attitude where you feel obliged to have a certain amount of intellectual intake, which is very bourgeois”.
He expanded that reading should be something that sparks joy and not words to be archived, noting, “Reading should be something you do which you enjoy—you shouldn’t feel obliged to take in this written data just for the sake of it, just to store up the knowledge… I think reading should be enjoyable and natural, and something that you use. If you read one book and you use it for the rest of your life, that’s greater than reading a book a week that’s just there, of no use whatsoever to you”.
