In these first couple of years prior to punk, Cabaret Voltaire “never had any notion that we could ever make and release records,” says Kirk. “It was all done for our own amusement. We’d do mad stuff—drive around in a van with tape loops playing out the back, or go into pubs with a tape machine and play weird stuff—just trying to wind people up, really.” Provocation for its own sake was the name of the game. Cabaret Voltaire drew hard stares for the way they looked, too. They were fashion crazy, starting with the skinhead look in their early teens, progressing to glam, and finally developing a do-it-yourself style based around old clothes from charity thrift stores, which they’d customize with paint. Mallinder was the group’s ace stylist. “He had two rooms in his flat, one in which he lived and the other which served as his wardrobe,” recalls
NME
’s Sheffield correspondent Andy Gill (no relation to Gang of Four’s guitarist). As documented in the Sheffield zine
Gun Rubber,
a typical outfit for Mallinder might be gray pleated flannels, snakeskin shoes, a red Hawaiian shirt with the collar turned up, and a suede U.S. Air Force jacket. Looking as concertedly stylized as Mallinder did was a real statement at a time when most ordinary young men wore bell-bottom slacks and platforms while sporting sideburns and straggly shoulder-length hair.
Sheffield was a surprisingly compatible environment for the bohemian lifestyle. You didn’t need much money, thanks to the city-subsidized buses and the plethora of empty warehouses that could be squatted or cheaply rented as rehearsal spaces. The art colleges and the University of Sheffield provided student bars with dirt cheap beer and various undergraduate societies put on gigs. Cabaret Voltaire conned one of these organizations, Science for the People, into letting them play their Tuesday-night disco, reassuring the booker, “Oh yes, we play rock.”
On May 13, 1975, the Cabs played their debut gig to a room full of bemused students. Tristan Tzara would have been proud of the boys, who managed to trigger an audience riot to rival anything stirred up by the dadaists. “We had a tape loop of a recording of a steam hammer as percussion, and Richard was playing a clarinet with a rubberized jacket on it covered with flashing fairy lights, and it just ended with the audience invading the stage and beating us up,” Watson recalled years later. In the melee, Mallinder fell offstage, chipped a bone in his back, and had to be taken to the hospital. Kirk wielded his clarinet like a club to beat off the attackers, then hurled his homemade guitar into the audience. According to Kirk, “The people who attacked us ended up with the nastier injuries because a lot of people who came to see us, including some very dodgy people, took it upon themselves to take our side of the argument. Everyone was very drunk, and everything just went mad.”
Cabaret Voltaire’s next bout of
épater les bourgeois
also took place at the university. “One of the guys in the music department got us to do a performance interpreting this piece,
Exhaust,
by this bona fide classical composer Jean-Yves Bosseur,” recalls Kirk. “We just played a tape loop of someone saying the word ‘exhaust’ overlaid with some music, and we had film loops running that started melting. They were freaked out and we didn’t get invited to the after party.” This was 1976, the same year that Musical Vomit triggered a similarly negative, but much more physically demonstrative, response from the audience at the Bath Arts Festival, exiting the stage in a hailstorm of beer cans.
When punk came along, Cabaret Voltaire and the Meatwhistle/Musical Vomit crew were thrilled by its shock effects and sartorial provocations. “It just seemed a natural progression from glam to punk,” recalls Phil Oakey. “The same kids that had been wearing fake animal prints were suddenly wearing vinyl with safety pins through it. I
did
have the first zip T-shirt in Sheffield because I made it myself.” The first time Oakey met Ian Craig Marsh, the latter was dressed to distress. “I had really tight drainpipe jeans, stitched at the crotch with leather, and instead of a T-shirt I had a pair of women’s tights, with the crotch ripped out for my neck to go through, pulled over my head and stretched really tight. And I’d got a cigarette and burned holes in it, so it was split everywhere. The finishing touch was the bracelets: two small, individual-portion baked-bean cans, cut out at both ends and then slipped over my wrists.”
In June 1977, all three members of Cabaret Voltaire joined Marsh, Adi Newton, Glenn Gregory, Martyn Ware, and 2.3’s drummer Hayden Boyes-Weston for a one-off gig as the punk-spoof supergroup the Studs. “It was an anarchic, raw event,” recalls Newton. “One of our helpers had a bag of pig ears which were liberally thrown at the audience.” After chaotic, improvised versions of the Kingsmen’s “Louie Louie,” Lou Reed’s “Vicious,” and Iggy Pop’s “Cock in My Pocket,” the band left the stage to howls of abuse.
The Studs were just a bit of fun, though. Where punk had inspired kids all across the U.K. to grab guitars and make sub-Clash two-chord thrash, Sheffield’s resident aesthetes turned up their noses at the idea of back-to-basics garageland rock ’n’ roll. “There were no punk bands at all in Sheffield,” claims Phil Oakey. Partly out of a typically stubborn Northern disinclination to follow London’s lead, and partly impelled by a native spirit of futurism, the local groups tended to embrace synths, tape recorders, and crude rhythm boxes rather than the standard rock instrumentation of guitars, bass, and drums.
Punk rock seemed passé by the end of that summer anyway. “Initially we saw it as maybe a rebirth, and then we came to see it as the end of the cycle,” says Marsh. “It was obvious that punk wasn’t leading to anything interesting or new. When we started the Future, we were definitely on a mission to destroy rock ’n’ roll.” Martyn Ware, who cofounded the Future with Marsh and Newton, didn’t even bother to see the Sex Pistols and the Clash when they played in Sheffield. He’d actually
tried
to play guitar, but gave up in disgust when he learned that to stop his fingers from bleeding he’d have to toughen the skin by soaking them in alcohol. Luckily, in the summer of 1977 two epochal records arrived to show Marsh and Ware the shining synth-paved path to tomorrow: Kraftwerk’s
Trans-Europe Express
and Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love.” The pair were convinced that synths and machine rhythm were the way to go. “We were dead against doing anything with guitars, full-stop,” says Marsh. “It became our manifesto: No standard instrumentation.”
Having dropped out of the Meatwhistle scene to work as a computer operator, Marsh now had money to burn. He bought a build-your-own-synth kit he’d seen advertised in
Practical Electronics
magazine. “There were no real commercial synths available at the time. The early Moogs were custom-made and cost a fortune, a hundred grand or something like that. Strictly prog-rock supergroup territory. The synth kit I bought, you needed some degree of technical smarts to be able to solder it together.”
Marsh started hanging out at Meatwhistle again, sometimes dragging the machine down there and tinkering with it. Intrigued, Ware suggested an arrangement where he’d help Marsh pay for the synth in return for access to it. “But it was virtually unplayable, and generally took about half an hour to tune up,” says Marsh. “It was only really good for weird noises.” Between the two of them, they acquired two superior machines: the Korg 700S, a simple monophonic keyboard synth (“monophonic” meaning you could only play one note at a time, no chords), and the Roland System 100. The latter cost £800—a small fortune in 1977—but had infinitely more creative potential. Instead of a keyboard and preset sounds, the System 100 was a “patch player” machine. Its innards in plain view, the machine was a tangle of wires, sockets, and knobs. The operator created his own sounds, “synth patches,” by adjusting all kinds of variables. In order to remember how a specific sound had been made, it was necessary to sketch out where all the different cables went, the levels at which various “potentiometers” (dials) were set, and so forth. “But however carefully you notated stuff down, there were so many critical variables you’d never quite get the same sound back,” says Marsh. “So there was a random element you just had to give yourself up to.”
In the Future, Marsh used the System 100 to generate alien noises and futuristic textures, while Ware used the Korg to play simple one-finger melody lines. The music was minimalist by default. Producing coherent rhythm proved even more challenging. In the days before drum machines, you could get rudimentary rhythm generators and keyboards featuring preset beats (tango, disco, rock, etc.), but there was no scope for programming new and unique rhythms. To get around this, Marsh created percussion sounds from scratch using the System 100. He’d take a noise, filter it, then sculpt the “envelope” of the sound so that it had the attack and decay of a particular drum. White noise was good for ersatz hi-hats and cymbals, while the duller-sounding “pink noise” could be made to resemble the woody thud of bass drums and snares. Gathering these pseudopercussive noises, Marsh painstakingly sequenced them to resemble a full-kit drum track. Inevitably, the results were a bit stilted.
The Future’s third member, Adi Newton, was the one most interested in abstract sound experiments using tape recorders. “Adi had been to art school and he introduced me to a lot of modern-art stuff—Man Ray, Duchamp,” says Marsh. Newton had rented some rooms in a derelict factory to use as a painting and music studio. He also lived there. Twenty-one B Devonshire Lane became “a location of many wild parties and a drug experimentation zone,” Newton recalls. It also served as the Future’s studio base.
Initially, the Future came up with the “rather radical idea that we’d have shared vocals,” says Marsh. “We dispensed with our names and called ourselves A, B, and C. It was all very computer orientated and linked to this lyric composition program we created called CARLOS: Cyclic and Random Lyric Organization System.” A cybernetic version of Burroughs’s and Gysin’s cut-ups and surrealist automatic writing, CARLOS, says Ware, was a bit like a slot machine. “You’d pump in, like, one hundred nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions, whatever, and it would pump out random lyrics.” Specific lines or words were assigned to individual voices—A, B, or C. “In the end we abandoned the system for more straightforward vocals, which Adi tended to do,” says Marsh wistfully. “Blank Clocks,” one of the few successful and surviving CARLOS tracks, shuffles a restricted number of nouns and modifiers in slightly different combinations: “Your heart the thigh my pain blank time your face the clock my mind/Blank heart your thigh the pain/My time blank face your clock/The mind my heart blank thigh your pain the time my face,” etc.
At this point, the Future had a decidedly progressive rather than pop slant. Tangerine Dream is audible in the doomy techno-Gothic mindscapes of “Future Religion,” while the desolate electronic vistas of “Last Man on Earth” are just ten minutes excerpted from a piece that was originally one hour and thirty-seven minutes long. Nothing could have been further from 1977’s new punk norm of two chords and two minutes. But in August of that year, the Future approached the London major labels in search of a record deal. They sent an eye-catching, computer-graphic-laden brochure to fifteen companies. “Not many people then had access to computers, and we had all these bizarre dot matrix designs on computer printout paper with perforated edges,” says Marsh. “We sent out our manifesto and said we wouldn’t be sending demo tapes, but would be in London on certain dates and would play them the tapes if they wanted to make an appointment. Surprisingly, we got nine replies, big names like EMI, Island, CBS.”
With punk at its height, the labels were looking for New Wave acts. “The A&R guys at the record companies were all forty and looked ridiculous in these rubber tops with zips they’d bought down the King’s Road,” says Marsh. Most of the companies showed the band the door after hearing the tapes. Only Island Records expressed enthusiasm. “They said they were really interested but thought we should go away, work the music up into more songlike forms, and return in six months,” says Ware. Returning to Sheffield determined to follow Island’s “constructive advice,” Marsh and Ware realized that “Adi couldn’t actually sing a note, and more to the point didn’t really
want
to sing. He was more into voice as weapon.” They decided to cut him loose. Surreptitiously, they moved all the equipment from Devonshire Lane to Marsh’s apartment and left Newton a note. “We broke contact for a while, until he cooled off,” says Marsh.
Singer-less, the Future made instrumentals for a while. “Dancevision” sounds like a blueprint for Detroit techno with its neon lights glimmer and stringlike sounds evoking some ambiguous alloy of euphoria and grief. But a vocalist was clearly required. In November 1977, Ware had a brainstorm. “I told Ian I knew this guy from my school days who could sing and who looked fantastic. He was the coolest guy in Sheffield, rode big fuck-off Norton motorbikes and had this lopsided hairstyle. He looked totally androgynous and the girls just thought he was gorgeous.” The guy was Phil Oakey and the hairstyle was something he’d spotted on a girl on a bus, a hair model sporting a version of a famous Vidal Sassoon cut from the sixties.
Oakey was the youngest of four sons in a working-class-made-good family. “My dad was a top postmaster and by the time I came along, we were quite well-off. We lived in a posh suburb.” As a youth, his great passions were motorbikes, glam style, pop music, and science fiction. “I ended up working two years in a university bookshop and I had every science-fiction paperback you could get. I was really into Philip K. Dick and Ballard.” Dick’s influence is all over early Human League. “Circus of Death,” the B-side of their debut single, was partly inspired by
Ubik,
while “Almost Medieval” from the first album,
Reproduction,
is based on
Counter-Clock World,
a novel in which time goes backward.