Like a late-night transmission from a long-dormant UHF station, a new Cabaret Voltaire LP is beaming from Sheffield on November 20 to succor Dangerous Minds readers during these trying times. Shadow of Fear, the Cabs’ first new release since 1994’s The Conversation, is also the first we’ve heard from the band since founding member Richard H. Kirk resurrected the name for the 2014 Berlin Atonal festival and subsequent live performances in happy European cities.
I caught up with RHK by phone last week. Despite a historically bad connection, I managed to learn a few things about Shadow of Fear, the new incarnation of Cabaret Voltaire, and Kirk’s welcome plans to release two more new Cabs albums and a twelve-inch single next year. An edited transcript of our conversation follows.
Richard H. Kirk (Courtesy of Mute)
How has the last year been?
Um, pretty boring. I mean, I was lucky, insomuch that I managed to get all of my recording finished just as the lockdown was coming in in England, so, you know, that was something. But pretty much since I finished recording the new album… I’ve got a couple of guys who I work with on the artwork, so next thing I was into that, and then afterwards it was mastering.
So it’s been pretty boring, you know? Not particularly nice weather, um, and, you know, now lockdown again. [laughter] I mean, I haven’t been out of the house since January.
Wow.
Well, back in January I got sick with some kind of bug which was suspiciously… it felt like it could be COVID. But I was unwell for about six weeks, and then I finally came back from it, so I just didn’t feel it was advisable to go out. I mean, I’m lucky; I have a garden, so I’m not kind of [stuck] indoors.
I just feel like, over the summer, people went a bit too crazy. They lifted the lockdown, started encouraging people to go to pubs, restaurants, and that’s all kind of kicked back in, you know? It’s still out there.
I saw a lot of pictures in the media of people on beaches.
I mean, I’m 64 and also, I smoke, and I figure that I could be a good candidate [laughs] for illness, so I just have to be patient. They just announced some sort of vaccine today in the UK, but I don’t know whether I believe much of what’s on the news media anymore.
You’ve always been a skeptical consumer of media, right?
Totally, news.
If not for COVID, would you have been out on the road this year? Did you have plans to tour?
Yeah, I mean, there were a couple of possibilities for Europe. I think one was in the Czech Republic and one in Spain. But in the end, you know, it was October, and I just thought, I don’t think it’s gonna [work]. I’d love to be out there. I get the opportunity to travel around Europe, so, I really enjoy that, but at the moment I’m kind of stuck—stuck in Sheffield. Next year, things might be better, but there’s no guarantee about that.
Can you tell me about the process of making the record?
Okay, so, the tracks I started to write back in 2014, when I did the first Cabaret Voltaire show for twenty-something years, and it just built from there, basically. Over a five-year period, I had about three hours’ worth of material that I’ve been using for the live shows. And then in September of last year, I started to assemble it into the album, just making overdubs and removing things generally. Trying to make something that was a live experience into something that could be played as an album and repeatedly listened to.
I don’t want to pry too much, but the bio mentions that you had computer problems, so I’m curious what your setup is.
Okay, well, I have like a very old ProTools system on a Mac G4 which is twenty years old, so even my computer equipment is vintage. [laughter] But I decided to buy a MacBook Pro, and I was gonna get, like, Ableton, or another program called Reaper that’s very cheap and apparently very good. [So I bought my] MacBook, and I was just about to order the software, and I noticed that the USB ports didn’t work. So I took the computer to a repair place, and they said that it looked like someone had spilled a cup of coffee in there, into the circuit boards. So I sent it back and got a refund and just decided to work with [the G4]... you know, because I’d spent a long time looking into different setups and talking to various people who might recommend some different ways of working, and then I just got fed up, and decided “I’ll work with what I have.” And it turned out good for me in the end.
Yeah, I like this record very much. Do you play guitar on it at all?
Sure, there’s quite a bit of guitar on about three or four tracks that spring to mind. Maybe four tracks or something.
Are there any other live instruments?
No. Just guitar.
Cabaret Voltaire, 2014 (via Mute)
And these are pieces that you came up with playing at festivals, right? Starting with the Berlin show, and then you built it up as you did the festivals?
Yeah. I was writing new tracks when I usually went to a different place. Also I used a lot of ambient and tonal material in the live shows, like drones, so I kind of kept expanding upon that as well. There was way too much for an album. So apparently I’m okay to mention that there are gonna be two more albums and a twelve-inch single in the new year.
Oh, that’s wonderful!
Well, uh, you haven’t heard it yet. [laughter] The two albums are kind of drones, like sixty-minute tracks, very electronic, no beats, just kinda head music, which was a total contrast to what I did for the first piece. And the twelve-inch single is kind of, not techno, but more dance-orientated, but didn’t really work within the context of Shadow of Fear, so I thought it would be nice to make that a separate release just on twelve-inch vinyl. So yeah, there’s more to it than meets the eye.
When I was listening to Shadow of Fear, I imagined a visual accompaniment to it when you see it live. Is there a video or film component?
I mean, I used these screen visuals for the live shows, but none of it was synced up. It exists, but not as yet in conjunction with the music, and I think the problem… it’s kind of one thing to do it live, but there’s so much copyright material in there, I think if I tried to release it on a DVD or as a film, I could end up with some legal problems. [laughs] But I don’t know, maybe at some point in the future, it may be something that could happen, but at the moment it’s just straight-ahead music.
You always handled that aspect of the band, right? Didn’t you create the video component of the live show?
Yeah, I mean, that’s one of the things that I did throughout Cabaret Voltaire. Originally it was, like, Super 8 and standard 8 film, and then, in the early Eighties, video. I didn’t make the promos. We worked with a guy called Peter Care who now is based out in Los Angeles, and he made a lot of the long-form videos with us, some we edited, some he edited. But the live visuals always kind of had more to do with what I did. That was a kind of continuation, just with more screens and larger screens.
As a fan of Cabaret Voltaire, I always thought of it as a kind of information service, maybe in part because of what you did with Doublevision. I wanted to ask you where you go for information and culture.
Oh my God! I mean, I don’t use social media at all, you know, I don’t have any of my own channels. If I’m honest, I have fun trying to decode mainstream media, i.e., television. I’m still with television and radio, but I do use certain things; I do find the internet useful. But I wouldn’t rely on it for a lot of things. Maybe some years back, you know, it was easier to find some clarity and some truth, but, I mean, what can I say. The last four years of Mr. Trump and fake news hasn’t really helped, shall we say.
No, it’s one of the things that’s really worrying about a vaccine, because if a large percentage of people in America or the UK don’t believe the vaccine works, or think it’s nefarious, it will be much harder to get rid of the virus.
Totally, totally. But then again, who knows? Like, they say that this virus originated in bats. You know, we might end up with a load of vampires! [laughter] People start mutating. But, I mean, they say that the one they have, the one they’re gonna use here, they’ve tested it, and I assume that means at least no one’s died who’s been given it.
But yeah, I totally agree with what you’re saying about whether people will trust it. Especially if there are voices shouting loud that you shouldn’t, you know?
‘Chance Versus Causality,’ Cabaret Voltaire’s 1979 film soundtrack issued last year
There’s something about the early days of industrial music—I feel that you all approached music-making as a form of counter-propaganda, if that makes sense to you. Do you think of Cabaret Voltaire as still having that function?
I think, if not that exact function, then something very similar. Maybe it’s more evident in the live shows. But it’s difficult to explain. It’s nice to ask some questions in there, if you get what I’m saying, without being too specific, too blatant about it.
Raising doubts?
Yeah, that would be a good way to put it. And just, I don’t know, taking the piss out of establishment values. It was a big thing with the Surrealists, and I still hold true to that, you know?
Richard, did you have anything else you wanted to say about this record?
Not particularly. I hope that it can speak for itself. It’s not a piece of COVID propaganda or something, it’s just about the dark times we seem to have entered in recent years. It’s almost like, especially with the news media, everything seems to be a threat to people of one type or another, whether it’s Al-Qaeda, Islamic State, the coronavirus, you name it, there’s a very long list. I often wonder, why do they do this to us? Why should everybody be scared?
I’m a bit relieved that Trump didn’t win another four years, because in England things are—kinda like a right-wing government, and if you look back to the 1920s and what happened in Germany, and the notion that immigrants are scapegoats, and like basically if you create a situation of chaos, then what it needs is a strongman to come in and take charge. And we all know who the strongman was in Germany, we know how that went. So the way this thing has been going, you can’t help thinking about how we ended up with the Nazis, and are we going to end up with them again? But I don’t know, maybe things might change now.
I totally agree with you. That was Trump’s strategy over the summer, was to try to make the protests as violent as possible so that he could then appear to be the person restoring law and order to the country.
Strange way to do it. [laughter]
It’s like a protection racket.
Yeah. Yeah, totally. And you’ve got a few people in Europe, very right-wing leaders, and I’m just wondering now whether we might see the domino effect now that the main protagonist is exiting stage left, hopefully.
Hopefully.
Well, yeah. I just got some news earlier, and he’s mounting his legal challenges. I mean, I was watching the news over the past couple of days, and they just had this bedraggled figure in a baseball cap swinging at a golf ball on one of his fucking golf ranges. [laughter] It just looks so sad, you know? All on his own.
I don’t know, I don’t think he’s been right since he supposedly had the coronavirus and then they gave him a load of steroids. I think something went a bit astray.
I think the guy’s in denial. He needs to do the right thing and let someone else clear up his mess.
Thank you for talking with me, Richard, I’m a huge fan of your music. I hope you’re able to tour sometime soon so I can see you play.
Well, now that things have changed in America, you might even see me make my way across the Atlantic, you know? I look at a lot of news footage, and those mass shootings, you know, it just seemed at one point, America just seemed, like, very dangerous. I don’t know, maybe I’m just seeing the worst and not the best.
You know, and then there’s all the police beating and murdering Black people. I mean, for fuck’s sake, man, you know?
It doesn’t make you want to visit?
Well, not up until the recent change of leadership. It’s a long time since I’ve been to America. I think 1991 was the last. I think I went to Montreal in the year 2000, but that’s Canada.
Was that a solo gig?
Yeah, it was. I played at FCMM film festival. It’s really good, a really good festival. I’ve had one or two requests, but the problem is I don’t like to fly. Some guys, they were trying to get me on a cargo boat, but it took like two weeks or something.
That’s a long trip.
Well, it is on a cargo boat. [laughter]
Probably not a lot of amenities.
No. [laughter] So, we’ll see. It would be great to get back out and play some more live shows, but by that time I will have written new work anyway, so it would be a combination of existing things from the new album and then a bunch of new stuff.
Shadow of Fear is out November 20 on LP, CD, and streaming.