This month we will be coming to Sheffield on two occasions. The first was scheduled as the occasion of an illustrious anniversary, the second, unfortunately, came to us unexpectedly yesterday, 21 September.
Through a statement from Mute Records, the label that has released the Cabs’ latest albums, we received the sad news of the death of Richard H. Kirk. As other illustrious people have said, 808 State, we have lost one of the fathers of electronic music.
And that is no exaggeration.
The news of his death reached the public on 21 September, but we are not sure of the exact date of death or the causes of death. Richard, Kirky to his friends, was always extremely jealous of his private life, to the extent that only in an interview in 2015 did he let slip that he was married. But we are not here for gossipy gossip, we are going to try to explain why for those who have not known his figure in depth, and to pay tribute to it for those who have followed the career of this multifaceted artist.
Richard Harold Kirk was born on 21 March 1956 in Sheffield, the heart of industrial steel in England, the capital of South Yorkshire and the homeland of groups like Human League, Heaven 17 and Clock DVA (if we talk about his contemporaries and fellow musicians, if we extend in styles and times, the list is tremendous, from Martin Fry’s ABC to Moloko, Pulp, LFO and Artic Monkeys). At the end of the sixties, Richard and Stephen William Mallinder, his future partner in the band that brought them fame and international recognition, met and began to discover sounds like Bowie, the Velvet or Roxy Music, abhorring the suffocating and boring progressive rock. But those first influences are not limited exclusively to the world of music (in fact, they always said that Cabaret Voltaire was not a band, but an artistic project), and Richard has always cited different artists and writers such as Warhol, Francis Bacon or William S. Burroughs as fundamental references in their production.
The pair teamed up with another strange element of the Sheffield habitat, a guy called Christopher Richard Watson (better known as Chris Watson), whose main hobbies were sound recording and tape manipulation. The chronicles say that the birth of Cabaret Voltaire as a group dates back to 1973, and, as everyone knows by now, the name comes from that nightclub in Zurich that served as the nerve centre for the birth of the Dada movement, another of the band’s influences.
Richard described in an interview his early motivation for making music as “boredom” stemming from the absence of distraction in early 1970s Sheffield. “You had to find your own entertainment, which happened to be making weird electronic music. And so it was, to such extremes as running out of a gig (including destroying his clarinet) because people thought they were going to see a mainstream rock band, and when they met the Cabs version 1.0, it went rather awry.
In the second half of the seventies, and in an old cutlery factory (steel and Sheffield again…) they began to create together with the first version of The Human League (i.e. The Future, the group formed by Ian Craig-Marsh and Martyn Ware, later founders of B.E.F. and Heaven 17) what would become Western Works Studios, which began as a rubbish dump in Richard’s own words. Later, the Human League left the studios and only the Cabs remained, and Western Works soon became a real catalyst for everything that was happening in the city.
In 1978 they signed to Rough Trade, one of the UK’s major independent record labels, and Cabaret Voltaire began to take off at great speed on the British music scene. Their sound has always been difficult to define for being innovative and imprinting a personal and non-transferable stamp on their releases, but the word experimental has always been attached to that definition.
Although, for example, if Punk were to be defined in an electronic key, I think it should be called Nag Nag Nag, or without Three Mantras bands like Muslimgauze would not have existed. Or that dance music would not have been the same without Yashar or The Dream Ticket.
The influence of Cabaret Voltaire on the music of the decades that followed is boundless and almost infinite.
In 1981, Chris Watson left the group and became one of the best sound operators in British television, while Kirk and Mallinder continued with Cabaret Voltaire. The following year, the alliance with Rough Trade broke down and they managed to release one of their best tracks (Yashar) with Factory Records (hence the connection with John Robie, Arthur Baker’s right-hand man who was already working with New Order) and the Johnny Yesno soundtrack before signing with Virgin. There came the album that made them dazzle their own and strangers and launched them to wider audiences than before, The Crackdown, and another of their best racks, The Dream Ticket.
But they were no longer on an independent record company, and there the commercial demands were different.
Then came another change of label, to another multinational company, Parlophone, and they had a musical renaissance at the beginning of the nineties, with all the House and Techno that was coming from the USA and everything that was happening in the UK (Acid House, Balearic, raves…), apart from another important factor, they created Plastex, their record label, and they returned to create with complete artistic freedom. The first stage of Cabaret Voltaire lasted until the mid-nineties, when it went into hibernation, with Mallinder moving to Australia (where he stayed for more than a decade).
But Richard H. Kirk’s creative torrent was immeasurable. Proof of this is the list of aliases he has recorded under or collaborated with: Al Jabr, Anarchia, Biochemical Dread, Bit Crackle, Blacworld, Chemical Agent, Citrus, Cold Warrior, Dark Magus, Destructive Impact, Dr. Xavier, Electronic Eye, Extended Family, Frightgod, Future Cop Movies, International Organisation, King Of Kings, Multiple Transmission, Nine Miles Dub, Nitrogen, Orchestra Terrestrial, Outland Assassin, Papadoctrine, Port Au Prince, PSI Punky Dread Allstars, Reflexiv, The Revolutionary Army (Of The Infant Jesus), Robots + Humanoids, Sandoz, Signals Intelligence, The Silent Age, Trafficante, Ubermenschlich, Ubu Rahmen, Wicky Wacky and Vasco de Mento.
Apart from his work in the Cabs, in 1980 he released his first solo cassette, Disposable Half-Truths, and from then on, under his own name, almost twenty albums. He was one of the first artists to release on Warp Records (the third release to be precise), another of the wonders that Sheffield has bequeathed to the history of music. Sweet Exorcist was the group (which he formed with Richard Barratt aka DJ Parrot aka Crooked Man) with which he released in 1989 that 12″, Testone, for that label that was starting in his hometown (and from which he never moved in his life).
Another important sonic artifact in his career was Sandoz, a pseudonym under which he released from 1994 to 2012 and in which he strolled through Techno, Ambient, Electro and Dub without complexes. During those years, he created his own label (Intone) and continues to release under countless aliases.
An immovable believer in the certainty that nostalgia is an abhorrent thing, he refused a huge amount of money to “resurrect” Cabaret Voltaire just to play old material at Coachella. The band was resurrected, only with him at the controls, when he had something new to show the audience, and that happened in 2014 for the Atonal festival in Berlin. Since then, he performed a few times until last year when he surprised us with a new Cabaret Voltaire album, the superb Shadow Of Fear. This was followed in March and April 2021 by two experimental Drone-style smashes, Dekadrone and B9NDrone.
Just when we thought we were going to be able to continue enjoying new releases from Cabaret Voltaire, and with this level of quality, the news of Kirky’s death has arrived like an axe. The list of mentions and tributes on social networks by important names in electronic music is very long… more than evident proof of his tremendous influence.
For those who want to be introduced to Richard’s tremendous musical universe because they don’t know his work in depth, we can recommend some albums from his time with the Cabs such as Red Mecca, 2×45, The Crackdown, Plasticity and the aforementioned Shadow Of Fear. In its own name, the 8-cd box #7489 is a sonic testament to his most experimental work, and as Sandoz, In Dub-Chant to Jah and Acid Editions perfectly illustrate his impressive versatility.
