Stephen Mallinder Quotes
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In the 80s, we were still living in a kind of Cold War environment.
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Looking back, I think we were very much a part of democratizing music, and we wanted to demystify the process of making music - to show it's a myth.
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I don't think it had a name when we started. If punk has any roots, Dada is part of it. And we saw ourselves as part of a kind of Dada tradition.
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We had always used found sound, but we had always used it in an analogue way. And it was the early days of using collage and sound in a digital way. MTV, a couple of years later would be that way.
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I think underneath it all [in the Big Funk] was a little bit of a Europeanness in it.
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We were working in entertainment, in the music industry, with popular music, it was important, but it was something that we also felt was a responsibility.
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We also worked with Marshall Jefferson for Groovy, Laidback and Nasty. So we were lucky to work with some really great people.
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I think that's the fascinating thing that exists now. This contrasts with a celebrity art and celebrity music culture.
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I edited Big Funk, some of the footage was shot by Peter Care. We were film buffs as much as music buffs, and so there are film reference as well as sound references.
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I think in everything we did, there's a sense of tension and a sense of things pulling in a different way. It's interesting calling it "beat music". That's quite true, the rhythm is up to the fore, it's got a slap bass, and it's got "funk" in the title. But I think there's always a level of irony when we did those kind of things.
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We've always been observant of things, and I think Crackdown was very much like that and the film interpretation was that journalistic view of that situation.
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I think probably underneath it all, film [Kino] has its own rhythm and its own dynamic, and we were trying to capture the movement of film and cross-reference it with music.
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If you're going to change things, one of the things we had to change is to get away from that traditional model of rock music, and we were a part of that.
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We were responding to a period in the 70s when we started that it was very much you cannot be involved in music unless you studied to do music.
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We were fortunate at that time we were working with Virgin, and with Flood, probably more well-known as Brian Eno's engineer now and U2's producer, etc. Even though we weren't working in a strictly popular music area, which was great, we were lucky enough to work with people who were on the cusp of those sort of things.
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This was in the sense that if Dada was reacting to the morality and aesthetics of pre-WWI, then we were very much a reaction to the pomposity of rock that existed within music at that time.
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Some of it was shot in Berlin, but a lot of it was filmed in Hamburg, along the Reeperbahn in Hamburg in the famous red light district. Kino is obviously German and "film" and "cinema" and we were always cinematic in our thinking.
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We've always been journalists - and have seen ourselves in that way. But we sort of recontextualized it through music.
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I think what we tried to do lyrically, vocally and musically was to capture a sound.
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As sonic journalists, we were increasingly becoming bombarded with global images. It was the early idea of the cut-up, the idea of images being juxtapositioned, which we were doing with sound. That was the early days of samples.
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We were sort of coming from an angle where we wanted to break rules.
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Even though we were influenced by American culture and music, we like the rest of Europe have been colonized with that in the post-war period. At the same time there's a sense of dirty earthiness and Europeanness and Britishness in it as well.
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I think you have a certain level of confidence in what you do. "Arrogance" is the wrong word. I think when you go into it, you're aware that you're doing it for the right reasons - and you have your own moral and ethical code. And we weren't driven by money, but by a a desire to make music and make a statement.
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Going there [Japan] in the early 80s was quite a culture shock. I think the bombardment of Shinjuku and all that would have filtered through, which certainly informed things we later filmed.
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Music doesn't have to be so rule-based - and so strict in its structures, construction and perception.
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One of the tropes of our videos is that they were very rhythmic with clipped edits.
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We were iconoclastic. We weren't there to sort of follow the trends really. So it was important that we were making a statement against that.
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Even if that statement was ambiguous, we kind of wanted to cause a stir. We thought that by having the name "Cabaret Voltaire", that with it came a certain responsibility. It wasn't meant to be purely entertainment; it was meant to be something a little bit more serious - and to provoke people - wrapped within an outer wrapping of entertainment.
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[Kino] worked really well as a song title, and to build into a lyric, and also how we embraced mulit-media at the time.
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Crackdown had Dave Ball playing on it. Flood worked on our next album, and Adrian Sherwood worked with us on Code.
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