“What are we here for? We are here to go!”
Brion Gysin
Cabaret Voltaire always had an interest in the work of William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin. In 1987, they turned that into a dance track in designer clothing with Bill Nelson on guitar and Adrian Sherwood at the controls.
Mute are reissuing the Code album as a deluxe offering, which means the alternative dancefloor can again shake to Stephen Mallinder instructing you to “Get serious!”
The producer behind some of the most important records of the past four decades began studio life carrying cups of tea.
Mark Ellis was a junior staffer at Morgan Studios in 1978 when producer Chris Tsangarides, watching one runner keep the tea coming while the other vanished, named the pair “Flood” and “Drought.” The nickname stayed with the man who kept coming back with the cups and spoons. He is now one of the longest-serving producers in British music, and the list of bands whose sound he has shaped runs from Cabaret Voltaire to U2.
Flood had already been the vocalist in a band called Seven Hertz and the tape operator on Rick Wakeman’s album, 1984, before he became Morgan’s house engineer and went freelance in 1981. His first album credit was as assistant engineer on New Order’s first album, Movement. A series of assignments for Stevo’s Some Bizzare label followed, with engineering tasks for Cabaret Voltaire, Psychic TV, and Marc and the Mambas. That experience delivered him to Daniel Miller’s Mute Records, which kept him busy as one of the label’s go-to producers for Depeche Mode, Erasure and Nick Cave.
The scale of Flood’s credits since then is impressive: the studio bands of the eighties gave way to the stadium acts of the nineties, and a second career in the 2000s brought Sigur Rós, Orbital, and Interpol into the his workspace. In 2006, he shared the Album of the Year Grammy as co-producer of U2’s How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb.
Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins, who made three albums with him, described him as “very masterful with the sonics.” His secret skill, according to Corgan, is that he knows how to find “an ambiance of the song that you don’t necessarily see.”
Movement, the first album New Order made after Ian Curtis’s death, credits Flood as assistant engineer under Martin Hannett’s studio leadership. The tea-carrier from Morgan had become the second pair of hands on one of the 1980s’ most scrutinised records.
Movement was a difficult album. Hannett was trying to keep the band in the box he had built for them as Joy Division. Movement suffers from a claustrophia that is impressed into every groove. It was also beautiful in the way that a butterfly struggles to emerge from a chrysalis. The band’s wings wouldn’t reach their full magnificence until “Temptation,” but the colours could just be seen.
Flood’s first full production credit of consequence arrived with the Sheffield duo, Cabaret Voltaire. He co-produced their 1983 meisterwerk, The Crackdown. It was the album that carried Richard Kirk and Stephen Mallinder from industrial experimentation on Rough Trade to a major label (Virgin) and a harder dancefloor posture.
“Just Fascination” signals the change in approach: clipped samples over a sequencer with no give; Mallinder half-chanting on top. Flood’s part in the record began the pattern that recurred for decades: the studio man who could make machines groove like a band.
Flood engineered the Bad Seeds’ debut, From Her to Eternity. It was the first project of a relationship that ran through The Firstborn Is Dead, which he produced, and on to mixing work for the band until the late nineties.
The title track is all forward lean – piano hammered in runs above a drum stomp that does not vary, with Cave in full cry over the top of it. The record put Flood on the desk for a band playing as if each take were the last of their lives, and he kept the levels honest through all of it.
Mute paired Flood with Vince Clarke and Andy Bell from the start. He produced Erasure’s first two albums, Wonderland and The Circus, building the glossy half of the label’s 80s output, while Daniel Miller’s other acts darkened the other half.
“Sometimes” gave the duo their first substantial hit, and the production is key: bright programmed bass under a chorus that opens on the first line, with Bell’s voice carrying the melody. The warmth of the programming did the label proud without softening the synthpop.
Flood produced the middle run of Nitzer Ebb’s career – Belief, Showtime, and Ebbhead – and returned decades later to finish Industrial Complex. No other producer worked the EBM seam so thoroughly from the inside.
To Bring You My Love credits Flood as producer, engineer and mixer – the fullest control he took over any record of the decade. The album widened Polly Harvey’s writing from guitar records into slower, stranger material.
“Down by the Water” turns on its organ figure and the small, drowned vocal on the bridge. The mix keeps the low end loud and the voice dry, so the nursery-rhyme menace of the words never softens. Flood returned to Harvey for Is This Desire?, White Chalk, Let England Shake and her later records – one of the longest partnerships of both careers.
Flood co-produced Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness with Alan Moulder, the double album that carried the Smashing Pumpkins from clubs to arenas.
Corgan’s verdict on their working method is instructive: Flood would “really fight with us”, in Corgan’s words, to find “another vibe” the band could not yet see. “Zero” shows the band being forced out of its comfort zone: the downstroked riff; a taunting chorus; and a cheap keyboard line given teeth. The production argues with the songs until they stand up straight.
Flood engineered and mixed Achtung Baby alongside Brian Eno, Daniel Lanois and Steve Lillywhite; and then took a full production credit on Zooropa, with credits for loops, engineering, and mixing with Eno and The Edge. Thirteen years later came the shared Album of the Year Grammy.
“Numb” is the clearest case for his hand in the band’s sound and success: The Edge’s flat, deadpan vocal over a mesh of loops and percussion, with the guitars held back until their impact was really needed. The track showed a stadium band taking its electronics seriously – and the producer’s credit sat at the front of it.
For Pretty Hate Machine, Trent Reznor assembles his dream cast. Flood produced and engineered the album’s opening pair of songs, “Head Like a Hole” and “Terrible Lie”, alongside Keith LeBlanc, with additional synth programming scattered across the rest. He joined the sessions late, after finishing Violator for Depeche Mode, which made “Head Like a Hole” one of the last tracks completed – partly at Blackwing, the studio Depeche Mode and He Said had made alluring to Reznor.
Reznor built the drums from samples lifted out of his record collection, and Flood’s production gives the track its shove: the churn of the synth bass under guitars broken out for the refrain, and all of it carrying the aggression Reznor wanted. Flood came back for Broken and The Downward Spiral, where his credits extended to hi-hat and synthesizer. He had engineered Ministry’s synth-pop debut, With Sympathy, years earlier; with NIN he built the industrial mainstream that followed.
Violator credits Flood as producer alongside the band, Daniel Miller and Alan Wilder, and his fingerprints are on the whole record.
“Enjoy the Silence” is the concentrated case: Gore’s demo was a ballad; Wilder proposed an up-tempo version; and Wilder and Flood assembled the new arrangement while the rest of the band were out of the room. Gore came back, gave in, and played the guitar riff that rides the single.
Gore acknowledged that, “Flood in tandem with Wilder was a great team.” That’s a conclusion that holds across the album. “Enjoy the Silence” became the band’s biggest single, and it required the composer to be out of the room. What Flood helped the production team to do was lift an absorbing demo into a song that will live long after them.
In 1973, Stephen Mallinder (universally known, simply, as Mal) joined a musical collective that included two friends, Richard H. Kirk and Chris Watson. The top song on the charts that year was “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree.” The band that coalesced around the trio was called Cabaret Voltaire. Mixing Mallinder’s guitar with tones generated by homemade oscillators, the Cabs (for all names in Sheffield must be reduced to a single syllable) sat at the opposite pole, artistically and commercially. Named after the Zurich cafe where Lenin and Tristan Tzara crossed paths, the band subverted expectations about song structure, politics, and melody. Their experimentation created a bridge between musique concrete and what came to be known as industrial music.
The Cabs had guitars but didn’t use them to play riffs. They had keyboards, but didn’t knock out sounds like Roxy Music or The Doors. As the lead vocalist, Mal spoke his words, instead of singing them. The band cut up tapes of radio transmissions instead of constructing melodies. Throbbing Gristle released their recordings on their cassette label and Factory Records pressed them onto vinyl, but the Cabs never sat comfortably in either camp. With the advance Stevo negotiated for them from Virgin Records, they established their own label, Doublevision, to release videos and records by other artists they liked. Their Western Works studio got new gear from the same deal and provided artists like Chakk, Eric Random, and Test Department with a space to create their own sounds.
We didn’t really want to be musicians.
STEPHEN MALLINDER
The idea of being technically proficient or learning a traditional instrument was kind of anathema to us.
In time, the Cabs would grow towards dance music; moving further and further towards techno purity. They would trade independent labels for majors; provincial parochialism for global reach; and improvised noise for sequenced rhythms. Along the way, they would lose some fans and find others. Commercially, it made little difference: the Cabs rarely got paid properly, no matter which path they took.
Mallinder eventually sold up (though not out) and took his leave to study and teach art in Australia, while working as a journalist. It was an inversion, both artistically and geographically: the Sheffield autodidact turned into an academician at the opposite end of the Earth. Among his activities, he set up OffWorld Sounds, an electronic music label. In 2011, following his return to the UK, he was awarded a PhD in music and popular culture from Murdoch University School of Media, Communication and Culture with the thesis, Movement: Journey of the Beat. The paper explored:
through rhythm, how popular music culture, central to changing perceptions of ‘self’ and ‘others’ through patterns of production and consumption, must also be viewed as instrumental in shaping new platforms of communication that have resonance not only through the emergence of new social networks and cultural economies but also in the development of media literacies and pedagogic strategies.
Dr Mal’s return to the Blighted Isle did not lead to the restoration of Cabaret Voltaire. Instead, he started working with Phill (AKA Phil) Winter and the omni-present Benge Edwards as Wrangler. When John Grant joined up with the group, they became Creep Show.
When Kirk unexpectedly passed away in 2021, the window for a reunion of any sort started to close quickly. With the 50th anniversary of the Cabs looming, Mallinder called on Chris Watson to get together for selected dates on a final tour to showcase the songs that made the group influential for generations of artists. The tour began in October 2025 and wraps in Sheffield on 25 October 2026 in Sheffield, having criss-crossed Europe and North America. Mallinder has explained the tour as a tribute to Kirk, but it is also a reminder of the scale of the group’s evolution and inventiveness.
Mutant dub from another planet, “Seconds Too Late” was released in 1980 on Rough Trade. By that point, the group was well on its way towards the dance floor. Mallinder’s menacing vocals are supplemented by a vocoder that provides robotic depth.
The Voice of America reflected the Cabs at their most experimental. The Cold War tension is impressed into the grooves of the record, while the instrumentation is bent and distorted to create a claustrophobic atmosphere. Mallinder’s vocals are matter-of-fact and dystopian, which lends proceedings a sinister air.
Named after a propaganda channel operated by the United States to subvert the Warsaw Pact countries, the material carries political overtones without becoming didactic. The fact that the track is introduced by a police officer giving instructions for crowd management at a rock concert reveals exactly where the Cabs were coming from.
“Yashar” is the point at which disco discovered the Cabs properly. Raised on ska, reggae, and soul music, both Mallinder and Kirk were drawn to the mechanical rhythms of the dance floor. “Yashar” married a sample from The Outer Limits with electronic drums, funky bass from Mallinder, and Kirk’s keyboards. It was also one of the last recordings that Chris Watson took part in.
The bassline is the spine: a simple, circling figure that lets the arrangement spiral into dubby delays, shortwave chatter, and synth splashes without losing its centre of gravity.
By the time of “Just Fascination,” Cabaret Voltaire were leaning into a sharper, more structured industrial funk than their Watson-era material could have hinted at. The track rides a rubbery, insistent bassline from Mallinder that weaves between sequencer stabs and clanging percussion, giving the rhythm section a human swing even as the machines snap to grid.
“Sensoria” is the closest Cabaret Voltaire ever came to a club anthem, even if it still feels like a journalistic exposé of conservative social norms and mind control. Forged from two separate songs on the Micro-Phonies album, it was tooled for the alternative dance floor by John “Tokes” Potoker and Robin “Pop Muzik” Scott.
Mallinder’s first solo album, Pow-Wow, was released on Fetish in 1982. With its Neville Brody sleeve and industrial funk groove, it could have been mistaken for a missing Cabs album from a distance. Examined more closely, it was in a similar spirit to the Eno-Byrne collaboration, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, with a touch of decadence.
During his time in Australia, Mallinder created the project Ku-Ling Bros together with Shane Norton (Soundlab), and Jack Lucas (Yummy Fur/Il Capaninas). The act allowed him to explore his fascination with dance music without the formal roles of the Cabs.
Formed by Mallinder with Benge Edwards and Phil Winter, Wrangler became his main vehicle for creating and performing music from 2014.
“Stupid” is one of the standouts from the second Wrangler album, White Glue. A slow‑grooving monster built from a 90s‑style electro bassline and constantly mutating synth loops, the rhythm is sparse but aggressive; leaving pockets of silence that make every drum hit and bass accent feel heavier.
Mallinder’s voice arrives distorted and close; turning relatively few words into a sustained mood of sleaze and threat. “Stupid” underlines how Mallinder’s sense of groove and ambiguity can make a simple pattern feel unstable, even menacing, without piling on arrangement tricks.
The third solo album from Mallinder, tick tick tick, was released in 2022. This track demonstrated that he had lost none of his gift for treating paranoia as a contagious condition.
The US Army instructional film, Your Job in Germany, provides the vocal samples for this eminently danceable single. The samples come from the U.S. Army instructional film Your Job in Germany, written by Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr Seuss, and aimed at occupying GIs being warned not to fraternise with the conquered German population.
With soul girl backing vocals, Adrian Sherwood production, and Keith le Blanc programming the Oberheim DMX, the instrumentation is designer-made for the alternative dance floor. Mallinder’s own words seem like instructions to modern American youth:
It’s not safe to go out, it’s not right to stay home
Listen, my advice is to carry a gun
Cabaret Voltaire’s new live album, But What Time Is It Really?, arrives with a lot of history on its shoulders and very little sentimentality in its delivery. Recorded on the 2025 UK tour marking fifty years since the band’s first appearance at Sheffield Students Union, it captures the surviving original members, Stephen Mallinder and Chris Watson – joined by Eric Random and Oliver Harrap – running through a tight, contemporary set that leans hard on their early‑80s pivot into industrial funk without pretending the clock stopped there.
The tracklist reads like a focused re-edit of the Cabaret Voltaire catalogue. “24-24,” “Why Kill Time (When You Can Kill Yourself),” “Crackdown,” “Spies in the Wires,” “Just Fascination,” and “Yashar” form the backbone, with “Nag Nag Nag” and “Sensoria” arriving as late-set pressure points rather than museum pieces. New live piece ,“Tinsley Viaduct,” functions as a hinge between eras, echoing the concrete atmospherics of the early days with the high-fidelity weight that modern production allows. The sequencing favours momentum: tension; release; tension again. It’s enough to fray your nerves with anticipation.
It is hard to calculate the influence that the Cabs have had over the decades. From their earliest days, working with the Industrial Records and Factory Records set; through the Rough Trade lean years, when royalties never appeared; surviving Stevo to stock their own studio; collaborating with Wax Trax artists; and mining their techno fantasies – the sounds they have made have echoed across genres and continents.
Production-wise, the record is clean without being sterilised. Engineered and mixed by Benge at Memetune, recorded by Joe Peat, and mastered by James Trevasus, it presents a detailed, front-of-house perspective that lets Watson’s modular work, Random’s guitar, and Mallinder’s voice sit in balance. The low end has authority, but there is space for the mid‑range grit and tape‑era ghosts to show through. Dan Conway’s visuals, reworked into the sleeve with Paul Burgess, underline that this is a late‑period document, not a retro design exercise.
The value of But What Time Is It Really? lies in how it resolves the question of what a band like Cabaret Voltaire should be doing live in 2025-26. Following Richard H. Kirk’s death, Mallinder and Watson have been explicit that there will be no new studio material under the trademark. Instead, they have chosen to treat the catalogue as something to be re‑cut for the present tense. These recordings bear that out with taut and physical performances. The overall impression is of a group using its farewell tour to tighten focus rather than dwell in mythology.
What comes through the grooves is that this is not the Cabaret Voltaire of previous tours. It is the summation of all of the Cabaret Voltaires that have come before. Their ghosts emerge at just the right moments; electrifying the listener’s nervous systems. Memories are individual, but this spectral experience is collective.
Sheffield’s industrial pioneers are packing up their pedals, tape-loops, and sequencers. Stephen Mallinder and Chris Watson have confirmed a live album, But What Time Is It Really?, will be released by Cabaret Voltaire on 24 April 2026 via Memetune.
The recordings are drawn from last year’s sold-out 50th anniversary UK run of dates. The track listing hauls through the expected canon – “Nag Nag Nag,” “Sensoria,” “Crackdown” – plus a new live piece, “Tinsley Viaduct.” Long-time Mal collaborator, Benge, engineered and mixed the album. The late Richard H. Kirk is present in spirit.
The accompanying tour spans North America in May and September, Europe through June, and a final UK run in October with Gazelle Twin in support, closing in Sheffield. Mallinder and Watson have confirmed there will be no further studio recordings under the Cabaret Voltaire name.
The band began in 1973 and had a varied career, ranging from dadaist experiments to futuristic techno. Watson left in 1981 to work in broadcast media. Mal departed in 1994 to pursue an academic career in Australia. Kirk kept the name alive until his untimely death in 2021. Watson and Mallinder reconnected in 2025, and the current tour is the final lap for one of Britain’s most influential acts.
Cabaret Voltaire – 2026 Tour Dates
March 2026 – Europe
1. March 6, 2026 – Elevate Festival, Graz, Austria
May 2026 – North America
2. May 4, 2026 – Moore Theatre, Seattle, WA, United States
3. May 6, 2026 – Commodore Ballroom, Vancouver, BC, Canada
4. May 8, 2026 – Roseland Theater, Portland, OR, United States
5. May 10, 2026 – Summit Music Hall, Denver, CO, United States
6. May 12, 2026 – The Bellwether, Los Angeles, CA, United States
7. May 15, 2026 – The Warfield, San Francisco, CA, United States
June 2026 – Europe Continued
8. June 2, 2026 – silent green Kulturquartier, Berlin, Germany
9. June 5, 2026 – Elysée Montmartre, Paris, France
10. June 13, 2026 – Paradiso, Amsterdam, Netherlands
11. June 19, 2026 – Les Docks, Lausanne, Switzerland
October 2026 – UK & Ireland Final Tour
12. October 7, 2026 – The Academy, Dublin, Ireland
13. October 8, 2026 – The Limelight 1, Belfast, UK
14. October 10, 2026 – Town Hall, Birmingham, UK
15. October 11, 2026 – Arts Club Liverpool – Theatre, UK
16. October 13, 2026 – Rock City, Nottingham, UK
17. October 14, 2026 – The Globe, Cardiff, UK
18. October 15, 2026 – Bath Forum, Bath, UK
19. October 17, 2026 – Boiler Shop (w/ Gazelle Twin), Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
20. October 18, 2026 – Barrowland Ballroom, Glasgow, UK
21. October 19, 2026 – Albert Hall, Manchester, UK
22. October 21, 2026 – De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill on Sea, UK
23. October 22, 2026 – Roundhouse, London, UK
We are in the year of the fortieth anniversary of Play It Again Sam Records. It is also the year that Bruce Geduldig, Tuxedomoon’s visuals artist, would have turned 70. Fitting, then, to find a six-track EP of songs by The Weathermen on release from PIAS.
A collaboration between Geduldig and Jean-Marc Lederman from Fad Gadget’s first touring band, The Weathermen leaped onto the stage with “Deep Down South” in 1985. From their base in Brussels, they combined the electro-intensity of Front 242 and Kraftwerk with a sense of humour that mercilessly mocked rock tropes and the lovers of Svetlana Alliluyeva. Named after a group of middle-class American radicals, who used to recruit youth by attacking them in the street and were known for blowing themselves up, The Weathermen took nothing seriously except the mixing of their samples and heavy-duty beats.
For their third communique, John F. Kennedy had been roped in for lead vocals on “Let Them Come to Berlin.” Using the cut-up tape style of Cabaret Voltaire, The Weathermen managed to turn the dead president’s anti-communist speech into a dancefloor classic. It set a template for subversion, both on and off the dancefloor, and anticipated Berghain decades before the queues started to form.
The 40 EP collects these songs with four others from the band’s very respectable back catalogue. The stand-out track, and the one that had the greatest reach for the duo, is “Poison,” in which Geduldig plays the role of stalking groupie, Suzanna Stammer. Over Lederman’s classic electro track, which featured sampled metal and a menacing bass line, Stammer leaves a series of threatening voice messages. The scary part is that there are real Suzanna Stammers, from Plan K to Pustervik. Thanks to The Weathermen, you can dance to genius tracks like “Bang!” in the club while she scratches up your Bruce Springsteen records back at home. Best have a word with your drummer about who he lets in.
It’s 2023. Bruce is gone, but the beats remain.
Creative rebellion is the theme of The Horror Show. The exhibition at Somerset House captures the art of punks, witches and conceptual artists in a three act show filled with costumes, typography…and music.
Gazelle Twin provide a surround-sound installation inspired by the women lost to violence. If the theme isn’t enough to inspire horror, then sitting in a darkened, empty room with just a little red light for company, as ghostly voices move around you, should provoke some kind of response.
The vocals of Marc Almond and Midge Ure emerge in another room, where 80s parties are represented through costumes and videos. Under the effects of their incantations, creative types produced frocks and excessive make-up; but, arguably, Visage and the New Romantics represented zombified Glam, rediscovered by the younger siblings of 70s Bolan fans. Soft Cell, by contrast, injected a sense of sleaze and subversion into mainstream pop (knocking them cold in black and gold). “Martin” should have been the song choice here: a darker soundtrack to unsettle the old punks huddling around the output of Central St Martin’s students.
Cabaret Voltaire’s Lyceum show is represented by a cassette tape. You can hear it on Spotify now, and Mal has the institutional respectability of a tenured academic, while Chris Watson is at home on the BBC. At the time, however, this was the sound of Britain’s decayed, post-industrial cityscape. With Brexit and twelve years of Tory government, the country is rapidly reviving the sense of anxiety and frustration that inspired bands like the Cabs.
A framed copy of “TVOD/Warm Leatherette” is nestled alongside books by J.G. Ballard, which helped to inspire Daniel Miller. Car crash eroticism might be due for a revival.
Last Few Days, the experimental band that included 23 Skidoo’s Fritz Catlin and introduced Laibach to the megaphone, are prominently represented through posters and less conspicuously by polaroids. The posters provide a post box at Throbbing Gristle’s studio address, which probably won’t reach the band now that London Fields has been gentrified.
The exhibition is tied together and given an identity by the typographic contributions of the Barnbrook studios. Contrasted with the sleek, corporate patterns of the institutions and corporations that line the Embankment are combinations of type and signs that have been chewed and chopped into grotesque combinations.
The scariest thing in the exhibition is a puppet of Margaret Thatcher. Continuously channeled by the superannuated members of the Tory party, as a ghostly incarnation of the police state, her gruesome face looks on with a fixed expression at the decline and rot of modern Britain. It is a state made in her image.
The howl of human misery is Mark Stewart’s fellow traveller. It is in his voice. It is in his words. Even when he lets love lead the way (e.g., the magnificent “Stranger Than Love”), the rasp and rattle of anxiety and despair shape his sound. Then there is the anger. Stewart’s eyes see the deeds of the wicked, and he gives both barrels to them (e.g., the even more amazing “Hypnotised”). Everything he shares is impressed with the message: get off your knees and dance.
VS is a collage of rhythm against repression. Beginning with Patrick Codenys tearing the seams of dub for “Rage of Angels” – a track cast as Mark Stewart vs Front 242 – the premise of the album is cast. The head-strong and the world-weary are thrown into action, in a blur of post-punk personalities. Stewart is triangulated with Stephen Mallinder and Eric Random for “Cast No Shadow,” which gets the Leaether Strip treatment. Random reappears for “Ghost of Love,” aiming his sequencers into the void. There is dark matter there, and transmissions can be detected from Consolidated, Mika Vainio, Mike Watt, KK Null, Ye Gods, Adrian Sherwood, and Lee “Scratch” Perry. Two of the contributors are no longer living, but Death is no A&R man. Get up, said James Brown, and the time for the big payback was here.
With the release of The Crackdown in 1983, Cabaret Voltaire broke out of the indie box and gate-crashed the dance music party.
The band that excelled at industrial sound had hinted at their interest in funk, but it was with their first major label release that they shifted the balance in favour of the dance floor. With lashings of paranoia and a subversive rhythm section, the Cabs set the tone for the arrival of 1984.
This video captures them at the height of their powers.
Eric Random‘s role in alternative music is sometimes lost in the liner notes: here he is playing tablas on Cabaret Voltaire’s Micro-Phonies; there he is adding adding texture on the Cabs’ 2×45. He pops up as a percussionist on Psychic TV’s “Love, War, Riot,” producing and playing on the feted Some Bizarre compilation, and standing next to Nico on her tour of Eastern Europe.
That’s a resume of distinction, but the limelight hasn’t shone directly on Random very often. After some dabbling in a band and being a roadie for local heroes, Buzzcocks, he started his recording career in The Tiller Boys, a post-punk incubator that played on the same bill as Joy Division and also counted Peter Shelley as a member. Needless to say, it was Shelley, on his way from being a Buzzcock to a Homosapien, who got most of the attention.
Random’s first solo release, an EP called That’s What I Like About Me (reversing a line from a hit by The Knack that was then in the charts), was named Single of the Week by the NME in 1980. It was a promising start, but critical acclaim and commercial achievement took divergent paths. Random’s style was deeply underground, and what success he enjoyed was entirely subterranean. Subsequent releases included albums on New Hormones, Cabaret Voltaire’s Doublevision imprint and FON, as well as a smattering of tracks for Plurex and Touch. The people he connected with were more ACR than A&R, and after travels abroad his interest veered from the industrial to the Indian; the trail of recordings never leading towards the charts aimed for by label-mates like Chakk or Krush.
That isn’t to say that Random didn’t have an eye on the dancefloor. The proto-acid 12″ single, “Mad as Mankind,” recorded with Richard H. Kirk and Stephen Mallinder in 1984, was as funky as it was ahead of its time. A synthetic bass sequence and basic drum pattern provided a pulsing framework around which Random erected layers of keyboards, bass guitar, tabla and processed vocals. It was never designed to sit next to Heaven 17’s “Let Me Go,” but it was no less sophisticated.
Fast forward to 2016, skipping over tales of compilations and live work only for brevity, and Random has again set his sights on the alternative dancefloor. Words Made Flesh provides a dozen slices of exceptional dance material. The real reason Avicii retired might be that he decided he couldn’t do anything as groovy as “Phobic,” and William Orbit would probably find affinity with “Arc Light.”
The year isn’t half over, but Words Made Flesh is a serious contender for the album of the year. The acid bites of “Let It Go” are a reminder of the power of the accent in an 8-step sequence, while there is real magic in the more sinister “Go Figure” – the latter a collaboration with Stephen Mallinder. There are Eastern influences in “Conspiracy Complete” that represent a complete update of the experimental sound that came from the Cabs camp back in the 80s. Will this break Random’s pattern of excellent material being given more recognition from peers than the public? Only if there is any justice left.
