Richard H. Kirk
Cabaret Voltaire éminence grise BORN 1956
“We were fucking arrogant,” Richard H. Kirk told MOJO’s Danny Eccleston last year of Cabaret Voltaire’s early phase. “We knew what we were doing was special and our ideas were original.” He sustained the stance with distinction for more than 40 years. The son of a Sheffield communist steel worker, ex-art student Kirk played guitar and treated clarinet in the group’s harsh early incarnation (at their first gig in 1974 he wore a fairy light-festooned jacket plugged into the mains). Named for the Dada movement’s club night in 1916 Zürich, and inspired by Eno, Velvets, Krautrock and dub, their Western Works studio – which legend says was sited next to a manufacturer of nuclear fallout shelters – was also an important part of their myth, a self-contained laboratory where albums including 1981’s cornerstone Red Mecca were forged. Their proto-industrial electronics would encompass postpunk, funk, synthpop, electro, house and beyond, yet the whole was infused with a paranoid, questioning edge befitting an age of information overload, the deep state and manipulated realities. Though their highest chart placing was 1983’s Number 31 album The
Crackdown, producer/writer/ programmer Kirk likened the band to The Velvet Underground, as modest sellers with a vast influence (a poster for 1984’s Micro-Phonies can be seen on the hero’s bedroom wall in John Hughes’ film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off). Kirk’s other projects included Sweet Exorcist, whose Warp-released Testone is a Steel City techno classic, Sandoz and Electronic Eye. After the Cabs split in 1994, he retained a vigorous solo release schedule, but resurrected the Cabaret Voltaire name for the forbidding, dissident
Shadow Of Fear in 2020. Suspicious of modern technology, he admitted to still using a mid-’80s Atari 1040ST computer and a sequencer of similar vintage. In tribute, his former Cabs partner Stephen Mallinder called him, “Stubborn, no sufferer of fools, but insightful, spontaneous, and with vision… and underneath the spiky shell a warm heart.”