Sheffield music 'really healthy', says Cabaret Voltaire veteran

The future of Sheffield music looks "really healthy", one of Cabaret Voltaire's founding members has said after winding up the band's 50-year career in the city.

Chris Watson joined fellow founder Stephen Mallinder at the city's Octagon Centre on Sunday night to complete their UK-wide tour and finish where they had started in the mid-1970s.

The sold-out homecoming marks the end of a band that was at the forefront of a revolution in popular music, which saw musicians turn away from guitars towards wire-sprouting modular synthesisers and bedroom laptops.

Speaking to the BBC after the show, Watson said there was "a really good atmosphere" at the Octagon with "a lot of love in the room".

About finishing in Sheffield, he said: "It was perfect. I mean, we started there 50 years ago so that's the place we were always going to finish it and that's our, for Mal and I, the two remaining members, that's our home city so we were certain that's where we wanted to close the chapter."

The third founding member, Richard H Kirk, died in 2021.

Sheffield music journalist Daniel Dylan Wray, who was at the final show, said the band's influence had been "incalculable".

"They were originators and pioneers, doing it years ahead of everyone else, and blazing a trail that many others would follow," he said.

"The world of electronic, dance, industrial and post-punk music as we know it today was shaped by their output – everything from Detroit techno to groups like Nine Inch Nails via Sheffield's own rich lineage of electronic music, has all been touched and moulded by their greatness."

Cabaret Voltaire took their name from the Zurich club that became the birthplace of the Dadaist art movement in 1916.

German artist Hugo Ball, who travelled to Switzerland amid the horrors of World War One, teamed up with other emigres to perform anarchic, prank-like shows.

Its influence spread across Western artistic styles throughout the 20th Century and its rambunctious energy was adopted by artists looking to cause chaos and flip entrenched assumptions of what art should be.

For the Sheffield trio, whose early experiments sound akin to a sentient synthesiser having a nightmare, the Dadaists were an open door towards a performance style which some audiences found difficult to accept.

At one of their first shows, which Watson said the band had "blagged" at the University of Sheffield's students' union, they "confronted" an audience who were expecting disco.

He said the students were "ironically, people who you would think are front-thinking, people who would be interested in something new, and of course they weren't".

The musician added: "They were outraged by something that they couldn't think they could dance to, and so it just descended into this beautiful chaos, which we were really proud of."

Sonically, Watson drew on Sheffield's soundscapes, and he was also inspired by musique concréte, an art form that developed in France in the 1940s as a way of turning raw environmental sounds into musical compositions.

This led him to a career in producing sound for BBC radio and wildlife documentaries with Sir David Attenborough after he left the band in 1981.

He described the final Cabaret Voltaire tour as a celebration, rather than a reunion, because of Kirk's absence.

Nick Potter, a music programme producer at the University of Sheffield, said: "'It was a real honour to be able to host Cabaret Voltaire for their final ever gig - metres away from where they played their first in the students' union's Upper Refectory.

"Cabaret Voltaire have a long history here - including filming music videos in the drama studio and Chris Watson's honorary doctorate.

"Their legacy of innovation and experimentation is a real point of pride for the city, and Sunday's gig was a perfect way to finish everything off."

Wray said the show at the Octagon, which holds up to 1,800 people, brought people from all over the world and of all ages.

He described the show as "a little bit of history" and "one of those gigs that felt like a privilege to be there for and witness".

When asked why he believed Sheffield's musical future to be healthy, Watson said: "Because it's driven by young people, people with fresh, inquiring, intelligent minds, who aren't just seeking 15 minutes of fame on social media but are interested in making music that has its own life and genre and depth and integrity to it.

"That's the kind of music that I enjoy listening to."

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Cabaret Voltaire's Richard H Kirk dies aged 65