Cabaret Voltaire: In the 70s
R.J. Preece: What were a couple of things that you think people should know about your work in the 1970s?
Stephen Mallinder: 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. And we were coming from a completely different place, which was saying “sound” is what you want to define it as, and you can shape it into music in whichever way you want.
Music doesn’t have to be so rule-based—and so strict in its structures, construction and perception. We were sort of coming from an angle where we wanted to break rules. 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.
R.J. Preece: So would you describe that approach or thinking as “punk”?
Stephen Mallinder: 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. 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.
I think we saw our reaction coming from Dada, but at the same time, it formed into punk, which was very much a reaction to the social conditions. That was part of it for us as well, and that’s why we were kind of swept along with punk. It was an important period for us, because even though we weren’t a “punk band”, and what became a model for a punk band, we were able to be dragged along by the spirit of that time.
There were a lot of things going on… 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.
Stephen Mallinder, intro | In the 70s | Crackdown | Kino | Big Funk | Sensoria | Looking back now
ads by artdesigncafe
Facebook comments
