Cabaret Voltaire's classic first singles

The group's debut record, Extended Play, was released by Rough Trade in October 1978. Somewhere between 1977 and 1979, the classic Cabaret Voltaire sound took shape: the hissing high hats and squelchy snares of the rhythm-generator; Chris Watson's smears of synth slime; Stephen Mallinder's dankly pulsing bass; and Richard Kirk's spikes of shattered-glass guitar.

Everything coalesces on singles like "Silent Command" and "Seconds Too Late" to create a stalking hypno-groove feel somewhere between death disco and Eastern Bloc skank.

Cabaret Voltaire - Second Too Late 1980

On other singles - "Nag Nag Nag", "Jazz the Glass" - there's an almost charming sixties garage-punk feel, the fuzztone guitar and Farfisa organ vamps recalling ? & The Mysterians or The Seeds.

Cabaret Voltaire - Nag Nag Nag 1979


Cabaret Voltaire - Jazz the Glass 1981

You can hear the chill wind, the icy silver-machine whoosh of Kirk's guitar sound emerging on "The Set Up" on the debut EP.

Cabaret Voltaire - The Set Up 1978

Another Cabaret Voltaire hallmark was dehumanizing Mallinder's vocal via creepy treatments that made him sound reptilian, alien, or, at the extreme, like some kind of metallic or mineralized being. On "Silent Command", for instance, Mal's vocal bubbles like molten glass being blown into distended shapes.

Cabaret Voltaire - Silent Command 1979

Visiting USA for the first time in November 1979 inspired the sophomore album The Voice of America: the band caught wind of the impending shift to the right with Reagan and his born-again Christian constituency.

"A big novelty for a bunch of kids from England, where TV finished at eleven o'clock and there were only three channels, was the fact that America had all-night TV and loads of stations. We just locked into this televangelist Eugene Scott, who had a low-rent show that was all about raising money. And the only reason he wanted money was to stay on the air", says Kirk. Scott's voice ended up on the Cabs' classic single "Sluggin for Jesus".

Cabaret Voltaire - Sluggin' for Jesus 1980

1980's mini album Three Mantras was an oblique response to events in the Middle East.

Its two tracks "Eastern Mantra" and "Western Mantra", contrasted the evil twins of fundamentalist Islam and born-again Christian America, beloved enemies locked in a clinch of clashing civilizations.

Cabaret Voltaire - Eastern Mantra 1980


Cabaret Voltaire - Western Mantra 1980

"It kind of culminated with the third album, Red Mecca. It's not called that by coincidence. We weren't referencing the fucking Mecca Ballroom in Nottingham!", recalls Kirk. 

Purely through its sonic turbulence and tense rhythms, Red Mecca also seemed to tap into closer-to-home issues: the urban riots of summer 1981, unrest stoked by mounting unemployment as Thatcher's deflationary policies kicked in, then ignited by insensitive policing in inner-city areas.

The Human League - The Dignity of Labour

The Human League's second release for Fast Product was a tribute to 'the worker'. The Dignity of Labour consisted of four electronic instrumentals inspired by the Soviet space programme. Each offered a different slant on a central concept: the extent to which 'modern technology depends almost entirely upon the worker'. In this case Russian miners toiled deep beneath the earth's crust, excavating the coal needed to make steel, the steel in turn being turned into gantries for Yuri Gagarin's spaceship. Gagarin appears on the EP's front cover as a splendidly isolated figure walking across a Moscow square to receive a medal for being the first human in outer space.

The EP came with a free flexi-disc, which documented - in true Brechtian fashion - the band and Last debating the sleeve's image. At the end Oakley makes a brief statement about the concept EP's theme: individualism versus collectivism.

The Human League - The Dignity of Labour (Bonus Flexi Disc) 1979

"You couldn't live in Sheffield and not be aware that the industrial era was crumbling", says Last. "So, on one level, the records was a totally serious hymn to the dignity of workers, but at the same time it was imbued with many levels of irony, doubt and alienation". Despite its timely resonances and atmospheric, ahead-of-its-time electronica, however, the EP's pensive instrumentals confused most 'Being Boiled' fans.

The Human League - The Dignity of Labour Part 1 1979

After the EP's release Last believed there was no point in putting out a third League single on Fast and decided to secure a major-label deal for the group. Approaching the big companies again, The Human League pitched themselves as the Next Big Thing in music: a wave of positivity after punk's nihilism and outrage.

"Blind Youth", the first song on their demo tape, ridiculed fashionable doom-and-gloom mongers, especially people who depict modern urban life as some kind of dystopian nightmare. 'High-rise living's not so bad', sings Oakey, a dig aimed equally at J.G. Ballard and The Clash. 'Dehumanization is such a big word/It's been around since Richard III'. Firmly rejecting punk's 'no future' posturing, The Human League exhorted the blind youth of Britain to 'Take hope...your time is due/Big fun come soon...Now is calling'.

The Human League - Blind Youth 1979

Lo-fi electronic music

In mid-1978, a curious spate of cultural synchronicity found "Warm Leatherette" being released at around the same time as several other lo-fi electronic singles, all put out on indie labels: Throbbing Gristle's "United", Cabatet Voltaire's Extended Play EP, Human League's "Being Boiled", Robert Rental's "Paralysis" and Thomas Leer's "Private Plane".
"There was this period when they all came out, one after the other", recalls Leer. "And it was like, 'Where are all these weird records coming from?' None of us knew each other. There was obviously something brewing."
Actually, Thomas Leer and Robert Rental did know each other. Two Scottish friends who'd moved down to London at the height of punk, Leer and Rental, like Miller, were inspired to put out their own records by the Desperate Bicycles' example.

Throbbing Gristle - United - 1978


Cabaret Voltaire - Do the Mussolini - 1978


The Human League - Being Boiled - 1978


Robert Rental - Paralysis - 1978


"Private Plane" sounded electronic, but Leer didn't actually own a synth. Instead he processed his guitar and bass using various gadgets and played Rental's stylophone (a gimmicky electronic keyboard played with a pen) through an echo effect. All these gauzy silverswirl textures gave "Private Plane" an ethereal feel perfect for its mood of remote serenity tinged with wistfulness, loosely inspired by a recent TV program about the reclusive multimillionaire Howard Hughes. Leer's fey voice is equally perfect, but owed something to contingency: he had to whisper the vocal because the recording took place at night in his one-room apartment and he didn't want to wake his girlfriend.

Thomas Leer - Private Plane - 1978

The Normal - Warm Leatherette

Working in his North London bedroom, Daniel Miller, aka the Normal, created "T.V.O.D." and "Warm Leatherette", the two sides of his self-released debut single as the Normal.
The Normal's sound was electropunk. "Warm Leatherette" especially - all harsh stabs of analog-synth distortion and dispassionately perverse lyrics about the eroticism of car accidents, via Ballard's Crash - could hardly have been further from the floridly romantic keyboard synth arpeggios of prog rock.
The single did unexpectedly well, selling thirty thousand copies, and inadvertently turned Miller into the CEO of his own record label. Mute Records was the name he'd put on the back of the single, along with his home address. Many people assumed Mute was a proper record label specializing in weird electropop. Within a week of the release of "Warm Leatherette" all kind of peculiar demo tapes started arriving in the mail.

The Normal - Warm Leatherette - 1978


The Normal - T.V.O.D. - 1978

Kraftwerk - Trans-Europe Express & Donna Summer - I Feel Love

For many of the postpunk persuasion, 1977's most significant singles weren't "White Riot" or "God Save the Queen", but "Trans-Europe Express", a metronomic, metal-on-metal threnody for the industrial era by the German band Kraftwerk, and Donna Summer's Eurodisco smash "I Feel Love", made almost entirely from synthetic sounds by producer Giorgio Moroder, an Italian based in Munich.
Kraftwerk's serene synthpop conjured glistening visions of the Neu Europa-modern, forward-looking, and pristinely postrock in the sense of having virtually no debts to American music.

Kraftwerk - Trans-Europe Express - 1977


Donna Summer - I Feel Love - 1977