Cabaret Voltaire

Sheffield, 1973, and a name borrowed from Zürich

Cabaret Voltaire formed in Sheffield in 1973 around Stephen Mallinder, Richard H. Kirk and Chris Watson, who named themselves after the Zürich nightclub where the Dada movement took shape. The first proper live performance came in May 1975 — the anniversary that eventually gave the current run its reason to exist. Early on the group shared bills with Joy Division and moved in the orbit of Factory Records; Mallinder has since described Ian Curtis as a sweet man and a mesmerising performer, which is about as sentimental as the Cabs' own account of that period gets.

Watson left in 1981 to take a job at Tyne Tees Television, which turned out to be the start of a second career rather than a retreat from sound. Mallinder and Kirk carried the name forward for another decade and more, moving from tape splices and treated vocals into something closer to dance music without ever fully committing to it. Mallinder's own summary is that the group was never anchored by the idea of being a pop band.

The records that carried the name

The Rough Trade years produced the run most people mean when they talk about Cabaret Voltaire: Mix-Up in 1979, Three Mantras and The Voice of America in 1980, and Red Mecca in 1981 — the last of these still the record that outsiders reach for when they want to describe what industrial music sounded like before the term hardened into a genre.

The move to Some Bizzare and Virgin brought The Crackdown in 1983, Micro-Phonies in 1984 and The Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord in 1985, a stretch in which the rhythms tightened and the vocals came forward. Code followed on EMI in 1987, produced by Adrian Sherwood; Mallinder now calls it one of the most political records he and Kirk made, built around technology, power, paranoia and greed. Groovy, Laidback and Nasty arrived in 1990 and Body and Soul in 1991, by which point the group's centre of gravity had shifted towards house and techno.

The cultural residue is odd and durable. The Micro-Phonies sleeve turns up on a bedroom wall in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, John Hughes having been a follower; Trent Reznor is among the musicians who have said plainly where a large part of Nine Inch Nails came from.

Kirk's death, Watson's return

Richard H. Kirk died in September 2021, aged 65. He had kept the Cabaret Voltaire name alive alone in his final years, which made the question of what happened next genuinely open rather than a matter of scheduling.

Watson, meanwhile, had built a life in field recording: he founded The Hafler Trio, released solo albums on Touch, and worked on natural history programmes with David Attenborough as well as Springwatch and Great Railway Journeys. His 2003 album Weather Report was included in The Guardian's list of 1000 albums to hear before you die, and in 2006 the University of the West of England gave him a doctorate for his contribution to sound recording. He is president of the Wildlife Sound Recording Society and lives in Northumberland.

On 13 May 2025 Mallinder and Watson announced they would play together again for the 50th anniversary of that first 1975 show. The reunion set happened at Sheffield's Sensoria Festival on 25 October 2025, followed by a UK tour that November — including Gorilla in Manchester on 18 November 2025, with I Am Fya opening. Watson had not been in the band since 1981, and has spent this project learning material from eras he had no hand in making.

A live album, and a hard stop

The 2025 UK shows sold out and were recorded. But What Time Is It Really? came out on Benge's Memetune label as a 16-track CD on 24 April 2026, with a ten-track magenta vinyl edition following on 22 May; the vinyl cut leaves off Sensoria, which anchors the CD. Benge engineered and mixed at Memetune, Joe Peat recorded the shows, James Trevasus mastered, and the artwork is by Dan Conway and Paul Burgess. A live edit of Nag Nag Nag went out first on Bandcamp in 24-bit/96kHz.

Watson has said the record captures the essence of contemporary live performance and connects it back to the band's history; Mallinder framed it as a chance to fix the shows as a moment in time, and as a way of honouring Kirk. Both have been clear that this is the end of the line: no new studio recordings will appear under the Cabaret Voltaire name after the current activity. Speaking on the XS Noize podcast published on 15 September 2026, Mallinder put the reasoning bluntly — he has no interest in the group becoming its own tribute act. The same conversation covered a remastered edition of Code.

Where the tour stands in September 2026

The farewell routing has run in legs. West Coast North American dates went first in May 2026, taking in Seattle, Vancouver, Portland, Denver, Los Angeles and San Francisco. East Coast tickets went on sale on 20 February 2026, and on 8 July the closing North American leg was confirmed: Dallas at the Granada Theater on 11 September, Levitation in Austin on the 12th, two nights at Metro in Chicago on the 15th and 16th, the Phoenix Concert Theatre in Toronto on the 18th, SAT in Montreal on the 19th, The Wilbur in Boston on the 21st, Knockdown Center in New York on the 25th and Underground Arts in Philadelphia on the 26th. I Speak Machine opens most of those shows.

Europe follows in October, with Gazelle Twin and Fader on support duty, before eleven UK dates: Birmingham Town Hall on 10 October, then Liverpool, Nottingham, Cardiff, Bath, Newcastle, Glasgow, Manchester, Bexhill and the Roundhouse in London on the 22nd, closing at Sheffield's Octagon on 25 October. Dublin's Academy on 7 October and the Limelight in Belfast on the 8th sit ahead of the English dates. The UK run was announced in October 2025, with pre-sale on the 30th and general sale on the 31st; Gazelle Twin supports every night, and Mallinder described the pairing as a chance to go round the block one more time alongside one of the most singular artists the band knows.

What the reviews have found

Richard Foster, writing on Louder Than War about the Paradiso show in Amsterdam on 13 June 2026, found the group in pugnacious and at times celebratory form, with an encore of Nag Nag Nag and Sensoria that turned distorted and sinister as the lightshow spread across the hall. His verdict was that nothing about it was sloppy or slapdash — a deliberate piece of work rather than a heritage run-through. Watson was not on stage that night, with Eric Random on guitar alongside Mallinder.

The Manchester show at Gorilla in November 2025 drew similar notes from the same publication: sequenced synths and vocoders over heavy beats, a deliberate drop into more familiar territory after the first four songs to let the room breathe, superb sound and visuals that lived up to a group that has been making images and music together since the mid-1970s. Not everyone has left satisfied — some audience members have gone in expecting a straight greatest-hits reading and found the treatment harsher than remembered.