NEW YORK, NY.- Richard Kirk, a founding member of the English group Cabaret Voltaire and a major figure in the creation of the post-punk style known as industrial music, has died. He was 65.
His death was confirmed by his former record label, Mute, in an Instagram post Sept. 21. The post did not say when or where he died or cite the cause.
Kirk formed Cabaret Voltaire in 1973 in Sheffield, England, with Stephen Mallinder and Chris Watson. They borrowed the name from the Zurich nightclub where dada, an art movement that responded to society’s ills with irrationality, was born in the early years of the 20th century.
“When we started, we wanted to do something with sound, but none of us knew how to play an instrument,” Kirk said in an interview for a 1985 New York Times article about industrial music. “So we started using tape recorders and various pieces of junk and gradually learned to play instruments like guitars and bass.”
Despite his claim, Kirk was initially a clarinetist, and he developed a scratching, slashing style as a guitarist.
The members of Cabaret Voltaire created the template for what would become known as industrial music: hectoring vocals, mechanical rhythms, scraps of recorded speech snatched from mass media, conventional instruments rendered alien with electronic effects.
On early-1980s recordings such as “Three Mantras,” “The Voice of America” and “Red Mecca,” the group embraced the literary cutup techniques of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin; British author J.G. Ballard’s dystopian provocations; and punk rock’s abrasive stance. Musical influences included Brian Eno, the German band Can and Jamaican dub.
Watson left the group in 1981, and Kirk and Mallinder pursued a more commercial direction that brought them to the cusp of mainstream success. Cabaret Voltaire disbanded in 1994, after which Kirk pursued a bewildering range of solo projects and collaborations. He revived Cabaret Voltaire as a solo effort in 2009, focusing exclusively on new material, and released three albums in 2020 and 2021.
Kirk was born March 21, 1956, and grew up in Sheffield, a steel town.
“You looked down into the valley and all you could see was blackened buildings,” he told author and critic Simon Reynolds in an interview for his book “Rip It Up and Start Again” (2005), an authoritative post-punk history.
Sheffield was a bastion for Labour Party and radical-left politics, and as a teenager, Kirk was a member of the Young Communist League.
“My dad was a member of the party at one point, and I wore the badge when I went to school,” he told Reynolds. “But I never took it really seriously.”
Mallinder, in a 2006 interview on the Red Bull Music Academy website, said he and Kirk had been drawn to Black American music from an early age.
“We used to go to soul clubs from when we were about 13 or 14,” he said. “We were both working-class kids; we grew up with that. And anything else that was in our world at that moment, it didn’t really matter to us.”
But local performances by Roxy Music, then an up-and-coming art-rock band that included Eno on primitive synthesizers and tape effects, suggested new possibilities.
“People like Brian Eno were a massive influence on us, because he was actually integrating things that were nonmusical, and that appealed to us,” Mallinder said. “We didn’t really want to be musicians. The idea of being technically proficient or learning a traditional instrument was kind of anathema to us.”
Kirk attended art school and completed a one-year program in sculpture. He joined Mallinder and Watson, a dada-besotted telephone engineer, in Cabaret Voltaire, which was initially an amorphous, boundary-pushing workshop project based in Watson’s attic.
“We studiously went there Tuesdays and Thursdays every week and experimented for two hours or so, during which time we’d lay down maybe three or four compositions,” Kirk told Reynolds.
Less musicians than provocateurs at first, the members of Cabaret Voltaire were soon swept up in England’s punk-rock revolution. In 1978, the group established Western Works, a rehearsal and recording studio based in what had previously been the offices of the Sheffield Federation of Young Socialists.
“Western Works gave us the freedom to do what we wanted,” Kirk said.
An advance from the independent label Rough Trade helped the band outfit the studio with a four-track recorder and mixing desk. Rough Trade proceeded to issue some of the band’s most influential and enduring work.
After Watson left the group, Kirk and Mallinder moved increasingly toward unambiguous dance-floor rhythms, drum machines and lush synthesizer sounds, scoring underground hits such as “Sensoria,” “James Brown” and “I Want You.” A major-label contract with EMI resulted in a collaboration with the influential producer Adrian Sherwood on the group’s album “Code” (1987) and a 1990 collaboration with Chicago house-music producers, “Groovy, Laidback and Nasty.” But audience indifference and mounting debt led to the group’s dissolution four years later.
Kirk plunged into an array of pseudonymous side projects and collaborations. Performing with Richard Barratt (aka DJ Parrot) in a duo called Sweet Exorcist, he was among the earliest artists documented by the fledgling Warp label. He had another potent collaboration, with the Sheffield recording engineer Robert Gordon, as the techno duo XON.
Information on survivors was not immediately available.
Kirk rejected lucrative offers by festivals such as Coachella to revive the original Cabaret Voltaire.
“Some people might think I’m daft for not taking the money, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable within myself doing that,” he said in a 2017 interview with Fact magazine. “Cabaret Voltaire was always about breaking new ground and moving forward.”
He bolstered that impression by declining to perform any older Cabaret Voltaire material.
“I always make it really clear that if you think you’re going to come and hear the greatest hits, then don’t come because you’re not,” he told Fact. “What you might get is the same spirit.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
