Cabaret Voltaire: Stephen Mallinder on the reissue of “Code” and the farewell tour: “We didn’t see ourselves in industrial”

“We didn’t see ourselves in industrial as much as industrial saw itself in us”. That's how Stephen Mallinder sums up the relationship between Cabaret Voltaire and a genre they helped shape without ever fully accepting its boundaries. Interviewed by Tom Phelan for Far Out, the singer and co-founder of the Sheffield outfit looks back on the making of 1987's “Code”, now reissued in a remastered edition, while the farewell tour brings to a close one of the most important and influential chapters in British electronic music.

Cabaret Voltaire and the reissue of “Code”

Founded in 1973 by Mallinder, Richard H. Kirk and Chris Watson, Cabaret Voltaire moved through tape experimentation, post-punk, industrial, dub and club music, anticipating developments that would later become central to house and techno. As the band's voice, bassist and stage presence, Mallinder helped give a physical, rhythmic dimension to its sonic explorations. After Watson left in the early 1980s, he carried on alongside Kirk until 1994, later relocating to Australia. Since then his work has continued across solo records, collaborations and projects such as Wrangler and Creep Show, the latter with John Grant, alongside writing and academic research.

Released in 1987, “Code” captures a decisive turning point: Cabaret Voltaire retained the unease of their early days, but channelled it into more accessible structures and an increasingly close dialogue with the dancefloor. The move to EMI had allowed them to expand the resources of their Western Works studio and bring in Adrian Sherwood, a producer they admired for his work spanning dub and experimentation. Analogue synthesizers were now joined by new digital technologies, opening up unprecedented possibilities for sound manipulation. “We were developing that electronic, club, twelve-inch dimension, but with the new digital technologies that were starting to emerge and with a really accomplished dub producer we admired a great deal. That was the mix the record grew out of”, Mallinder recalls.

The English artist also reasserts his impatience with labels. “We didn't coin that term ourselves. It was attached to us and, even though we didn't reject it, it wasn't something we created”, he says of industrial. “We were Northern English guys making music in an industrial city, and in some way we were expressing that”. But harshness was only one part of their language: “We were really into groove: that was the whole point”.
Behind tracks like “Don’t Argue”, “Here To Go” and “Sex, Money, Freaks” there also remained a critical eye on the present. Samples, distorted voices and mechanical rhythms spoke of a world shot through with propaganda, repression and economic upheaval. “Code” was thus fully immersed in the climate of “antagonistic” Britain of the time, opposed to Margaret Thatcher's free-market policies: “It was about money. About greed. About wealth. About people indulging in everything”. Songs like “Sex, Money, Freaks”, Mallinder adds, tried to capture “that growing sense of entitlement we still live with today”. Even the band's Dadaist name, as the English musician recalls in the Far Out interview, was meant to keep that tension alive: “We were still trying to provoke, to question things and push people to ask themselves questions”. Without, however, attributing any redemptive power to art: “Dada was an art movement. It didn't govern anything, it didn't stop wars. In its own way it made noise to draw attention to things”.

The rediscovery of the record now comes via the Mute reissue, released on October 9th on limited-edition marbled vinyl and digitally, with new liner notes dedicated to the making and legacy of the album. The project also includes a triple-CD deluxe edition, with two additional discs of remastered period remixes and previously unreleased versions recovered from the archives. “It was a record that gave us the chance to connect with other people. That's why I think it mattered”, Mallinder concludes.

The Final Tour

At the same time, Mallinder and Watson are bidding farewell to audiences with “The Final Tour”, launched in 2025 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the band's first show. Following Kirk's death in 2021, the two co-founders chose to look back across the entire span of Cabaret Voltaire's career, with no plans for new recordings under that name. The schedule included a date at London's Roundhouse on October 22nd and will close on October 25th at Sheffield's Octagon, returning to the city where it all began.
For a band used to looking forward, reckoning with their own past is an unusual experience. “It's interesting to be able to bring it all together”, Mallinder observes, “because it's allowed me and the others to get a perspective on what we did across that whole span of time, rather than just a snapshot of one particular moment”.

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