When Chris Watson, Stephen Mallinder and Richard H. Kirk were born in the mid-1950s, their native Sheffield was a declining industrial English city and the steel mills were beginning their decline. The music they used to breathe in that hostile city necessarily responded to that factory, mechanical, dark and claustrophobic environment that once again linked socioeconomic context and sound, the very meaning and character of music. As a name they chose a Dadaist reference, Cabaret Voltaire, a café in Zurich that was the epicenter of the movement, an artistic and multidisciplinary avant-garde movement from the beginning of the 20th century from which the trio adopted its irreverent and provocative spirit. So much so that at their first gig in Sheffield, Mallinder was thrown off the stage by a student, one of many irritated by the trio’s challenging music. And he injured him.
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