The Studio Above the Cutlery Works: How Cabaret Voltaire Built Western Works and Kept Their Sound Their Own

Most bands of the late 1970s rented rooms by the hour and went home with someone else’s version of their sound. Cabaret Voltaire did the opposite. By 1977 the Sheffield trio had a studio of their own on Portobello Street, in a building called Western Works, and that single practical decision explains a lot about how they sounded, how they signed and how long they lasted.

Tape Loops Before Records

The group formed in Sheffield in 1973 around Richard H. Kirk, Stephen Mallinder and Chris Watson. Sources differ on exactly when Mallinder joined, but they agree on the method. Watson was a telephone engineer who built electronics, and the early work was tape loops, reel-to-reel manipulation and home-made gear: oscillators, a ring modulator, a cheap drum machine, with processed voices laid over the top. The name came from the Zurich club associated with Dada. Their first performance as Cabaret Voltaire, in 1975, ended in a fight with the audience.

None of that needed a conventional studio. It needed a room, a few machines and time, which is the logic behind what came next.

A Room on Portobello Street

In 1977 the band set up in Western Works, a former cutlery workshop on Portobello Street. Accounts disagree on whether it was the second or the top floor, and on how many records were made there. One history says the 1979 to 1981 albums were all recorded in the building. Another account of the band says it became a social hub for Sheffield’s scene and that other local acts made early recordings there.

What matters is the arrangement. Watson financed it, the band controlled it and nobody was watching the clock. For a group built on tape manipulation, an always available room was an instrument in its own right.

Choosing Rough Trade

In 1978 the band signed to Rough Trade. According to one history, Factory had offered to sign them and Throbbing Gristle were interested in releasing them on Industrial Records, but Rough Trade won by offering a four-track Revox tape machine in place of an advance. It is a telling detail. The deal was struck in equipment, not money, and it fed straight back into the room on Portobello Street.

Mix-Up arrived in 1979, followed by The Voice of America in 1980 and Red Mecca in 1981, which topped the UK independent chart. Their 1974 to 1976 tapes also came out in 1980 as a cassette on Industrial Records, so the earliest experiments reached listeners on the very medium they were made on.

When the Trio Became a Duo

Watson left in October 1981 and the group continued as Kirk and Mallinder. By 1983 they had signed to Some Bizzare with a Virgin licensing deal. One account says a 50,000 pound advance improved the Western Works operation, though the label wanted the next album recorded in London, and The Crackdown was made there with Flood rather than at home. The same account says the original studio was abandoned in 1987 after break-ins and financial trouble, while later Kirk records still carried the Western Works name.

What the Room Taught

The lesson for anyone making music outside the mainstream is not that you need a famous studio. It is that owning a space changes what you attempt. Cabaret Voltaire could loop, distort and rebuild a track for as long as it took, and then choose a label on their terms. The sound that came out was strange, rhythmic and deliberately unfinished, and it was theirs from the first oscillator to the last mix.

Cover photo: underclassrising.net (Flickr), CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons