Cabaret Voltaire - 1974-1976 (Industrial Records IRC 35)

Inspired by this blog post I thought I would post my one Industrial tape. I really wanted 24 Hours when I heard about it in Gordon A. Hope's Flowmotion magazine (his tape 'Synth Bites Man' was what got me interested in the tape scene in first place - long since taped over unfortunately) and 24 tapes of basically noise in an attaché case seemed like both the antithesis and apotheosis of DIY, but at the age of 15 I didn't have £88 for anything.

I had just started out on my record buying though, and made trips to the Virgin shop at the bottom of the Moor in Sheffield when I had money to spare. As well as buying singles and the occasional LP I also came across tapes from local bands. It's how I got my copy of 'Fragment' by Clock DVA and how, despite it being, at £4.99, actually more expensive than any single or LP I had so far bought (LPs were usually £3.99 or less), I got this. It took me several visits to decide to buy it, while in the meantime also acquiring more Cabaret Voltaire and indeed Throbbing Gristle, so for the sake of completion I finally paid out for it.

Industrial was more than just TG's label. It became a repository for counter culture artists and artefacts from all over the world, including Sweden's Leather Nun, Monte Cazzazza and William Burroughs, so a tape of early Cabaret Voltaire fitted in perfectly. The sleeve was in the house style, greyscale almost samizdat design, typeset with letraset or possibly some pro setting but with a hand-completed catalogue number on the tape label.

It's primitive tape and synth experimentalism filtered through a teenage haze and like much of that genre was probably more fun to make than do. Some of the sounds that informed early Cabs records are there such as tape loops and manipulations, the jet pedal that made 'Nag Nag Nag' so awesome to my young ears, treated drum machines and the fruity synth noises which seemed to be replaced by the Vox Continental when they started making 'proper' music.

None of these tracks appear on the 'Methodology' set, which to my ears attempted to make the move to being a band more deliberate, but they are as relevant to Cabaret Voltaire's early history as that set.

By the way, when Mute reissued 24 Hours as TG24 in 2004, I succumbed, for only two and a half times the price of the original, and still more desirable, tape set.

Side One

1. The Dada Man
2. Ooraseal
3. A Sunday Night in Biot
4. In Quest of the Unusual
5. Do The Snake

Side Two

1. Doubled Delivery
2. Venusian Animals
3. The Outer Limits
4. She Loved You

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