Cabaret Voltaire

Cabaret Voltaire was a DIY experimental band formed in Sheffield in 1973 who used a mixture of electronic devices, oscillators and tape loops to make sound and songs along with more conventional instruments.
The band progressed on to what could be loosely called guerilla live performances but similar to Suicide in their confrontational nature that saw Mallinder hospitalised on one occasion.
Their sound and approach coincide with Throbbing Gristle who were also exploring similar sonic and performance landscapes. Courted by both Industrial and Factory Records the band signed with Rough Trade because they offered a Revox Tape machine instead of an advance that they used to record their Mix Up album.

The band would release several singles and albums but for our purposes, it’s Extended Play and in particular the Nag Nag Nag single.
It should be pointed out that this song (apart from The Seeds No Escape cover on their Mix-Up album) stands alone. The band had been listening to a lot of Sixties punk psychdelia like The Seeds and Red Krayola along with Can and Kraftwerk and the song was born out of that. With Mayo Thompson of Red Krayola over from the States doing some production for Rough Trade, he came in as producer.
Nag Nag Nag is an early slice of electro-punk that’s been and still is popular on dance floors. Part of its appeal is the drum machine which like all machines at the time has a bossanova beat and warp speed drum roll when you increase it to 4/4 time pattern. It’s a catchy little number that unfashionable for those punky times clocks in at over 4 minutes!

Stephen Mallinder The vocals were pretty loud and distorted, but they were still decipherable. There was a part of us that didn’t want to compromise, we had a particular sound and we just wanted to shape that into a regular pop song, but in a warped way. You find out how people relate to your music and that verse-chorus-verse-chorus bit of a middle eight is a proven formula, but it’s what you do with it that’s the interesting thing. The Flying Lizards’ version of ‘Money’, for instance, is a pop song but it’s twisted. Devo made twisted pop songs too.
I do understand why people like ‘Nag Nag Nag’. I think it caught the zeitgeist. It has a massive attitude, which I really love. As a band, you see yourself as a spectrum of ideas and sounds and how those come into being, so it was quite good to go, “We can write a weird pop song if we want”. It also makes a bit of sense of the other things we were doing. It makes the weirder stuff sound more sensible. There is some sense in going, “We’ll give you something that you can relate to and if you unpack that, then there’s loads of different ideas to have a look at. We’ll make you laugh, we’ll make you dance, and we’ll freak you out as well”. Neil Mason, Electronic Sound

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