Cabaret Voltaire

Red Mecca (1981)

Red Mecca is Cabaret Voltaire at their coldest — tape loops, treated voice, and a rhythm section that sounds like machinery rather than musicians, made amid a genuinely tense mood in the band's home city. "Split Second Feeling" and "Sluggin' Fer Jesus" build dread out of repetition rather than melody, voices looping and degrading until they stop resembling language. There's no relief built into the record — no chorus, no release — which is exactly the point of an album more interested in atmosphere than songcraft. It remains one of the starkest documents of early British industrial music, years before the term had settled into a genre.

Sleeve notes

Red Mecca · 1981

Cabaret Voltaire formed in Sheffield in 1973 around Richard H. Kirk, Stephen Mallinder, and Chris Watson, building tape loops and treated instruments in a home studio years before "industrial music" had a name to give them. Watson, a keen sound recordist even then, left the group in the early 1980s for a long career recording wildlife and environments for the BBC — an unlikely second act for one of the more disorienting record collections of the era. Kirk and Mallinder carried the band forward as a duo through the early '80s, its records growing colder and more rhythmically insistent as the decade's political mood darkened.

Their 1979 single "Nag Nag Nag," released two years before Red Mecca and still their most recognizable track, did more than any single album to define the queasy, danceable menace industrial music would run with for the next decade. Cabaret Voltaire kept mutating for another decade after that, moving toward electro and house rhythms as dance music absorbed textures the band had spent the '70s inventing almost alone. Mallinder eventually departed, leaving Kirk to carry the name into the 1990s before retiring it.