The future of Sheffield music looks “really healthy”, one of Cabaret Voltaire’s founding members has said after winding up the band’s 50-year career in the city.
Chris Watson joined fellow founder Stephen Mallinder at the city’s Octagon Centre on Sunday night to complete their UK-wide tour and finish where they had started in the mid-1970s.
The sold-out homecoming marks the end of a band that was at the forefront of a revolution in popular music, which saw musicians turn away from guitars towards wire-sprouting modular synthesisers and bedroom laptops.
Speaking to the BBC after the show, Watson said there was “a really good atmosphere” at the Octagon with “a lot of love in the room”.
About finishing in Sheffield, he said: “It was perfect. I mean, we started there 50 years ago so that’s the place we were always going to finish it and that’s our, for Mal and I, the two remaining members, that’s our home city so we were certain that’s where we wanted to close the chapter.”
The third founding member, Richard H Kirk, died in 2021.
Sheffield music journalist Daniel Dylan Wray, who was at the final show, said the band’s influence had been “incalculable”.
“They were originators and pioneers, doing it years ahead of everyone else, and blazing a trail that many others would follow,” he said.
“The world of electronic, dance, industrial and post-punk music as we know it today was shaped by their output – everything from Detroit techno to groups like Nine Inch Nails via Sheffield’s own rich lineage of electronic music, has all been touched and moulded by their greatness.”
