BAND: Cabaret Voltaire
VENUE: The Town and Country Club, Kentish Town
DATE: Feb 12,1986
PA: Oz PA Hire

When Eddy and Oz heard rumours that the factory where they were working in Manchester was about to give them the push, they decided they'd prefer to take the initiative and jump, also acquiring a reasonably generous redundancy payment to comfort them on their descent.

They'd never had anything to do with audio before that time and so the obvious thing seemed to be to start a PA hire company. Fortunately they had a friend called Diane who was also consumately ignorant of sonic technicalities, and thus unfettered by any overly weighty theoretical concerns the three cavalierly went where sensible business advisers fear to tread; they "Bought some black boxes, and started doing it". With a couple of 4560s, two ATC9" mid reflex cabs, a pair of cheap horns and a prototype Hill console, they launched themselves into the pubs and clubs of the northern nights to do battle with the slings and arrows of outrageous THD.

Six Years On...

Six years later they all own big houses in East Sussex, drive C reg Merc convertibles and... well, at any rate they've got a sturdy 8k rig that's continually expanding and an impressive list of clients which includes Cabaret Voltaire. Oh yeah, and they're hounded by the music press for interviews.

The system at the Town and Country Club represented their entire stock, although they have done larger venues such as the Dominion, Tottenham Court Road, where they simple hire in the necessary extra. This time the rig was all at stage level and each side consisted of:

Bass: 10 1x15 (Gauss) bins,
Low mid: 4 Philishaves,
Hi mid: 4 Gauss HF4000/JBL2355 long throw flares,
2 Gauss HF4000/Martin wide angle flares,
Hi: JBL 1" drivers with pepperpots JBL2402

The bass bins were powered by Studiomaster 800Cs with HH V800s driving the rest. Currently the main desk is a TAC 24:8:2 which they are extremely happy with although a need for more channels is now sending them in search of a larger format. The eight groups were thus configured:

1&2 Stereo kit
3 Bass
4 Main tape
5&6 Instruments excluding kit in stereo
7&8 Vocals and effects in stereo

System protection in terms of limiting is built into each individual pass of the BSS modular crossover, but a dbx 162 stereo Over-Easy compressor adds a little gentle compression to the stereo outputs of the desk to even-up the often very spikey Cab's material. This is a fairly standard feature of an Oz ring when working with bands, such as the Cabs, that have what might be described as a hard edge, although if the vocals are the most prominent part of the music, they open the 162 right up to allow the voice to come forward. A KlarkTeknik DN300 1/3-octave graphic provides overall system correction with the aid of a KT DN60 spectrum analyser fed by a KT laboratory calibrated microphone.

All effects were returned through spare channels on the desk and the four auxilliary sends were used as follows:

Aux 1: Roland Space Echo 201, returned in mono; a repeat echo mostly for vocals.

Aux2: Lexicon PCM60 digital reverb, returned in stereo, very short room program mainly for drums.

Aux3: Lexicon PCM41 DDL, returned in stereo; a short repeat mainly for drums to add depth. Also using modulation to give strange vocal effects.

Aux 4: Yamaha Rev 7, returned in stereo; 1.9sec decay for general ambience.

Though not in the rack that night, an Eventide H910 Harmonizer is sometimes used on vocals with a severe downward pitch change of 0.86 to give the familiar growling, Darlekesque sound to the voice.

Scamps

Cabaret Voltaire consists of just two people: Richard Kirk who plays keyboards, guitar (a low cost Strat copy), and two tape recorders, which are to be explained shortly, and Mal who plays a Washburn Steinberger bass copy and sings. For live work they also generally have a drummer on stage as indeed they did in this case. Being all electronic (Simmons SDS9) there was no need for gating on the drums, although there was a Scamp compressor on the snare to decrease its wide dynamic range to manageable proportions. Two of the four mikes on the stage were covering the hi hat (Sennheiser 441) and the Timbale (Beyer M201). The remainder being a Beyer M88 for lead vocals and a Shure SM58 for any other spontaneous vocals that Richard might deem appropriate, such as those required to deal with overly boisterous comments from the audience.

The keyboards consisted of a Korg sequencer, a DX-7 and a Juno 60 which also has some Scamp compression to even up the drastic difference in levels between presets, many of which are Richard's own voicings. The Washburn Steinberger copy bass was compressed about 5:1 as was the voice — Scamp in both cases.

The only instrument amp on stage was a small Carlsbro Cobra combo for the guitar, and that's a very recent addition which still isn't used for the out front sound. Everything is DI'd and, apart from the Carlsbro, all stage sound is via the foldback which consists of a TAC 24:8 console feeding a pair of 2-way active side fills containing 2x15 Gauss and a 2441, plus three pairs of Martin LE200 wedges using the two channels of a dual Formula Sound and one 27-band Pa:ce graphic for feedback elimination. Drawmer compressors are used for the foldback basically as they are for the FOH system.

A large part of the band's sounds comes from pre-recorded tapes, recorded and mixed by the band in their own Soundcraft 24-track studio. Although highly successful in terms of a lengthy career, a huge number of albums and a devoted following, money has seldom been overly abundant, and so many of the instruments/sounds that the lads want to use live they have to have on tape, hiring in the various expensive digital sampling synths or series of drum machines for a few days to capture magnetically in the studio. A second tape recorder simply runs a tape of noises and effects which is used via the pause button like another instrument, as the moment dictates.

If you've never been to the Town and Country Club, it's a truly great place to see a band. Although it's based on the familiar old theatre design that so many venues have, it doesn't suffer from the feeling of neglect that most do. It feels like it's been taken care of and suggests a respect for the public that's missing elsewhere. Definitely very worthy of patronage as a punter and easy stage access for bands.

Anarchy and Shifts in Everyday Perception

The live performance is a careful balance between a live musical performance and video-to-tape show. After talking to Mal after the concert, I understood that, being basically anarchistic in outlook, the intention of the band is to cause a shift in the way people see everyday things, rather than to make any specific statements about how things should be seen, or to rally behind any particular political standpoint. This they undoubtedly do by cutting footage of man's various barbarous inhumanities to man in with footage of comfortable everyday events or familiar clips from old films, with often disturbing effect. The music is similarly non-specific and though it does rely on sequencers and tapes, it's still very much a performance and can as easily not work as work. At times the music syncs with the video so well as to suggest that some guiding intelligence is at work after all, but no, in fact it's all in the eye of the beholder — the video is put into play at the start and runs wild against what ever is played.

Oz jokingly told me that the band almost never do encores and that there were only two reasons for doing one: either they've played really well and want to play some more or they've been absolutely awful and consider that the audience deserve another crack at it.

This night the place was totally packed. It seemed that they weren't going to let them go without a second helping of some kind, and they asked in such a civil way — cries such as, "Oh go on, let's have some more", filtered clearly through the din. All very pleasant.

For me it got a little tiring after a while, and wandering around the table seating in the balcony I saw several people relaxed enough to take a nap, or just staring into space away from the stage. It's the sort of gig you goto, lean against a wall with a drink in your hand and find that you've wandered off into a daydream, coming to minutes later to find that you can't remember what you were daydreaming about, except that it was very pleasant. Could this be the previously mentioned shift in perception? Job done.