Cabaret Voltaire
Stephen Mallinder and Richard H Kirk were now working mainly as a duo when I photographed them in this quiet London park. Their album ‘2x45’ was just released on the indie label Rough Trade and it featured a more funky take on their industrial electronic sounds. This was probably their most accessible album to date and I still find it difficult to listen to with it’s jagged synthesisers piercing the heavy rhythms and distorted vocals. They were veering towards more commercial sounding music by their standards and within a year they would be getting into the mainstream charts.
I saw them perform several times around in the early 1980s often in almost complete darkness so it was refreshing for me to be able to photograph them on a sunny day without wondering whether I would be able to get a single decent shot of them in focus. It was also the first time I’d ever seen them not dressed in black from head to toe. I couldn’t quite get them to smile though. It probably wouldn’t go with their music or their image.
