{"id":10305,"date":"2011-11-07T03:21:14","date_gmt":"2011-11-07T03:21:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/?p=10305"},"modified":"2011-11-11T19:23:49","modified_gmt":"2011-11-11T19:23:49","slug":"the-crackdown-by-cabaret-voltaire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2011\/11\/07\/the-crackdown-by-cabaret-voltaire\/","title":{"rendered":"The Crackdown by Cabaret Voltaire"},"content":{"rendered":"

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I mentioned yesterday Richard H. Kirk’s announcement<\/a> that Cabaret Voltaire’s albums on the Virgin label are to be reissued next year by Mute Records. The news gives me a topical excuse to write something about the first album in that series, The Crackdown<\/em>, which happens to be my favourite of all their releases. Cabaret Voltaire, like 23 Skidoo, benefited a great deal from their association with designer Neville Brody in the early 1980s, and this post mostly concerns Brody’s design for The Crackdown<\/em> and its accompanying singles. The Crackdown<\/em> was released in 1983 with the advance from Virgin having allowed them to buy new equipment and add a degree of polish to their recordings which earlier albums had lacked. Brody had been designing their covers for the past two years, and continued to do so for the next few releases before leaving the music business to concentrate on magazine and other design work.<\/p>\n

\"crackdown2.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

What I liked about this sleeve was the way it gets the most out of the careful arrangement of a few simple elements. The front photo showing Stephen Mallinder and Richard Kirk posing with video equipment (monitoring the viewer) is enlarged and cropped to provide backgrounds elsewhere. The sleeve photos wrap around front and back while the shape made by the titles determines the layout of track titles and credits. (The various CV graphics are credited to Phil Barnes.) The type wasn’t set digitally but was applied by hand using Letraset rub-down lettering which makes me wonder how much planning was required to get the track titles to perfectly fit their intended shape.<\/p>\n

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<\/p>\n

Being their first album on a label with bigger budgets, this release has an inner sleeve which can perhaps be read as a hot interior for a cool exterior. There’s more meticulous Letraset type (and saxophone mis-spelled…oops). The early numbers of this album also included a free four-track 12″ of music from the Cabs’ video label, Doublevision.<\/p>\n

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\"crackdown5.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Crackdown<\/em> track was released as a 12″ single with both tracks given additional power by dance producer John Luongo. This slab of vinyl remains for me the group’s finest moment, The Crackdown<\/em><\/a> in this version being a relentless monster that should always be played as loud as possible. Kirk and Mallinder’s faces are here enlarged almost to the point of abstraction, a typical Brodyism.<\/p>\n

\"crackdown6.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"crackdown7.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Just Fascination<\/em> was selected for the 7″ release with the design almost copying the 12″ but for Phil Barnes’ graphic which I always read as representing concentrated attention or (yes) fascination. What’s less obvious is that the green square on the 12″ sleeve is exactly the same size as the single sleeve, the only example I’ve seen of two related releases being connected in this way.<\/p>\n

\"crackdown8.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Neville Brody also designed magazine ads and posters for Cabaret Voltaire. The one for The Crackdown<\/em> is below.<\/p>\n

\"crackdown9.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"crackdown10.jpg\"<\/p>\n

So after all of this care and attention to detail, how did Virgin repackage the album for CD in 1985? Terribly is the answer. Granted all<\/em> Virgin’s first wave of CD reissues were perfunctory but this one treats Brody’s design with such a lack of respect it’s insulting. The credits are reduced to the barest minimum with no mention of the other musicians (including Dave Ball from Soft Cell) who appeared on the album. But they do manage to waste an entire page of the insert with some pointless boilerplate about “The Compact Disc Digital Audio System”. The only positive point is that the extra tracks from the Doublevision single were included as a bonus.<\/p>\n

\"crackdown11.jpg\"<\/p>\n

\"crackdown12.jpg\"<\/p>\n

This, then, is why I’m looking forward to Mute reissuing these albums, whatever they do it will be better than this. The 12″ versions of The Crackdown<\/em> and Just Fascination<\/em> (and Empty Walls<\/em> from the 7″ single) appeared on compilations in 2001 but they could easily be tacked onto the end of the reissue. There might even be room for The Dream Ticket<\/em> 12″. How about it, Mute?<\/p>\n

\u2022 See also: Micro-Phonies<\/em> at Hard Format<\/a><\/p>\n

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
\n\u2022 The album covers archive<\/a><\/p>\n

Previously on { feuilleton }
\n\u2022 Graphic design in Heat<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I mentioned yesterday Richard H. Kirk’s announcement that Cabaret Voltaire’s albums on the Virgin label are to be reissued next year by Mute Records. The news gives me a topical excuse to write something about the first album in that series, The Crackdown, which happens to be my favourite of all their releases. Cabaret Voltaire, … Continue reading “The Crackdown by Cabaret Voltaire”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,29,3,10],"tags":[150,3065,3068,149,3067,3763,3066,3069],"class_list":["post-10305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-design","category-electronica","category-music","category-typography","tag-cabaret-voltaire","tag-dave-ball","tag-john-luongo","tag-neville-brody","tag-phil-barnes","tag-richard-kirk","tag-soft-cell","tag-stephen-mallinder"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pq7rV-2Gd","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10305"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10305\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}