I think what we tried to do lyrically, vocally and musically was to capture a sound.
Some of it was shot in Berlin, but a lot of it was filmed in Hamburg, along the Reeperbahn in Hamburg in the famous red light district. Kino is obviously German and "film" and "cinema" and we were always cinematic in our thinking.
Even though we were influenced by American culture and music, we like the rest of Europe have been colonized with that in the post-war period. At the same time there's a sense of dirty earthiness and Europeanness and Britishness in it as well.
I think that's the fascinating thing that exists now. This contrasts with a celebrity art and celebrity music culture.
I think we saw our reaction coming from Dada, but at the same time, it formed into punk, which was very much a reaction to the social conditions. That was part of it for us as well, and that's why we were kind of swept along with punk.
We were coming from a completely different place, which was saying "sound" is what you want to define it as, and you can shape it into music in whichever way you want.
I edited Big Funk, some of the footage was shot by Peter Care. We were film buffs as much as music buffs, and so there are film reference as well as sound references.
I think in everything we did, there's a sense of tension and a sense of things pulling in a different way. It's interesting calling it "beat music". That's quite true, the rhythm is up to the fore, it's got a slap bass, and it's got "funk" in the title. But I think there's always a level of irony when we did those kind of things.
I don't think it had a name when we started. If punk has any roots, Dada is part of it. And we saw ourselves as part of a kind of Dada tradition.
[Kino] worked really well as a song title, and to build into a lyric, and also how we embraced mulit-media at the time.
As sonic journalists, we were increasingly becoming bombarded with global images. It was the early idea of the cut-up, the idea of images being juxtapositioned, which we were doing with sound. That was the early days of samples.
In that period, we had the Cold War mentality imbued through us - the Post-war [environment] and the Cold War. I think we were reflecting some of that. This was before the Wall collapsed, etc.
We were iconoclastic. We weren't there to sort of follow the trends really. So it was important that we were making a statement against that.
I think probably underneath it all, film [Kino] has its own rhythm and its own dynamic, and we were trying to capture the movement of film and cross-reference it with music.
I think you have a certain level of confidence in what you do. "Arrogance" is the wrong word. I think when you go into it, you're aware that you're doing it for the right reasons - and you have your own moral and ethical code. And we weren't driven by money, but by a a desire to make music and make a statement.
You don't have to be trained in music to create sounds and to produce and release music. That's what we were saying back in 73-74. And that's the way the world is now - and all the tools of creation, production and dissemination are there in everybody's bedrooms, front rooms and studios.
We've always been journalists - and have seen ourselves in that way. But we sort of recontextualized it through music.
Crackdown had Dave Ball playing on it. Flood worked on our next album, and Adrian Sherwood worked with us on Code.
Looking back, I think we were very much a part of democratizing music, and we wanted to demystify the process of making music - to show it's a myth.
Even if that statement was ambiguous, we kind of wanted to cause a stir. We thought that by having the name "Cabaret Voltaire", that with it came a certain responsibility. It wasn't meant to be purely entertainment; it was meant to be something a little bit more serious - and to provoke people - wrapped within an outer wrapping of entertainment.