Not long ago, going through my records, I pulled out a bootleg of Coil live in Moscow. I had to look up the date: 15 September 2001, DK Gorbunova, the old Gorbushka. Four days after the towers came down in New York. The date I had forgotten. Nothing else about that night needed looking up.
My friend Andrey had a friend, Ivan Pavlov, who records as CoH and who opened the evening. Ivan put us on the list. What followed was not a concert in any sense I had known until then. The sound was not only heard; it was felt by the body, through the floor and in the chest. The visuals swallowed the hall. The band stood on stage in overalls smeared with what looked like blood, playing with light bulbs as if they were instruments, which that night they were. I walked out a different listener from the one who had walked in.
What I did not know until later was that Andrey had been expected backstage. He never went. Another friend from Nizhny Novgorod who did make it through brought him souvenirs at the train afterwards. Andrey did not mind in the least. The impression was so immense, he said, that he preferred not to meet the magicians in person. A quarter of a century on, I think he was right, and I think his choice says something about what music was for us then.
Lausanne, June 2026
This summer I went to see Cabaret Voltaire at Les Docks in Lausanne, part of what has been billed as their farewell run. Richard H. Kirk died in 2021; the name is now carried by Stephen Mallinder and Chris Watson, the two surviving founders. It was a good night. And yet I could not shake a thought that has been following me around for some time: that I was watching the closing chapter of a way of making music that will go when the bands who invented it in the late seventies and eighties go, words spoken or sung over short, repetitive compositions.
The new releases
The same thought returns every time I go through the lists of new releases and reissues. The reissues are where the energy is, which is already telling. As for the new music, it is obvious that there are loads of young men and women who can play their instruments with a virtuosity that would have made some of my heroes blush. It is equally evident that their music does not touch me the way The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Weather Report, Miles Davis, The Clash or The Stranglers did, and still do. Two of those names made music with barely a word in it, so this is not only about lyrics. It is about necessity: the sense that the record had to exist, that somebody would have burst had they not made it.
Almost any month’s list will give you a reissue of a record that changed popular culture when it first came out. Some artists managed that with every album; others released masterpieces and cultural phenomena interspersed with more pedestrian efforts. But they had something to say and something to play. Robert Fripp or Klaus Schulze, Leonard Cohen or Fabrizio De André: without fail, they made music. We are still living in a time when my generation remembers books, not texts; albums, not dropped tracks.
Last year I took a long walk with the new album by Geese, a band much praised by people whose taste I usually respect. Some of the music was perfectly listenable. The lyrics, though, struck me as so infantile and so divorced from any recognisable reality that a second listen was out of the question.
Recycling
What I hear instead, more and more, is the past being recycled: in the music, in the lyrics, even in the names of the bands. Bob Vylan clearly took a great deal of effort to come up with. Greta Van Fleet borrowed their name, innocently enough, from an elderly woman in their Michigan home town, yet the band sounds so much like Led Zeppelin that the name starts to feel like one more quotation. Even when it is not intentional, it reads like a grim reminder of how little is left to invent.
I should be honest here, because the charge cuts both ways. Cabaret Voltaire took their name from Hugo Ball’s Dada club, which opened in Zurich in 1916. My heroes borrowed too. The difference, I think, is direction. A Sheffield trio naming itself after a Dada cabaret in the 1970s was making a declaration of intent: it pointed forward, toward noise, chance and provocation. A pun on Dylan points only back at Dylan.
I know that every generation says this, and that somewhere, in rooms I no longer go to, someone is probably having their own Gorbushka night right now. I would be glad to be proven wrong. But I keep coming back to Andrey on that platform, turning over the souvenirs he had chosen not to collect in person. The magicians were real enough that meeting them might have diminished them. I find it hard to imagine anyone today needing that kind of protection from their favourite band.
