Cabaret Voltaire – Gazelle Twin – Birmingham Live Review

Cabaret Voltaire – Gazelle Twin – Birmingham Town Hall – Saturday 10th October 2026

For fifty three years Cabaret Voltaire have been creating music, travelling, as their 2014 compilation was titled from electropunk to technopop. All of it worth listening and dancing to. So how do you go about celebrating that amount of music on a final tour? Easy, well it looked easy from where I was sitting anyway, you play a bit of all of it, ‘From the arse to the nose’ as was remarked from the stage.

The venue is Birmingham Town Hall and yes, it’s posh. Nice seats, very nice architecture and brilliant sound. I’m surrounded by people of a certain age, yes there are youngsters but in the majority are old people creaking and drinking pints. I class myself as one of these, except the pints, I’m driving.

Whatever genius got Gazelle Twin to support deserves a pay rise. The electronic music stops, the lights go out and she walks to the front of an empty stage bar, a table of electronics and a keyboard, both of which she ignores. Synths rise, beats rumble out of bass sounds and she starts to sing. Where do I go with her voice? It’s captivating, strong and wild. It sounds raw and ancient and gets progressively louder as the music grinds on. It feels feral in here. There’s a flickering light behind her and the voice turns harsher, her panting and breathing become the rhythm of the music and it sounds terrifying.

The electronic sound turns weirder, there’s synths growing and a low bass note. The light is green and as it floods the stage the music turns threatening and pagan to match it. Gazelle Twin is alone and almost looks lost out in the middle of the stage, but then it sounds like she is channeling demons. She provides a pathway for fear and holds the crowd mesmerised.

She plays recorder as synths sparkle behind her and as the electronic rises it links the ancient to the modern. A warning though, if you fancy catching Gazelle Twin, this feels like horror to me, folk horror in music and this sound is threatening and dark. The sheer power of the vocal is breathtaking, dissonant and brilliant.

The sound turns weird, she stands with two microphones, one turns her voice into a strange London accent, male London accent. The other her usual voice, the former threatens the latter as the synths shudder and echo the words. It’s two vocal parts sung by one person and it feels both brilliant and wrong. A heartbeat bass hum gets louder and louder to a slow beautiful piece of music and her vocal starts to glitch and lose itself. The sound switches to odd piano notes and another high strong vocal, she seems lost and alone suddenly in the middle of the stage as the screen behind her echoes the performance backwards getting smaller. It shows off her vocal again, it’s perfect.

It switches to a fast drum, fast talking and an industrial feel, it’s stronger and angrier until it’s overtaken by her vocal wail. It turns weird again and the strings sound like the Psycho soundtrack, stabbing at us, hard with another messed up vocal. She pants again and her breath becomes the song, it’s channeling folk horror into all of us as it turns disturbing once more. Then just stops. She walks away. What a set.

I meet the Photographer at the bar, he never made it to the seat, speak to old friends and chill until we get a five minute warning over the speakers in the bar that the performance will resume in five minutes, I told you it was posh.

Cabaret Voltaire are coming on and the place is full. Look around, there are members of Birmingham bands all over the place. The screen flashes a huge CV logo and industrial beats like a slow hammer falling echo around the building. There are four of them on stage, one behind a table of electronic wonderfulness, two behind synths and one standing at drum pads. They go straight into beats, smart synths and drones, a great big sound and luscious groove especially when the singer steps away from the synths and takes the microphone to sing. He picks up a bass guitar for the next song and it turns funky and with the electro playing over the beats and bass it’s a properly skewed pop song, fast and excellent. It slips into a high synth whine, low bass and wailing synths, the beat rolls over and over industrial and harsh. The music is rich and full, it’s all played live, synths, guitar, bass and the drumming is wonderful on what looks like just two pads. They switch again into synth pop, a small hollow beat and layers of synths. It’s bright and wide, wide open. The guitar and bass just add to it and it slides down towards a sleazy feel.

Older sounding beats and synths come in, wooshing sounds come over the top of and then layered again the guitar plays. Weirdo electronic sounds and industrial beats, there’s a hard punk edge to it, hard and edgy. They play a song about Sheffield ‘We’re going to take you down the steelworks’ it’s an industrial, like the steelworks rhythm and synths creating texture while black and white photos of Sheffield fill the screen behind them, factories and streets, excellent soundscapes. It is repetitive and a massive sound.

Beat poetry rings out over hard beats, with a poppy synth tune over the top of it again, a perfect slice of post punk concrete thinking. He gives a word to Trump and they go on with hard industrial beats and hard synths, angry and low, its industrial synth groove is low and rumbling.

What we are getting here is the distillation of fifty three years of this band, it doesn’t matter what style of music they are creating or whether they play exactly what we expect, they are showing us exactly how to do this electronic music thing we have come to experience. This may be our last chance to see them and they are making the most of it.

Hard beats continue and the electronic noise is deep and rich. Layers of hard sound blend in and it is angry and alive. A proper old post punk spikey funk groove. The live guitar makes the sound all the more solid alongside the bass and the vocal is the icing on the cake. They stray into dance music with an edge and along with the rest of the sword I’m sucked into the projections and sound. The crowd are moving to the electronic dance music, funky guitar and bass embellish it. They finish the song, say thank you and leave the stage.

No one moves. They know this isn’t finished.

They come back. They play Nag Nag Nag, it’s glorious, there are people in front of the stage losing their shit. It’s hard. Fast and absolutely glorious. They carry on with funky punky dance music that leads into Sensoria to finish, sharp angular synths with bold beats and hard guitars. What a way to finish, they thank us and are gone. What a show, brilliant. I’m so glad we made it to see them.

–

Gazelle Twin