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.

We were responding to a period in the 70s when we started that it was very much you cannot be involved in music unless you studied to do music.

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.

We were working in entertainment, in the music industry, with popular music, it was important, but it was something that we also felt was a responsibility.

We were fortunate at that time we were working with Virgin, and with Flood, probably more well-known as Brian Eno's engineer now and U2's producer, etc. Even though we weren't working in a strictly popular music area, which was great, we were lucky enough to work with people who were on the cusp of those sort 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.