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.

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.

I think what we tried to do lyrically, vocally and musically was to capture a sound.

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.

If you're going to change things, one of the things we had to change is to get away from that traditional model of rock music, and we were a part of that.

I think underneath it all [in the Big Funk] was a little bit of a Europeanness in it.

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.