What makes a place creative? Why is it that some big cities are sad cultural wastelands, while others have got hit records, new genres and stylistic innovation coming out of the taps?
The history of electronic music provides plenty of curious case studies, among them the post-war motorik of Düsseldorf, and the post-industrial futurism of Detroit. But arguably the strangest of them all comes from the city dubbed ‘the biggest village in England’.
Currently the UK’s tenth-largest city, depending on how you’re counting, with a population of just over half a million people (and even more trees), Sheffield punches well above its weight when it comes to tunes. From #1 synth-pop hits to underground techno classics, clattering industrial funk to accidental Britpop icons, the Steel City might have produced more brilliant music per capita than any other world metropolis.
And yet, no one has published the definitive book on the subject – until now! Daniel Dylan Wray is one of the UK’s best music writers, consistently providing subcultural ballast to the Guardian’s music section with articles on things like Welsh reggae sound systems, donk battles at the Hull funfair, and the debauchery of London’s Columbia Hotel, to name a few recents.
His new book is Groovy, Laidback and Nasty: The History of Independent Music in Sheffield, out on 7th May via White Rabbit. As well as chronicling the maverick artists, chart invaders, parties, labels, venues, and even Christian cults that shaped the city’s musical history, the book offers many insights into the social and political backdrop to its creative peak in the ‘80s, as well as the mixture of humility, tenacity and DIY attitude that keeps the scene alive and well to this day.
We talked to Dan about why Sheffield wasn’t swept away by punk rock but instead loved Kraftwerk and Wendy Carlos, how Peter Stringfellow became a crucial early mover in Sheffield’s club scene, and why there are no murals of Jarvis Cocker in the city centre. We also heard about the unlikely chain of events that birthed Warp Records, and one of the most important yet undersung ‘80s club nights, Jive Turkey.
In the introduction, Tom and Chal catch up on Taganista sightings in the world, tall geezers in small clubs, and a bewitching lighting concept at Malibu’s recent gig at London’s Earth Theatre.
We also unveil a major expansion of our Rockufiction canon of ‘music films that bend reality’, including Frank Zappa, Daft Punk, Macca and S Club 7. That’ll probably be the final update on Rockufiction, but if you have any burning additions then get them in quick…
Parish notices! Tomorrow night (Friday, 1st May) Tom’s label Local Action will be co-hosting a party with TRIPTYCH at Ormside Projects, bringing Hodge, Tom Boogizm and harpriya to one of the best small clubs in town. Tickets here.
Then on 5th May, we’re back at the Devon Ojas Listening Room at 180 Studios for an audiophile sesh with Al Wootton and Valentina Magaletti! Collaborators in Holy Tongue and live bandmates in Moin, they’ll be exploring the musical echoes between their collections and chatting to us about, we reckon, drums and dub. Sold out, once again – sign up to the 180 mailing list to get first dibs next time, or stay glued to our IG.
CR: So why this book? And why you?
DDW: Sheffield’s a difficult city to succinctly do a narrative on, because it was never one of those cities that had a genre or a scene. Manchester had Madchester, Bristol had trip-hop, various other cities end up having a neat little narrative that you can wrap around them. Sheffield’s never really had that, because it’s super eclectic and varied, so I wanted to connect the dots and tie it all together across 60-odd years and put forward the case that, despite the varying sounds of music that make up the identity of the city, there’s this really strong, independent ethos that connects the dots throughout all of them, despite the musical differences.
I also wanted to highlight stuff that I think people are unaware of. I was speaking to someone I know in the industry who manages an artist on Warp a couple of years ago, when I was talking about writing this book. They asked what it was about, I talked through a few of the beats and mentioned Warp Records and they said, ‘Oh, what do you mean by Warp?’ They had no idea that Warp’s origins were in Sheffield. I was really surprised by that, because I’ve lived in Sheffield for the last 20-odd years and it’s an obvious part of the city. Then I thought, well, Warp has been in London for the last 25 years. It was only in Sheffield for the first 10. If you’ve only worked in the music industry for the last 10 or 15 years, maybe you have no idea about that. So I realised there was a lack of outside perception about Sheffield.
As for why me: I’m here! No one else has done it. I’ve been writing about Sheffield music for years. I moved here in 2004 and I’ve been writing for various publications and doing various bits and pieces. I realised, well, if I just keep writing these articles, I may as well go further and write the book and tell the history of contemporary music in the city.
CR: Where did you grow up?
DDW: I grew up in a little market town in East Yorkshire called Driffield, which isn’t that far, it’s like two hours on the train, but it’s small, isolated. There wasn’t really any culture growing up there: no gig venues, no record shop, no cinema. It’s pubs, charity shops, chippies, rugby players, violence, that kind of territory. I’ve warmed to it a bit as I’ve got older, when I go back I can see why. If you wanted a safe, quiet life to bring up your kids, you’d do it, but it was horrible to grow up there as someone who was a culture-hungry person. I felt quite malnourished growing up there.
CR: How old were you when you moved to Sheffield in 2004?
DDW: 18. I moved for university.
CR: So a lot of this book takes place long before you were involved in this scene. Something I’d like to get across to any of our non-UK listeners, or indeed UK listeners who don’t necessarily know this, is that the phrase ‘Made in Sheffield’ carries its own specific historical meaning. What do you think we need to know about Sheffield first, just to grasp what kind of city this is?
DDW: Sheffield was most famous and significant for a long period as a pioneer of the steel industry. The ‘Made in Sheffield’ stamp you’re talking about would literally be embossed on knives, cutlery and so on that would be sent all over the world and it was a real mark of quality.
It was a fundamentally working-class town. At the time there were a lot of little villages that have now been engulfed by the city and you would have communities based around steel. It’s also a mining city, so coal and steel are the things it was primarily known for for a long, long time.
Then you have this switch-over, where you have the decline of those industries and the gutting of the spaces those things were used in. A different type of making comes in, a lot of people take over those dilapidated spaces, because they’re rotten and they’re cheap and they’re affordable, and they go in there and make music and throw parties. So that ‘Made in Sheffield’ thing: there’s always been a real pride of making in the city. I think that attitude has carried through into the music.
The reason I wanted to write the book was because Sheffield hasn’t been documented all that much and a big part of that is because it’s got this huge ingrained humility about it. It’s not cool to brag in Sheffield. You don’t crow, you don’t shout about yourself. A big part of that is because it’s got this really longstanding working-class history of making things. The pride is in the work, it’s not in the talking about the work. Before it became known as a city of futurist pop, which I think is probably a fair thing to call it, it was a manufacturing city. It played significant roles in the wars for defence and arms manufacture. Prior to that, coal and steel were the things it was primarily known for, before culture got its way in there.
TL: I wanted to ask about that humility you reference in the book. There’s this idea that, compared to a city like Manchester which has this innate swagger, Sheffield has humility. Historically it feels like that’s been both a pro and a con for the city. Is that fair?
DDW: Yeah, massively. Fundamentally, I think it’s a noble characteristic and trait, to not be shouting about how great you are all the time and to be focusing on the craft of your work, whatever that craft may be. But that lack of shouting about oneself, or having the ability to step up and talk about it, has had the consequence of things not being documented. There are other contributing factors as well. If you look at comparable cities like Manchester and Leeds, Sheffield’s never been a main city for media infrastructure. It’s never had people shouting about it as much. If you’ve got an ingrained humility within the citizens of the city, combined with a lack of media outlets or people writing for national titles in the same way they did for others, it becomes this self-perpetuating thing, and the more you’re seen to have to be humble and not brag.
For some people it’s been a lifelong trait that they hold on to and are very proud of. Someone like Richard Hawley, for example, is staunchly like that. That’s still his big thing: being a big head is being a dickhead. For other people, they feel it’s really held them back. I think we’re in a period at the moment with the city where there is some reflection around whether this needs to change, whether maybe this has held us back. Maybe the reason we’re not being celebrated and championed or recognised as much as other cities is because of that.
TL: We’re going to focus mostly on the ‘70s onwards, but I do think we have to take a moment for a figure who crops up throughout the ‘60s section of the book. Most people in the UK will primarily know Peter Stringfellow as a strip-club mogul, as well as a tabloid fixture throughout the ‘90s. But one of the first things I learnt from this book is that he was actually integral to the history of live music in Sheffield. So for the uninitiated, who is Peter Stringfellow and why is he so significant?
DDW: Stringfellow, as you say, became known as a strip-club proprietor who was permanently trapped in the 1980s in many ways. He never grew out of his bleached blonde mullet, he liked leopard print, he always had girls on his arms and went from flamboyant to gauche, all the excess. He spent the final years of his life campaigning for UKIP and stuff. Not a great reputation, certainly not one that anyone would associate with anything of meaningful culture, but during his early days in Sheffield, in the early 1960s, he was a hot-shot carpet salesman in his early 20s.
He thought he’d found a loophole in the stock-taking system, or lack thereof, and started flogging carpets out of the warehouse on the side for extra dough. His boss got wise to him, set up a sting, he got caught and much to his own surprise he got arrested and imprisoned. He did a few months in Armley prison in Leeds, which was a Victorian-era prison, so it scared the hell out of him. He had a really horrible, traumatising time. When he came out in the ‘60s, if you were a respectable employer and a young man turned up with a criminal record on his CV, he couldn’t get employed. He had gone for an interview to drive a band around, he didn’t get it, but his friend did and through this friend he realised that these bands, when they go around and play, can make a little bit of dough.
He started putting on shows in Sheffield. The first one was in a church hall that he renamed the Black Cat Club. He drew a homemade sign and booked some local acts. But he had his big breakthrough when he’d read about this upcoming Scouse band, the Beatles. He booked them early, just as they were about to break, from his mum’s payphone on the council estate that she lived on. He got them just as Beatlemania hit.
He ended up taking on this club in a residential former mining village in Sheffield called the Mojo Club, or the King Mojo Club, in Pitsmoor. For three years he was a really vital promoter. He brought in Ike and Tina Turner, Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Stevie Wonder, Otis Redding. He was a respected Northern Soul DJ. He was one of the earliest people in the UK to throw all-night Northern Soul parties, just after the Twisted Wheel in Manchester, but years before Wigan Casino. It was a bit of an anything-goes – no booze, just coffee, so he had loads of kids on pep pills and whatnot.
It was also quite liberal. He became known for being really into having sex with lots of people from quite an early age, that was already there. The club started getting loads of complaints because there were condom wrappers all over the car park, so it was a quite wild club, both in terms of what you could get away with and in terms of the music they were bringing into this converted ballroom dancing place in residential Sheffield. The city at that point had not really seen anything like it. It went all downhill pretty swiftly from there, but he’s on record as it being the greatest years of his life. He played a really vital role for a few years in Sheffield. Without him, the city would have not seen most of those acts that came in.
TL: I have to ask, did you buy his autobiography?
DDW: Not only did I buy it, I read it. Which I would not recommend.
TL: I just checked – it’s currently going for £3.49.
DDW: Some of it’s bleak, to be honest. You do start to question his motivations for having a club around this period. It wasn’t all just culture, it was a very useful place to have a lot of young women around.
TL: Moving on to the ‘70s, one of the most interesting aspects of the book to me was the idea that, while much of the UK was having its punk moment in the ‘70s, Sheffield just wasn’t that bothered about the Sex Pistols or The Clash. Musicians in the city were actually much more influenced by Kraftwerk, and Brian Eno’s work with Roxy Music and David Bowie.
If there’s a Sheffield equivalent of the famous Sex Pistols Manchester gig, where everyone who attended allegedly formed a band, it seems to be this Kraftwerk show in 1976 which many of the city’s key musicians attended. So why did Sheffield reject punk rock in the ‘70s and fall for electronic artists instead?
DDW: One argument to be made is that there was this very important thing that took place in Sheffield in the mid-’70s called Meatwhistle, which was a youth theatre group. It was initially only meant to be for one summer, but it lasted [several years]. Future members of the Human League, Heaven 17 and Clock DVA were all members. It was a place where young kids were encouraged to experiment with performance art, Dadaism. They formed bands. One band they formed was called Musical Vomit, which was silly, over-the-top performance art, like Alice Cooper, shock-rock kind of stuff.
Speaking to a lot of those people who then left that and immediately wanted to go into making electronic music, who were hugely influenced by early Kraftwerk and Eno-era Roxy Music, I think when punk was on the horizon they felt like, oh, we did all that. We already did the dressing-up and being provocative and making noise and getting bottled offstage.
The Sex Pistols show at the Free Trade Hall in 1976 in Manchester, which people always go on about, was this catalyst for the next generation of musicians in Manchester. The same tour came to Sheffield a couple of months later. If anything, it was a more prestigious bill, because it had The Clash on it. It was The Clash’s first ever gig anywhere, they were on that bill. So if anything that was the punk-royalty gig of gigs to go to, but I spoke to loads of people at that gig and it was just a shrug of the shoulders. People weren’t bothered.
The spirit of punk was really picked up on, this idea of doing it yourself, because there was so little in Sheffield at the time. There were very, very few venues. There were certainly no recording studios. There was no one really saying, hey, come and have a go, other than the aforementioned Meatwhistle. That idea of ‘anyone can do it,’ all the cliched stuff around punk, really hit home, but no one wanted to mirror that music at all. Everyone immediately thought it sounded dated, that seemed to be the universal feeling.
I don’t know why it resonated so deeply, but Wendy Carlos’s soundtrack for A Clockwork Orange was huge in Sheffield, as well as [Anthony] Burgess’s work in general. Whether that was because at that time you had a lot of post-war brutalist architecture in Sheffield, built in the 1960s, and there was this feeling for a lot of young people that it was quite futuristic. There was a deep love of sci-fi among these guys, so there was this combination of being really influenced by electronic sounds, being in this blocky, urban, futuristic environment and a love of sci-fi. There was just this inherent desire to get to the next thing. They wanted to bypass punk.
CR: Once you get to roughly 1980, there’s so much going on. There’s no distinct sound or scene as such, there’s definitely more eclecticism than there is any kind of tribal look or sound. But you could say that on one hand there is this gritty, harsh synth sound coming through bands like Cabaret Voltaire, chiefly, but also Clock DVA and bands who are exploring a funky industrial sound. Then there’s this other branch, led by the later Human League and ABC, which is all glossy pop escapism.
You make it clear in the book that each of these approaches are in some ways a response to the fabric of daily life in Sheffield. So what can you tell us about how this relatively small town could produce such variety within quite a small scene?
DDW: ABC splintered out of Vice Versa – ABC was Vice Versa, really. Vice Versa started without Martin Fry on vocals, then they found out he could sing, which also coincided with them having a bit of a breakthrough. There was a guy called Disco John who had a really important impact on them. He ran some gigs and club nights in a place called The Blitz in Sheffield at the time. He was really into mutant disco from New York and would get all this stuff imported, and those guys really took to that. They lived in this condemned house in a suburban part of the city called Crookes, so they would be rehearsing in the room while Disco John was preparing his DJ sets, playing all this ZÉ Records, mutant funk-type stuff. They loved James Chance and all that stuff, so that was seeping in. There was a desire for them to start getting a bit more funky through the inherited New York sounds.
When I spoke to Stephen Singleton, who was in Vice Versa and ABC, he remembered this moment. I think it was New Year’s Eve 1979, he was at a party with a lot of the Sheffield crew, and the Clock DVA lot at that time were pretty druggy. They were quite naughty boys, there were a lot of opiates involved and sadly they lost one of their key members in ‘81 due to a drug overdose, so it got a bit nasty. [Singleton] was saying he just remembers being around this dark, dingy thing, with needles floating around, and it was an epiphany moment for him: I’m turning my back on this dark, synthy stuff.
There’s a quote from Martin Fry in the book that’s like, ‘We might have been living on Barber Road,’ which is a street in Crookes, ‘but we were dreaming of Vegas.’ For them, it went one of two ways. Either you embraced the grittiness, embraced the industrial surroundings, the doom and gloom, and you leaned into that and made music that was somehow emblematic of that and tonally representative of it – or you pushed in the other direction and went to create something different.
Then, obviously, with the Human League going in that direction, there was a split in the group, where you’ve got founding members Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh going in one direction to form Heaven 17, and vice versa with Phil and Susan going in the other direction. There was always a desire to go more poppy there because that had been the big thing. The Human League in the early days were deemed a little bit of a failure, really. You listen to ‘Being Boiled’ and it feels like this line-in-the-sand moment, this dark, bubbling, beautiful touchstone moment of futuristic electronic music, but the first couple of albums didn’t do super well. They had that weird period where they became the men to do more disco stuff, then Gary Numan jumped the queue.
There was a little identity crisis for a bit. Without getting too much into the more boring, prosaic stuff, there were huge technological leaps around then in terms of equipment that was coming in that could change the sounds, like Linn drum machines. That opened up a more kaleidoscopic musical palette for some people.
CR: If we could think about the ‘80s in Sheffield and how you get from the moment you were just describing to the end of the decade, with Warp Records, a few things happen that could easily have meant that Warp never even came about. There’s a lot of quite circumstantial, almost accidental events leading up to the label starting.
First of all, around 1982, a few of these synth bands actually got really successful – almost too successful, including the Human League, who have gone very pop. They’ve got the girls in, they’ve had a number one. Then, because everything is just moving so fast in this era, within a couple of years there’s a backlash. You describe this kind of lull in the ‘80s where all of that energy seems to get a bit scattered. There’s more drugs. You mentioned the miners’ strikes are going on, the Battle of Orgreave – there’s some serious social and political unrest.
If we’re going to understand the circumstances that produced Warp Records, I think we have to start with this band called Chakk, who are not one of the best-known bands from Sheffield, but I think are a really crucial connecting node in this story that gets us to bleep techno. So what do we need to know about Chakk and the connections that they had in the city?
DDW: Chakk are not a household name by any means, but they’re massively important and integral to the story of Sheffield music. Chakk were this industrial funk band, definitely inspired by Cabaret Voltaire. Certain members moved to Sheffield because of Cabaret Voltaire, hearing them on John Peel and thinking, this feels like a cool city to go to. There was a little cluster of groups doing this, including another one called Hula, all doing this industrial funk stuff.
Chakk benefited from the fact that their manager was a guy called Amrik Rai, who wrote for NME at the time and so could basically write their own press and was a one-man hype machine. He got lots of labels very excited and they had loads of money offers coming in. They did a big six-figure deal with RCA Records and they made this really crucial step, which I think was a catalyst moment in the history of Sheffield music. They said, ‘Give us money to build a studio in Sheffield’ – because there was no major studio in Sheffield at this point. ‘Give us money to build our own thing here, rather than sending us down to London and spending all this money on a producer and hotels,’ which was your go-to option if you were a regional band at the time.
They built a studio called FON above an old karate studio in a place called the Wicker, where Jarvis Cocker lived in poverty nearby for a bit – which is quite a funny period of his life, where he’s next door to some warring table-tennis teams who are taking shits outside each other’s doors to get back at one another.
Chakk were their own labourers, they hand-built it, and it was the first 24-track studio in Sheffield. FON, or ‘Fuck Off Nazis,’ was taken from a piece of graffiti that was prevalent in the city at the time. Chakk ended up becoming a little bit of a failure, really. They didn’t get their record right. They had to work with multiple producers and all this hype never really amounted to anything, but what they were left with was this studio that they now had ownership and control over. They struggled at first because there was this idea of, why the hell would anyone come to Sheffield to record? There were a few duds. There was an early house-pop track called ‘House Arrest’ by Krush that was a hit. They did stuff with Pop Will Eat Itself and the Funky Worm. They started to have a bit of momentum and get people coming in.
Crucially, they had a young producer working there who they hired on a young apprenticeship scheme called Rob Gordon, who was a total technology whiz. He’d been building doorbells since he was a kid. He was building preamps for all the sound system crews in Sheffield and he knew the studio inside out before he’d even seen it. Rob Gordon was one of the founding members of Warp and one of the three members of Forgemasters, who wrote ‘Track With No Name,’ which is the first release on Warp in ‘89.
FON Studios then became the FON record shop, and that’s where Rob and Steve, who founded Warp, started working. So through the combination of the producers working there, the people working in the shop and the realisation that you can do something like this in Sheffield – that’s the genesis of Warp. Without FON, without Chakk, I’m not sure there is a Warp. There’s a very solid connection between those two things, which I don’t think is all that well known or talked about.
Warp’s often spoken about as a bolt out of the blue, which in some instances it was. It was the right time, right place. But it was definitely due to what happened in ‘85 with FON. 1985 was also the year that Jive Turkey started. Jive Turkey was a seminal nightclub in Sheffield. It ran ‘85 to ‘92 and was a very early club, along with the Garage in Nottingham, for important house and techno records, alongside playing electro and street soul. It’s spoken about with a degree of reverence and evangelism in the same way that the Hacienda is – it was a really seminal club. In that period you had FON Records, then people started to make music in the city which was being road-tested at Jive Turkey. It was this perfect storm of all those things going on that led to that.
TL: There’s another connection there with Warp, because Winston Hazel, who was one of the founders and residents at Jive Turkey, is also in Forgemasters. Why was it such a special and significant night?
DDW: When it started, it was in a club which subsequently got renamed to Occasions. It was in a seedy upstairs room that was pretty dead at first, not many people went. Parrot – who’s also known as Crooked Man, and one half of Sweet Exorcist with Richard Kirk, and was also in All Seeing I and is a really important Sheffield figure who features a fair bit in the book – was one of the DJs there. But it wasn’t really until Winston joined that a kind of alchemy formed and it really took off.
Parrot’s white, Winston’s Black, and Sheffield’s nightlife scene at this period of time was segregated, essentially. There were a lot of racist door policies in the city and there wasn’t a huge amount of cultural mixing going on at that point. It created this inclusive space before people spoke about inclusivity in those terms, and it immediately attracted a genuinely diverse mix of people, Black and white, men and women, as well as music: electro, hip-hop, a lot of early funk and soul. Jive Turkey is a reference to an Ohio Players track.
Winston was the import buyer at the FON record shop which then became Warp, so he was getting stuff in really early. It very quickly became literally the first place that you would hear imported stuff. It stayed at this venue for a few years, then around ‘88 it moved to the City Hall Ballroom. There’s a little documentary online called Behind the Beat that captures a bit of that.
It was a big place for dancers, too. There were a lot of jazz dancers there that would take prominence on the dance floor. Jive Turkey became a place to road-test early Warp stuff, even before it had been pressed onto white label. People would take a DAT tape down there, so you might be hearing unreleased Nightmares on Wax or LFO. There was a genuine period where clubs like Jive Turkey and Cuba in Sheffield were literally the only places in the world where you were hearing this music, which I think it’s fair to say has become known as being game-changing.
Not only was it importing all this fresh sound that was blowing people’s minds, with a really rich palette of stuff from the past, but there was also this homegrown local sound that people were hearing for the first time, which people knew because the DJs were involved with it. Parrot was one half of Sweet Exorcist and one of the most seminal bleep anthems was ‘Testone.’
There’s a fun story in the book, where Jarvis Cocker hears it there for the first time, has his mind blown and he ends up going on to direct the video for that. Things like that are a nice little story of the overlap there, because no one in a million years would associate ‘80s Pulp, when they’re in their more whimsical indie phase, with bleep techno. There’s a quote, I think it’s from Parrot, about the first time he saw Jarvis: ‘he was off his tits in the tiniest denim shorts I’d ever seen on a man before, and I knew I liked him then and there.’
So Jive Turkey was really seminal and important for a lot of people. Busloads of people would come over from other towns and cities. In that very typical Sheffield way, as it turned into the early ‘90s, and DJs started getting put on podiums and there was the real celebration of DJ culture, [at Jive Turkey] they DJed in a broom cupboard instead. They didn’t even see the audience and the audience couldn’t see them, they just played their tunes from there. Speaking to Parrot, he was like, ‘I loved that broom cupboard, that was the happiest I’ve ever been anywhere.’
I think there’s something emblematic about that attitude: the clubs are for dancers, they’re not for DJs. He hated all of that superstar DJ stuff and he very quickly bounced out of that. That kind of sums up something attitudinal about Sheffield at the time: not only do you not want to be on the podium receiving praise for what you do, even though you’ve changed loads of people’s lives, but you’re happiest when you’re locked in a windowless room, DJing off breeze blocks in a broom cupboard.
CR: So you’ve got Parrot and Winston Hazel DJing. We’ve just mentioned bleep, but before that they’re playing imported house, electro, this street soul sound and jazz funk and British stuff. There’s a mention of Luke Una going there and having his mind blown by those really early Chicago house records.
But Parrot remembers that around 1990, indie kids on E started flooding the club. It’s a turning point in British dance music history, and obviously had a huge effect on the Hacienda, which had been a largely Black audience throughout most of the ‘80s. But it seems as if the acid house moment was not necessarily a great thing for the scene that was coalescing around Jive Turkey.
DDW: Both Winston and Parrot, in their words, say that ecstasy killed it. From Winston’s point of view, he was saying he felt that the origins of house and techno had their roots in jazz and soul, there was a lineage there. When you have a bunch of people who take a pill for the first time, who are indie kids or whatever, and they don’t have any understanding or appreciation of that lineage and they come to the club, they just want the hard, fast dance stuff. When the slower soul stuff would play, there was an impatience there, or a lack of respect. That created a vibe that began to push away some of the Black punters, who tended to be the ones that were the most skilled dancers, the jazz funk dancers.
So for them it’s an interesting antidote to the whole ‘ecstasy uniting everyone’ narrative that we so commonly hear. I’m sure that still exists. There would have been warring football fans in there who were placated and weren’t fighting. But from their point of view, they felt that ecstasy ruined it. They kind of accepted that the game was up, things were moving on, the tunes were getting harder and faster, the crowds were getting younger, and they accepted it, bowed out. But there was also some frustration and resentment there. They held on as long as they could, but they felt that it killed what they had created, and it certainly ruined the racial mix of the dance floor that they had.
Parrot says there was one night where he just looked out and it was just shirtless white lads, and he was like, this isn’t what it’s about, this isn’t what we signed up for. They sort of accepted that they were the old farts and bowed out. They exist as a counter-narrative.
I think they both got involved [in E], had a little dabble. They’re not vehemently anti-ecstasy, but the broader culture and the speed of the change of crowds that came as a result of that was, they think, a real negative influence on the scene and the harmony of the crowd at the time.
CR: Warp was also known for having a really strong visual identity. You spoke to Ian Anderson from The Designers Republic – he was quite a quote machine, actually, for a graphic designer! He had some aggressive opinions about not moving down to London. He was saying things like, ‘We targeted a hostile audience who could be disturbed by what we were doing’ – and what they were doing was graphic design. I thought there was something brilliantly uncompromising about that, with a genuine belief in the power of culture, subculture and design to actually have an effect on people.
It does also feel to me like this particular moment was when Sheffield was the most confident in its own identity. I wonder if this moment might have come earlier if Sheffield had had a functioning independent label of its own akin to Factory Records in Manchester, or Creation, Rough Trade, these bigger indie labels – because that does seem to be the missing part of the puzzle throughout the ‘80s.
DDW: Totally. I spoke to Richard Kirk from Cabaret Voltaire a few times before he died and I remember talking to him about the absence of the equivalent of a Factory, or a Zoo Records in Liverpool, or a Fast Product in Edinburgh, which ended up being the first label to put out the Human League. There was nothing locally. He said they would just send all their demos to labels in London and the unifying word between all of the rejection letters would just be ‘unfortunately.’ They were so despondent and desperate that they were looking to borrow money from local gangsters just to fund their records.
So around that time, late ‘70s, early ‘80s, had there been some sort of local equivalent, maybe something could have jump-started the identity of the city culturally a little bit earlier, because there was no centralised home for it, or a mouthpiece like Tony Wilson or Bill Drummond. Mute and Rough Trade formed around that time, there were loads of very strong identity-driven labels that popped up all around the UK, often identity based on genre or region. Sheffield didn’t get that until later.
CR: Pulp get a mention every 20 pages or so in the book–
TL: They’re the ever-presents, in many ways.
CR: Yeah, you regularly go back to see what Jarvis Cocker is up to – and he’s usually not doing that well. It’s amazing, the dogged determination, or stubbornness, whatever it is, that kept them going for about 12 years before they eventually really broke through.
DDW: Between their first gig and His ‘n’ Hers in ‘92, and ‘Babies’, which is the breakthrough, it’s 12 years. Dogged determination is right. Pulp has always been synonymous with being a ‘90s band, and the story is always about the Stone Roses dropping out of Glastonbury, this heroic moment, then Britpop, Different Class – that is the narrative. I don’t know how well known this earlier period is, though – which, as you say, is struggle, strife, identity crisis, horrible negative reviews, losing members to cults. It was a slog.
Real credit to them that they persevered for as long as they did, because they had a really difficult time. They had this period where they recorded a demo in 1980, when they were still all teenagers in school, and they got their first John Peel session. Jarvis was convinced he was going to be a pop star. It was 12 years until he did his next John Peel session. There was this little flash of flame as teenagers in 1980, then a decade of crisis almost.
CR: How much of that is down to the band’s and Jarvis’s dedication, and how much do you think Sheffield itself, the way that the city functioned as a music city, contributed to them being able to carry on, or having the will?
DDW: It’s a mix of both. The fact that they could exist as a band, as unemployed creatives, is really significant. The fact that they could subsist on the dole and housing benefit. I’m sure Jarvis got money from the Young Enterprise Scheme that was around at the time. That was probably a significant factor for them continuing to be able to exist. Then again, it probably drew them back to some extent.
Pulp are a fascinating band in as much as they are absolutely the byproduct of Sheffield. The ethos and the mentality and the attitude and the subject matter very much determined who they are as a group, but they also needed to leave the city in order to make it. They’re byproducts of it, but they’re also an example of how much there was a ceiling there at the time. It was a tough time to be a young weirdo in the city.
CR: Getting into the 2000s, the rebirth in indie music follows two quite distinct strands, which really shows how much the city has changed since the ‘80s – you’ve basically got synth weirdos and indie lads, and it’s the indie lads who end up getting all the press attention, during the Conor McNicholas-edited era of the NME. On the synth weirdos side you’ve got the great Pink Grease, the Long Blondes, quite a lot of bands who really barely made it out of Sheffield but are sort of cult bands.
Then you’ve got the Arctic Monkeys, a huge, world-dominating band, and many other bands who were in their slipstream at the time – or not, in fact. There’s this band called Milburn, who were actually around slightly before the Arctic Monkeys. They were very, very young, just like the Arctics were.
There’s this slightly mind-boggling quote that I really had to pause over by Joe Carnall from Milburn, who said: ‘At that time, no one in north Sheffield from working-class areas would be playing a synth. A synth to me would have been a middle-class instrument, because who knows piano? You kick a ball about and you can play guitar, but you don’t have a piano in your house. For us it was about authenticity and growing up, being good at your instrument.’
I’m interested to think about how much life, not just in Sheffield but in the UK generally, must have changed for somebody to think that. There’s the amazing Phil Oakey quote as well, where he’s laughing at these punk bands for saying, ‘All you need is three chords and you can start a band,’ and he’s like, ‘Well, if you get a synth, you only need one note.’ He’s seeing synths as the most basic way for absolutely anyone with no training at all to make music – but there’s this really different attitude that’s caught hold in the 2000s. How do you read that?
DDW: [Joe Carnell] is very aware of the naivety and borderline stupidity of the comments there, because obviously there’s no real correlation between playing a piano and a synth. They were young, angry lads and they had no interest in what came before. I think there’s a natural tendency for all generations to push back against the most recent preceding one – that everything the one that did before you is a bit lame. I don’t know how widely accepted his views were, but there were a lot of Sheffield bands that picked up on that.
There was definitely this very tribal, arty crew versus traditional indie lad dynamic. I don’t know how much of that was also a class thing, because there was a real geographical divide in the city at the time. A lot of those groups are from north Sheffield, which is almost a clique within itself, so I don’t know if it was just suspicion of outsiders, rather than him thinking about it as coming from a background where you’ve had piano lessons, as just cheating. There were definitely a lot more conversations around authenticity at that time, and authenticity always boiled down to white blokes with guitars, right?
CR: The NME fuelled that for sure. I look back at that era and the artists they chose to amplify at the expense of some others is crackers, in retrospect.
I also wondered if there was any sense of the lineage having broken down in some way, because something that’s clear from your stories from the ‘70s, ‘80s, is that there’s space. It’s someone’s studio or rehearsal room, then it’s someone else’s, then they go to this place and someone else uses that place. There’s this overlapping scene of bands taking over certain areas. Maybe it’s about having less available derelict industrial space, or about the city changing and not being quite so welcoming to young people who just need a room to rehearse in?
DDW: But there was still plenty of that going on at the time. There was a lot of cheap rehearsal space available in old industrial buildings. A lot of the groups in the early 2000s would have been just renting spaces for hours at a time to do their thing. But on the flip side, a lot of the lineage of the synth-y, sleazy, trashy, arty pop groups could be much more keenly felt at that time. This was around the time of Kings Have Long Arms, which features Adrian Flanagan, who’s subsequently gone into being in groups like Moonlandingz and the Eccentronic Research Council with Maxine Peake. He was collaborating with Phil Oakey on a song called ‘Rock and Roll is Dead’ and pushing back on that.
Mark Fell at this time did a rework of the Human League’s Travelogue in its entirety, in a very Mark Fell way. It was completely unrecognisable. There was definitely this period in the early 2000s, boosted by the whole electroclash mash-up thing and Ladytron starting to cover the Human League, where there was this nod-of-the-head tribute to that synthy Sheffield.
But I think [the rejection of synths] was more due to suburban teenagers hearing imported American guitar music like the Strokes and the White Stripes, and feeling like that was a ground-zero moment. Why would you be bothered about the music your dad was into when you’ve got this thing coming at you?
CR: I’m probably placing way too much store in the words of the 16-year-old guitarist from Milburn! But it’s interesting thinking about that particular era, because some of the really great music that came out of Sheffield then is indebted to that history and knows it very well. It’s not just musically, it’s an attitude. There’s an irreverence and a slightly gender-bending attitude. It’s wild, and it’s meant to be a little bit in your face. Those are two very different stories of Sheffield music at that time.
DDW: There was, as you may remember, that ridiculous attempt by the NME to coin ‘New Yorkshire’ as a genre.
CR: Bought that issue.
DDW: They called it the most exciting sound in the world at the time. It was really this lumping together of incredibly disparate groups that had nothing in common personality-wise or music-wise. Not only was there a geographical divide in Sheffield between some of these groups, there was supposedly a little bit of a rift at the photo shoot. It was a bitchy time for music. There was also a geographical divide that existed against the Leeds groups, because New Yorkshire was Leeds, Wakefield and Sheffield, broadly speaking. There was a real resentment from the Sheffield groups being lumped in with the Leeds lot. This is more rooted in football tradition, which I don’t really have the shared knowledge and understanding of.
It was a very tribal time, you were defined as much by the bands that you hated as much as by the ones that you loved. When you’re young and you’re full of it, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. In hindsight, when you get a bit older, you realise that tunnel vision just shut you off from loads of interesting stuff that you could have been exploring.
TL: As the book goes through the 2010s and approaches the modern day you find plenty to write about, but it doesn’t feel as distinct and maybe joined up as it has been in previous decades. How do you explain that? Why do you think that is? More importantly, do you think an era like the ‘80s in Sheffield could ever happen again?
DDW: I did an interview earlier today, actually, and the 2010s came up. I’m starting to wonder if I’ve done them a little bit dirty. The 2010s was a really interesting period. In Sheffield, every decade from the ‘60s onwards has had a breakout success story, a major thing that you can centre a story around and an artist that defines the city in some way. That’s one of the really interesting things about Sheffield music history, most cities don’t have a huge, era-defining global success story every decade for five decades in a row, and Sheffield kind of did. In the 2010s, it didn’t.
I think the 2010s is actually one of the most interesting periods in the city, because it reduces to a simmer. Everything goes really underground, it spreads out, it’s really eclectic, really healthy, really vibrant. It was also one of those chapters where I was really wary, because there isn’t a central story that defines the city and I didn’t want this book to ever feel like it was just an encyclopaedia. It was a difficult one to navigate, because the story just spreads and gets more eclectic.
I didn’t want to write a book for Sheffield heads, I wanted this to be something that people could pick up and feel was quite pacey and if you didn’t have much of an interest in Sheffield music you could hopefully still feel attached to it. So in a way it’s a shame, because I would have loved to have gone into more detail there, because there was loads of great stuff that happened in the city.
As for whether something like the ‘80s can happen again, the spirit is there, the intention is there, the creativity is there, it’s always there. I think the access is very different though. Having access to cheap, affordable space, being able to live on the dole, having access to housing benefits. So many of the pioneering artists that we talk about and celebrate as ambassadors of Sheffield were beneficiaries of dole culture, of housing benefits and of having a period to figure out what they wanted to do and experiment and fail and have a gestation period as a young creative. Obviously there’s economic pressure put on young people now in major cities. Thankfully Sheffield isn’t as crazy as London or Manchester, there’s a little bit of breathing room there, but you still need to pull in a decent amount of dough each month just to make the basics.
The economic and social circumstances of all cities have changed so significantly since the ‘80s that I don’t think it could happen on the same terms, but there’s plenty enough to be optimistic about. There’s really amazing community engagement in Sheffield on the grassroots network at the moment. This isn’t particularly No Tags-centric, but I think it’s emblematic of where Sheffield is at, broadly, culturally. There’s a punk and hardcore metal venue called The Lughole in Sheffield, a DIY spot, that got stung with a backdated business rates bill of £10,000, and it was going to sink them overnight. They were panicking, they put out a GoFundMe and in less than 24 hours they had raised it, plus a few grand on top. Even though things on a bigger scale can often feel a bit bleak, I see little things like that and I think, that’s kind of magic.
That deeply ingrained, do-it-yourself ethos that’s been in Sheffield from the off, that really staunchly independent attitude, still really exists. It might not go on to have the same level of commercial success and it might not operate in the same way, but it’s definitely there. It’s the same with [member-led venue] Gut Level, where I met you guys. They’ve put out fundraisers in the past and the speed at which they’ve raised their target shows that the community that’s there wants to support these places and really values them and what they contribute to the city. That makes me think the people are there, the creatives, the spirit, the energy is there, but maybe not always the means.
CR: It’s not my ideal situation, but I think there’s a kind of mindset shift around this problem towards basically a mutual aid mindset, a DIY mindset. This idea of keeping things small, or just being realistic that things probably will be small, and you’re doing your best to keep them alive and nurture them for the people that actually need them. That is very different to what some of the characters in this book had in the ‘70s and ‘80s. On one hand it was amazing, because they had a welfare state to support them – but no one should overly romanticise Sheffield in the early ‘80s!
DDW: It would have been a really hard place to live.
CR: I think it’s Parrot who says in the book, ‘I always think we were the first working-class generation that were allowed to be bohemians, because the state supported us.’ Historically, that is a blip. It may be that that never happens again, because it’s not just about the state choosing to support you, it’s a whole stack of historic global economic factors, including the history of post-imperial Britain and how it spent its money after the war, which enabled that to happen.
To follow on from what you’re saying, it’s easy to be disheartened with the situation, but you have to press on. Then you realise that actually people can do quite a lot of things together on a fairly DIY basis. As you say, saving a punk venue in 24 hours, without even a panic. I think there’s a lot to think about. I initially finished the book and just thought, oh my god, what’s the point! But it’s good to hear you say that.
DDW: Yeah, I’m feeling pretty good about it. There’s a bunch of very determined, creative, passionate people in the city, as there always have been. I’m feeling broadly positive. Statistically, you don’t want to bury your head in the sand about these things. It’s a tricky time. But anecdotally, on the ground, there’s a lot of positivity to lock into and amazing work being done by really impassioned people.
CR: And finally, what film should we watch?
DDW: I’m gonna go with a Sheffield one, is that alright?
CR: I think you have to.
DWW: I’m gonna pick a documentary called Tales From A Hard City. It’s a film I cannot recommend enough, it’s very, very cult and you’re not gonna find it on any streaming services – however you can find it in full on Vimeo. It’s a 1995 film, an amazing documentary that you would almost think is scripted. It could not be more mid-’90s Sheffield, if you want an idea of where the city was at. It features a bunch of people who were in a transitional period of their life –trying to make it, in some ways. There’s a boxer who’s trying to make it as an actor, and as a local celebrity, going around car show rooms trying to get free cars. There’s this guy called Wayne who’s like this media mogul, this guy called Glen who’s a petty thief who wants to make it as a hip-hop singer – and it’s just this story of their interlinking lives.
It’s funny, it’s sad, it’s touching, it’s beautiful – people who love this film really love it. Andy Votel, Badly Drawn Boy and all that Manchester Twisted Nerve lot were such hardcore fans that they used to hire out cinemas to get people to watch it. They even wrote to the director to get VHS tapes of the off-cuts. Mogwai programmed it as part of their ATP Festival – so yeah, people who know this film really love it.
