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“Sheffield was an ideal place to be a bohemian,” explains Martin Fry, Lamé leader, ABC, pop-soft futurists whose hymns of the synth in the early 80s crystallized the spirit of possibility of the new decade. “Ten Pence would make you cross the whole city on the bus.”
At the height of Fry's renown, it would have been almost impossible to imagine it in public transport. ABC was the counterpoint of platinum to punk nihilism. But behind their success were difficult moments that grow up in the city of southern Yorkshire, once the world capital of steel manufacturing, but at the end of the 20th century, it was in decline. As Jamie Taylor points out in his new book on Sheffield's contribution to pop music In the 1970s and early 1980s, “when stainless steel was made, the durable brilliance of beauty and perfection can blind to tension, mud and wreckage which is essential to its creation.”
London, Liverpool and Manchester dominate the history of British pop. But what Taylor calls “The Sheffield Space Age” has produced three groups that have made massive sales and international renown: the human league, Heaven 17 and ABC. “Don't You Want Me”, the 1981 single of the human league, sold 1 minute exemplary in the United States alone. Other acts of Sheffield have changed the cultural climate: the electro-industrial cabaret Voltaire was a cult success (the slacker-hero of John Hughes, Ferris Bueller, has a poster of the album of the group of 1984 Micro-phonies on his wall); Later in the decade and in the 1990s, Pulp would raise Britpop with irony and intellect.
But Taylor is less interested in days of peak than in the first years. Electrophonic studio Chronicles how the achievements of Sheffield were born in “The Shadowlands between lost industry and desperate Bohemia”.
The institutions financed by the State supported the success of Sheffield in terms of reducing Sheffield cards. Taylor explores a network of young people crossing free art colleges, libraries, theaters of young people and housing and transport strongly subsidized by a local left authority. Then there were recording studios in abandoned factories, live places and factory jobs that financed artistic visions – “Graft” is the word of Taylor. A generation of artists – Fry, Martyn Ware of Heaven 17, Phil Oakey of the Human League and Jarvis Cocker of Pulp among them – had little money, musical training or connections. They had imaginative freedom and a confluence of support.
Two resources were important. The first was an electrophonic studio, which despite its glamorous and enigmatic name was a recording installation in a suburban council house gathered by an amateur. The book devotes a lot of space to Ken Patten, its owner, a former man from the RAF and a medium -time home recording lover who, in the 1970s, organized an affordable service with remarkable ingenuity for anyone who needs a demonstration band.
The second was Meatwhistle, a theater group for young people who mixed serious plays with Dada's experimentation (Oakey and Ware were one of his elders). He organized ambitious work – Marat / said, The notoriously violent play of 1964 by Peter Weiss takes place in a mental asylum during the French Revolution,, was an early production. He also generated all kinds of anarchy. An event put in a vomit musical star, a proto-punk group spitting vegetable soup in a toilet to light. Glenn Gregory, later of Paradise 17, described Meatwhistle as “a place of freedom and pleasure … Heaven 17 satirizing yuppie lifestyles a decade later, he alludes to his lasting influence.
This is an incredibly detailed book. Do we need to know Roger Quail, drummer with clock DVA, failed to win a Talking Heads sweatshirt in a raffle? Probably not. But it is published in the Spirit of documenting the obscure stories by the British pop archives, which is part of the University of Manchester, which perhaps explains the devotion of Taylor to the minute.
There are strange omissions. Women are mainly missing: Meatwhistle was co -founded by the artist Veronica Wilkinson, whose radical ideas are never developed. I would have liked more of her. Joanne Catherall and Susan Ann Sulley, the impassive vocal duo who brought glamor to the human league, are barely mentioned. In this story in the history of Sheffield pop, women are mainly mothers who hit appropriate jobs or cleaning after group practices. And Taylor never mentions the Arctic monkeys, another international success, perhaps the last hacking of the musical flowering of Sheffield.
But the strength of the book is that it gives life to the infrastructure, widely funded publicly, which supported an improbable bohemia which led to worldwide success. Most of this has disappeared and will probably never come back.
Electrophonic studio: the Sheffield space era, from the human league to the pulp by Jamie Taylor Manchester University Press 12.99 £ / $ 19.95, 304 pages
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