It was through the Northern and Midlands All-Dayer dance and DJ scene of the early to mid-1980s that Sheffield’s future electronic pioneers coalesced, in a culture that refused to be part of Thatcher’s divided Britain. It allowed us the freedom to broaden our minds through the study of things that interested us.” I liked to view it as a working-class equivalent of the student grant that posh kids who went to university got. Not having much money wasn’t a problem, to be able to use time as you wanted seemed to have far more importance than getting a wage. “My only ambition at the time was to avoid doing a boring job that I hated. “The caring welfare state of the time was open to a bit of creative abuse, and you could get your dole and housing benefit paid, no questions asked,” Barratt recalls. Out of these harsh times, there grew a single-mindedness and fierce creative spirit. Specifically, if a powerful right-wing zealot is attacking the things that you feel part of and have pride in.” “So being young and idealistic, growing up in a very working-class place like that with a long history of trade unionism and activism, it becomes part of the way you identify yourself. “During that period, Sheffield City Council had set itself up to be seen as the antidote to everything Tory, flying the red flag over the town hall and all that,” he recalls. Kirk-and founder of the historic Sheffield club Jive Turkey. One of the key figures in this story is Richard Barratt aka DJ Parrot, producer with seminal Warp Records duo Sweet Exorcist-with Cabaret Voltaire’s Richard H. Against the backdrop of high unemployment and the divisive austerity of Margaret Thatcher’s right-wing government, in the mid-’80s, a new generation used the machine as their weapon, creating music every bit as groundbreaking as their counterparts in Detroit and Chicago. In his book Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978–1984, Simon Reynolds explained how the Sheffield electronic scene of the late 1970s stemmed from “a bloody minded Northern disinclination to follow London’s lead a local spirit of futurism and technophilia shaped by the city’s role as one of the engines of the Industrial Revolution.”īut between 19, more than fifty thousand jobs were lost in the industry that gave Sheffield’s its nickname of Steel City. We used one finger,” announces the Human League’s Phil Oakey in Eve Wood’s 2001 documentary Made in Sheffield. “We thought we were the punkiest band in Sheffield. Back in the late 1970s, while bands across the United Kingdom picked up guitars inspired by the DIY spirit of punk, in the Northern England city, a group of synthesizer and drum machine mavericks created their own more revolutionary movement. Sheffield’s electronic music roots run deep.
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