When punk came to the United Kingdom in 1977, bands from the northern industrial city of Sheffield were laughing. Kids across the country were starting bands inspired by this new D.I.Y. ethic that only required learning three chords. Sheffield bands such as Cabaret Voltaire and the Human League did not participate in this copycat behaviour; they had already discovered and developed a more minimal form of musical expression through electronic music. “We were laughing at the bands that learned to play guitars, ‘cause they bothered learning three chords,” said the Human League’s Philip Oakey. “We didn’t even bother doing that; we just used one finger.”1 That one finger was used to play a synthesiser, the instrument that would come to define the Sheffield scene that began in 1972 and invented electronic pop. Most of the bands built their own synthesisers. These instruments were commercially available at the time but extremely expensive. Build-your-own-synth kits could be ordered through magazines but required a knowledge of electronics to even attempt the complicated soldering.2 This knowledge was a sign of the transition into post-industrial society: computers were quickly replacing industrial machinery as the new everyman machines. But while Sheffield was establishing itself as the newest innovator in music, its innovative steel industry was beginning to suffer its first downturn in decades after peaking in 1970.3 4 Steel had been defining Sheffield since the 18th century and provided most of the city’s jobs. But in the 1970s, the international oil crises caused Sheffield’s number one post-war customer––the automobile industry––to decrease its demand.5 Margaret Thatcher’s government chose not to come to steel’s aid and instead crushed the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation when the union went on strike in January 1980.6 Sheffield is still known as Steel City, but its synthesiser and electronic bands of the 1970s and 1980s established a new post-industrial industry for the city to take pride in: music.
During the 1970s, Sheffield was known as “the People’s Republic of South Yorkshire” due to its Socialist city council and the red flag they flew over the town hall.7 The city was an image of old Labour. Youths such as Richard H. Kirk, who would become a founder of Cabaret Voltaire, thought nothing special about being a member of the Young Communist League; that was standard Sheffield behaviour.8 A key aspect and point of pride for this People’s Republic was the nationalised steel industry. The Labour-controlled government nationalised steel manufacturing and created the British Steel Corporation in July 1967, merging fourteen major companies and their approximately 200 subsidiaries.9 This made ninety percent of Sheffield’s steel industry nationalised.10 During the 1950s, Sheffield had become a major centre for steel research and innovation in metallurgy. In 1952, United Steels created a Research & Development Department which was centred around Swinden Laboratories in Rotherham, just outside Sheffield. The Firth-Brown Laboratories were also founded during this time.11 Geoffrey Tweedale wrote in Steel City that “it was [Sheffield’s steel industry’s] human and knowledge base that gave it the competitive edge.”12 Sheffield steelworks believed their “competitive edge” came with their ability to innovate through developments such as strand bending technology and constant improvement in alloy steels, which were essential for the automobile and aircraft industries.13 Even as the city fell behind in production volume because other countries were catching up with Britain’s industrialisation, Sheffield remained a centre for steel innovation. This became somewhat of a null point, however, in the early 1960s as competition spread to the innovation sector of steelmaking, as well. “Sheffield did not realise that a few very aware metallurgists with instruments and computers could produce steel as well as the craftsman,” said one Sheffield metallurgist.14 Slowly, as the demand for steel dropped due to the oil crises in the mid-1970s, the steelworks started being rationalised.15
The musicians who emerged in Sheffield in the early 1970s proved that the compulsion to innovate was not limited to the steel industry. Computers were the new, post-industrial machines and what enabled outsiders to infiltrate Sheffield’s near-monopoly on steel innovation. Sheffield musicians took this new technology of the post-industrial age and applied it to music. Synthesisers were the computer’s musical equivalent. In the new modern era, the “mindless”, back-breaking factory or mining jobs would transform into mindless, cushy office jobs for drones behind screens. Likewise, sweaty drummers would be replaced with drum machines. This was the future. The bands were further inspired by partially or fully electronic music they had found, such as Kraftwerk, Roxy Music, and Walter Carlos’s electronic score for A Clockwork Orange.16 Of the year 1977, Ian Craig Marsh of the Future, and later the Human League and Heaven 17, said, “Initially we saw it as maybe a rebirth, and then we came to see it as the end of the cycle. It was obvious that punk wasn’t leading to anything interesting or new. When we started the Future, we were definitely on a mission to destroy rock ‘n’ roll.”17
Steel production soundtracked Sheffield in the 1960s and 1970s, especially in the working class areas where most of the bands lived. “You go to sleep at night and there was the sound of the drop forges, just hammering away,” said Marsh, “like a fucking metronome, like a heartbeat for the whole city.”18 Marsh’s language explains why these sounds would become aspects of bands such as Cabaret Voltaire: they were integral to all Sheffielders. A heartbeat for the whole city not only collects all Sheffielders as one Being through steel but also suggests that steel was the organ inside of every Sheffielder keeping them alive. The forgings did not just keep time like a metronome but kept life flowing through their veins. Something purely mechanical was made natural in Sheffield through its constancy. At Cabaret Voltaire’s first gig on 13 May 1975, rather than a drummer or even a drum machine, the beat was kept by the sounds of steel forging. “We had a tape loop of a recording of a steam hammer as percussion,” said Chris Watson.19 The band refused to have a real drummer, because they “didn’t want a rock guy showing off and doing drum solos,” according to Richard H. Kirk. Beyond distaste for standard rock instrumentation amongst all of the Sheffield bands from the time, Kirk said Cabaret Voltaire desired, “steady, mechanical repetition.”20 The band’s, or sound group as they called themselves, creations were born complete with a Sheffieldian heartbeat.21 In an interview with Melody Maker in 1981, Kirk explained that their original sound “was getting a lot of things out of our system, and then working through that.”22 Cabaret Voltaire were perhaps sorting through the facts of these very mechanical, very unnatural––in that they are inorganic––machines residing as natural organisms in their city. It would seem more natural to these musicians to make purely electronic music, to use a drum machine or sound recording of a steam hammer rather than a human behind a drum kit, if they have grown up with industrial noise as their everyday soundtrack.
Sheffield’s socialism also made its contribution through fostering the formation of bands by helping young people get together. City-subsidised buses meant transportation anywhere in the Sheffield area, no matter the distance, cost only two pence for children and ten pence for adults.23 This made it affordable for teenagers to explore their city and go out to clubs, pubs, venues, and other meeting places nightly. Meatwhistle, a government-sponsored youth theatre project organised by married couple Chris and Veronica Wilkinson, began in the summer of 1972 at The Crucible Theatre in Sheffield.24 The first production went very well so Meatwhistle was given a larger space: a vacant Victorian school. The organisers also lobbied for more funding to get lights, video cameras, and musical instruments.
Meatwhistle soon became a creative centre for youth in Sheffield. Bands not involved in the program were welcome to practise in the spare rooms. Martyn Ware of the Future, and later the Human League and Heaven 17, called it “an intellectual youth club.”25 Many bands met at Meatwhistle, or it was where members got the “confidence to be creative,” according to Ware, and think to form a band. “It enabled us to perceive that we didn’t need to have a lot of money to be creative,” said Ware.26 The future musicians who started out at Meatwhistle were: Ian Craig Marsh and Martyn Ware (The Future, The Human League, Heaven 17), Paul Bower (2.3, founder of fanzine Gunrubber), Adi Newton (The Future, Clock DVA, Gunrubber), and Glenn Gregory (Heaven 17).27 Meatwhistle allowed bands to exercise their creativity through its weekly Sunday performances.28 The musicians mixed around and formed various groups doing various styles of music that would last for one night’s performance. Musical Vomit sticks in people’s minds, however, and bothered to leave Meatwhistle to play in front of “real audiences.”29 The band used to hold concoctions of beer, vegetable soup, and other substances in the back of their mouths as they went onstage, then pretend to vomit.30 The mixture of music, art, and film going on at Meatwhistle led to many of its bands being just as interested in the performance aspect of music as its sound. The Human League, two of its founders coming from Meatwhistle, later used projections to bring visual interest to their show.31 While Cabaret Voltaire did not go to Meatwhistle, they hung around with the crowd because they had similar interests, and they too would have images projected at their gigs.32
Cabaret Voltaire formed in late 1973. “Initially there was a large group of people involved, a gang of mates interested in a bit of art and some films and a few strange books,” said Kirk.33 This number narrowed to three by the following year: Kirk (clarinet, guitar), Watson (synth), and Stephen Mallinder (singer, bass). Kirk was an art school dropout and Watson was a telephone engineer. They took their name from the Zurich nightclub and salon where sound poets of the anti-art art movement, Dada, used to perform.34 Watson discovered Dada in 1970 when he was a teenager through a book on the movement, and said it “just hit me so hard it changed the way I’ve thought ever since.”35 The band’s members were drawn together through their common interest in Dada and author William S. Burroughs, both of which use collage elements and distortion in their creations. Cabaret Voltaire wanted to bring these collage elements to sound recordings. Their first compositions were made with tape recorders, acoustic instruments, and microphones. “It fulfilled my ambition of making music without musical instruments,” said Watson.36 “The enjoyment that I got out of it was being part of a social group of people who had common aims and an interest just to push a few boundaries in different ways: art, music, sound, the printed word, the media in general.” They were creating a form of musique concrète, music formed entirely from pre-recordings. Although they were playing instruments and singing, nothing came out sounding as it did going into the machine. They also used the tape recorders to use found sounds, such as the steam hammer from their first gig, and film clips or other voices of the media and popular culture. Eventually the group obtained a drum machine and Watson’s electronics expertise as a telephone engineer was a major technological advantage: he made their distortion devices like custom fuzz boxes. Kirk had a homemade guitar.37
This use of film clips became a sprinkled element of the Long Blondes, a band formed in Sheffield in the mid-2000s. While the practise is common now, Cabaret Voltaire pioneered this, and the Long Blondes are clearly alluding to Cabaret Voltaire’s work, while simultaneously showing off their knowledge of vintage films. The non-Sheffield-natives were vocal about their love of Cabaret Voltaire, even including a lyric “nag nag nag” in reference to the Cabaret Voltaire song.38
Cabaret Voltaire triggered Marmite responses. Their first gig sparked a riot from the student crowd––who hated it––and some journalists, such as Melody Maker’s Lynden Barber, equated listening to Cabaret Voltaire with “being crucified” and called the band’s work “as sterile as it is pretentious.”39 40 There were other journalists, such as Chris Bohn, who repeatedly championed the band in Melody Maker. He was especially impressed with their live performance. In 1980, they released a live album of a show Bohn had attended, and in his review of the album, wrote, “But a lot of the night’s excitement has been lost –– e.g. the volume –– transferring the performance to tape, which doesn’t match the richness and depth of sound of the original recorded versions. They don’t vary radically enough from them, either, to make this essential listening.”41 The group’s live performances were extremely valued by fans. “They went on stage with the atmosphere that playing a concert was the most important thing you could possibly do,” said Russell Senior of Pulp. “There was nothing casual about it. There was nothing laid-back and pally and make friends with the audience. It was like, ‘We are doing this intense thing.’ It built up this hypnotic atmosphere.”42 The nature of synthesisers meant that most Sheffield bands’ shows never exactly matched the record; it was impossible to make the exact same sounds again. Therefore, every performance was special.
The shows featured projections of cut-up French porn, TV news, and movies. The images did not synchronise with the music. The group saw themselves as reporters. “We were more like, Let’s just present the facts and let people make up their own minds,” said Kirk.43 The group were accused of “exploitation” for the use of shocking images of the Ku Klux Klan, etc., but the band disagreed. “When people see it on the news, they’re totally punch drunk,” said Mallinder. “It’s news, and the news has become just as much a fantasy as ‘Hart to Hart’. You see it in a totally different context and it has far more impact on you.”44 They eventually translated this practise to videotape, making a VHS with a compilation of images over their compositions, both previously-released and new. As pointed out by Chris Bohn in Melody Maker in 1979, Cabaret Voltaire were most definitely the most experimental in Sheffield at the time, despite using more traditional instruments than a band like the Human League. Despite being strictly made of synthesisers, the Human League were making more traditional pop music.45 Their innovation came with their mode rather than their result’s ability to shock.
The Human League were entirely electronic. Martyn Ware, Ian Craig Marsh, and Adi Newton began as the Future in 1977, composing music using only synthesisers. When they began, they did not even have a drum machine and created imitation drums using their synthesisers, which involved much time and experimentation.46 They quickly decided they needed a singer, gained Philip Oakey, lost Newton, hired Adrian Wright as “Director of Visuals,” and changed their name to the Human League.47 David Bowie called them the future of pop music after seeing them live in December 1978, but the band did not gain popular success until 1981 after major line-up changes the previous year.48 The two founders, Ware and Marsh, left to form Heaven 17 with Glenn Gregory on vocals. This caused horrified responses within Sheffield: The two talented ones have left the Human League.49 Oakey and Wright, who had been put behind a synth now, proved them wrong after adding Joanne Catherall and Susan Ann Sulley to their line-up and then creating one of the most popular songs of the decade, “Don’t You Want Me,” and their triple-platinum album, Dare.
Just as the Human League’s new lineup was proving Sheffield wrong and bringing electronic pop to the masses, the steel industry was failing. 1980 had seen a major strike in the steel industry suppressed by the new Tory government. The post-industrial age took control. There are several opinions of the nationalisation of steel in 1967; here are two: first, that it was “one of the most ill-timed blunders in British industrial history” because the government had just invested millions of pounds to modernise an industry that was about to peak and then fail;50 or, second, that this was good-timing because the government was already in control and therefore it would be easier to support and save the steel industry. Margaret Thatcher was of a third opinion that Sheffield needed to be re-privatised and left to save itself. But the city continued to persevere, just as Pulp did. Formed in 1978, the Sheffield band did not achieve popular success until the mid-1990s with their fourth album, His ‘n’ Hers. Speaking about the 1980s, Dave Taylor of FON Records said, “I still to this day remember several very powerful and important people in the music business just saying to me, ‘Dave, as a friend, give up on Pulp. Just look at Jarvis––he’ll never be a pop star.’”51 It was not as easy to be attempting pop stardom in the 1980s as it was in the 1970s. “As the decade wore on, for a start, they just started putting in restraints on the dole,” said Jarvis Cocker of being a musician in Thatcher’s Britain. “It became the job seeker’s allowance and you had to prove that you were actively looking for work, even stipulate the kind of work that you were looking for. I do believe Margaret Thatcher even said, It’s time for a return to Victorian values; it’s not all about having fun. To be in a band in the mid-’80s was––I suppose because most people were on the dole, you just should’ve had Loser tattooed on your forehead.”52
The perseverance paid off. Pulp’s fifth album Different Class, released in 1995, reached number one. The band are now one of the most respected bands of the Britpop period. Jarvis Cocker’s lyrics continue to be celebrated for his intelligent presentation of the working class lifestyle, realism, and social commentary. Their song “Common People” is considered by many to be “the perfect encapsulation of the Britpop aesthetic.”53 Sheffield’s perseverance led to it becoming the safest large city in the country through “good community work.”54 Though many still associate it with the smoke and grey of the steel industry, the city’s many parks, gardens, and other green spaces, including the Botanical Gardens, Peace Gardens, and Winter Garden, have made it one of the greenest cities in England.55
Sheffield’s steel industry continues to feed the city’s music scene. Just as Cabaret Voltaire and The Human League were inspired by “the big drop forges crunching away” and incorporated these industrial noises into their music––literally, at times––bands of the new millennium use the gutted factories and steelworks as practise spaces.56 The sound of guitars, drums, and sometimes a synth fill the void left behind by steel. The renters of a Neepsend practise space just seven years previously, Arctic Monkeys took the headline slot at the 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony and proved that while the steel industry might be in Sheffield’s past (and about three hours earlier in Danny Boyle’s Isle of Wonder program), the Steel City continues to contribute to not only Britain but the world through its music.
Footnotes
1 Made in Sheffield, Dir. Eve Wood, Perf. Jarvis Cocker, Phil Oakey, John Peel, DVD, Plexigroup, 2005.
2 Simon Reynolds, Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984, (New York: Penguin, 2006) 93.
3 Reynolds, 86.
4 Tweedale, 334.
5 Geoffrey Tweedale, Steel City: Entrepreneurship, Strategy, and Technology in Sheffield 1743-1993, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995) 317, 334.
6 “BBC ON THIS DAY | 2 | 1980: Steel workers strike over pay,” BBC News, BBC, Web, 25 Apr. 2013.
7 Reynolds, 86.
8 Reynolds, 86.
9 Tweedale, 340.
10 Reynolds, 86.
11 Tweedale, 311.
12 Tweedale, 311.
13 Tweedale, 313, 317.
14 Tweedale, 333.
15 Tweedale, 341-2.
16 Reynolds, 92, 86-87.
17 Reynolds, 92.
18 Made in Sheffield.
19 Reynolds, 91.
20 Reynolds, 90.
21 Reynolds, 89.
22 Neil Rowland, “The Voltaire Enigma,” Melody Maker, 10 Oct. 1981: 16.
23 waxpancakes, “Jarvis Cocker’s Musical Map of Sheffield,” YouTube, YouTube, 26 Apr. 2012, Web, 22 Apr. 2013.
24 Reynolds, 88.
25 Reynolds, 88.
26 Made in Sheffield.
27 Reynolds, 87-88.
28 Reynolds, 88.
29 Reynolds, 88.
30 Made in Sheffield.
31 Reynolds, 97.
32 Reynolds, 100.
33 Reynolds, 89.
34 Reynolds, 89.
35 Reynolds, 89.
36 Made in Sheffield.
37 Reynolds, 90, 100, 91.
38 The Long Blondes, “Lust in the Movies,” Someone to Drive You Home, Rough Trade, 2006.
39 Reynolds, 91.
40 Lynden Barber, “CABARET VOLTAIRE: ‘The Voice of America’ (Rough Trade, Rough II),” Melody Maker, 2 Aug. 1980: 9.
41 Chris Bohn, “CABARET VOLTAIRE: ‘Live at the Y.M.C.A. 27.10.79’ (Rough Trade ROUGH 7),” Melody Maker, 9 Feb. 1980: 26.
42 The Beat is the Law: Fanfare for the Common People, Dir. Eve Wood, Perf. Pulp, WARP, Digital, Sheffield Vision, 2011.
43 Reynolds, 100.
44 Adam Sweeting, “CABS x 45,” Melody Maker, 26 Jun. 1982: 26.
45 Chris Bohn, “Music for bright nurseries and dark cellars,” Melody Maker, 6 Oct. 1979: 33.
46 Reynolds, 93.
47 Reynolds, 97.
48 Made in Sheffield.
49 Made in Sheffield.
50 Tweedale, 341.
51 The Beat is the Law.
52 The Beat is the Law.
53 Live Forever: The Rise and Fall of Britpop, Dir. John Dower, Perf. Noel Gallagher, Liam Gallagher, Damon Albarn, Jarvis Cocker, Kevin Cummins, DVD, First Look, 2004.
54 Richard Marsden, “Sheffield officially safest large city in UK, figures reveal,” The Star, Johnston Publishing Ltd., 12 Apr. 2013, Web, 27 Apr. 2013.
55 “BBC News – Green Flag Awards keep Sheffield’s reputation as green city,” BBC News, BBC, 18 Jul. 2012, Web, 27 Apr. 2013.
56 Reynolds, 85.
Bibliography
Barber, Lynden. “CABARET VOLTAIRE: ‘The Voice of America’ (Rough Trade, Rough II).” Melody Maker 2 Aug. 1980: 9. Print.
“BBC News – Green Flag Awards keep Sheffield’s reputation as green city.” BBC News. BBC, 18 Jul 2012. Web. 27 Apr. 2013.
“BBC ON THIS DAY | 2 | 1980: Steel workers strike over pay.” BBC News. BBC. Web. 25 Apr. 2013.
The Beat is the Law: Fanfare for the Common People. Dir. Eve Wood. Perf. Pulp, WARP. Sheffield Vision, 2011. Digital.
Bohn, Chris. “CABARET VOLTAIRE: ‘Live At The Y.M.C.A. 27.10.79’ (Rough Trade ROUGH 7).” Melody Maker 9 Feb. 1980: 26. Print.
—. “Friday: THROBBING GRISTLE / CABARET VOLTAIRE / REMA REMA.” Melody Maker 11 Aug. 1979: 23. Print.
—. “Music for bright nurseries and dark cellars.” Melody Maker 6 Oct. 1979: 33. Print.
Dudley, G.F. and J. J. Richardson. Politics and Steel in Britain, 1967-1988: The Life and Times of the British Steel Corporation. Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1990. Print.
Live Forever: The Rise and Fall of Britpop. Dir. John Dower. Perf. Noel Gallagher, Liam Gallagher, Damon Albarn, Jarvis Cocker, Kevin Cummins. First Look, 2004. DVD.
Long Blondes, The. “Lust in the Movies.” Someone to Drive You Home. Rough Trade, 2006. CD.
Made in Sheffield. Dir. Eve Wood. Perf. Jarvis Cocker, Phil Oakey, John Peel. Plexigroup, 2005. DVD.
“made in sheffield | gunrubber.” Sheffield Vision. Sheffield Vision Ltd., 21 May 2011. Web. 29 Mar. 2013.
Marsden, Richard. “Sheffield officially safest large city in UK, figures reveal.” The Star. Johnston Publishing Ltd., 12 Apr. 2013. Web. 27 Apr. 2013.
Reynolds, Simon. Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984. New York: Penguin, 2006. Print.
Richardson, Jeremy. British Steel and Government: Governance Success and Failure and Problematic Learning As a Policy Style. Colchester: Dept. of Government, University of Essex, 1999. Print.
Rowland, Neil. “The Voltaire enigma.” Melody Maker 10 Oct. 1981:16. Print.
Sweeting, Adam. “CABARET VOLTAIRE: ‘Live At The Lyceum’ (Rough Trade cassette COPY 002).” Melody Maker 11 July 1981: 13. Print.
—. “CABS X 45.” Melody Maker 26 June 1982: 10. Print.
Tweedale, Geoffrey. Steel City: Entrepreneurship, Strategy, and Technology in Sheffield 1743-1993. Oxford: Clarendon, 1995.
waxpancakes. “Jarvis Cocker’s Musical Map of Sheffield.” YouTube. YouTube, 26 April 2012. Web. 22 Apr. 2013.
Melodie Akers 