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"Nebula4.3, September 2007 Sheffield is not Sexy. By Stephen Mallinder Abstract The city of Sheffield’s attempts, during the early 1980s, at promoting economic regeneration through popular cultural production were unconsciously suggestive of later creative industries strategies. Post-work economic policies, which became significant to the Blair government a decade later, were evident in urban centres such as Manchester, Liverpool and Sheffield in nascent form. The specificity of Sheffield’s socio-economic configuration gave context, not merely to its industrial narrative but also to the city’s auditory culture, which was to frame well intended though subsequently flawed strategies for regeneration. Unlike other cities, most notably Manchester, the city’s mono-cultural characteristics failed to provide an effective entrepreneurial infrastructure on which to build immediate economic response to economic rationalisation and regional decline. Top-down municipal policies, which embraced the city’s popular music, gave centrality to cultural production in response to a deflated regional economy unable, at the time, to sustain rejuvenation through cultural consumption. Such embryonic strategies would subsequently become formalised though creative industry policies developing relationships with local economies as opposed to urban engineering through regional government. Building upon the readings of industrial cities such as Liverpool, New Orleans and Chicago, the post-work leisure economy has increasingly addressed the significance of the auditory effect in cities such as Manchester and Sheffield. However the failure of the talismanic National Centre for Popular Music signifies the inherent problems of institutionalizing popular cultural forms and resistance of sound to be anchored and contained. The city’s sonic narrative became contained in its distinctive patterns of cultural production and consumption that ultimately resisted attempts at compartmentalization and representation through what became colloquially known as ‘the museum of popular music’. A personal narrative that is inextricably bound up in the construction of the city’s sound has informed many aspects of the article, providing subjective context to the broader discourse, that of sound and the city image. How to Retune a City Attempts to resurrect a cultural phoenix from the extinguished ashes of Sheffield’s moribund industrial past were unsympathetically derided by the words of Conservative Member for Parliament, Michael Fabricant. Unwilling to acknowledge the growing momentum of the leisure economy in urban regeneration, Fabricant’s headline-generating Mallinder: Sheffield is not Sexy… 292 Nebula4.3, September 2007 assessment that, “Sheffield is not sexy, it is old and dirty”1 reinforced the perception of sclerotic post-work northern cities that defy restoration. The politician’s belief that an engrained deficit of glamour held back the city’s pursuit of the World Athletics Championships in the early 1990s suggested that cities like Sheffield, once the engine room of the nation’s manufacturing hegemony, had atrophied irredeemably. The city’s push for global interaction, through an international sporting event where commerce and service are deemed high-end goals, was compromised by the unfashionable image of an archaic and corroding landscape. The struggle for control and re-branding of its urban image is one that provides a narrative of well-meaning, but flawed, urban engineering in which the city attempts to negotiate its popular cultural present through its industrial past. The process also signifies the centrality played by the cultural industries, of leisure, sport and music, in redefining post-industrial economies and infrastructures. Sheffield sought cultural redemption in and through a sonic landscape continually shaped and stretched through osmosis by the once relentless rhythms of the city’s industrial pulse and emerging popular pastimes. Sheffield’s working class consumption and production practices grew from the dancehalls and working men’s clubs, through sixties’ northern soul, to eighties electronica and millennial super-clubs, refracted through the sardonic pop and rock from Pulp to the Artic Monkeys and Richard Hawley. In the hiatus of postwork Britain popular music forms began to occupy the tarnished shell of Sheffield’s disappearing economy to become valuable collateral in the push for its sustained regeneration. The indivisibility of the city’s political and economic narrative from its social and cultural history inevitably resulted in Sheffield’s creative production and consumption being built upon the bones of its past. The significance of this auditory culture, turned bankable commodity, is in the city itself. Sheffield’s municipal infrastructure, in the Source: Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport Minutes of Evidence. Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20 - 39) 16 October 2001 B. Kerslake and S. Brailey http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200102/cmselect/cmcumeds/264/1101607.h tm Accessed: 15.11.05. 1 Mallinder: Sheffield is not Sexy… 293 Nebula4.3, September 2007 absence of any effective entrepreneurial mechanism, became inevitably enmeshed in the reification of the city’s sound and unconscious celebration of its popular cultural forms. The sonic landscape, constructed upon its urban topology capturing the sound waves and rhythmic eddies, shapes their movement, reception, incubation and production within the community’s shared past. Emerging from its embryonic industrial and wartime soundscapes, Sheffield’s cultural narrative became most clearly identified in the 1980’s where the effects of industrial deceleration spectacularly encountered the dialectic force of accessible technology and its promises of modernity. The centrality of music as cultural currency, and as a solution to urban regeneration, lies at the heart of the pioneering attempt in the development of Sheffield’s Cultural Quarter. Significantly the city elected to regulate and administer nascent creative industry strategies, in a deflated economy with a meager history of local entrepreneurialism. The subsequent failure of the city’s talismanic National Centre for Popular Music signifies the inherent problems of institutionalizing popular cultural forms and resistance of sound to be anchored and contained. Metal Machine Music A subjective assessment of the transformations that have taken place in the configuration of the city’s popular music requires justification. Therefore, I confess to a personal narrative that is inextricably bound up in the sound of Sheffield. Born and raised in the city, I had, through working in the traditional steel mills, first hand knowledge of the strident, though decelerating rhythms of the city’s primary industry.2 I led a dual life from 1982 commuting on an almost weekly basis from London to work and record before finally severing physical ties in 1995 when I moved to Australia. I returned frequently, and permanently returned to the United Kingdom in 2007. However, my periods of absence could not erode a perception of me being identified with a specificity of time and place. My musical heritage has rendered me hermetically sealed and subsequently experience schizophrenic feelings of dislocated personal identity. An increasingly 2 On leaving school, in 1973, I spent a year as a labourer in the city’s oldest cutlery manufacturers, Sheffield Metal Company, which closed as a smelting works and relocated in the early 1980s. The brand name is still used and retails through an outlet in central London: Sheffield Metal Company, 5 Cavendish Place, London, W1 Mallinder: Sheffield is not Sexy… 294 Nebula4.3, September 2007 connected and mediated world has left a ‘past’ self orbiting as a perennial present; my musical legacy has been re-packaged, re-marketed and commodified to the extent that I, like many others, have fallen prey to a sonic and visual ‘reverse Dorian Gray’ syndrome. Digital simulacra has left, as with most first-world people today, a virtual-self untarnished by the encroachment of linear time, free to move through an on-line world. Nevertheless in my case this simulated self has been a virtuality fixed largely at the point of others choosing. It has however left me with a sense of my personal embodiment of sonic mobility, a paradigm of human movement – sonic consumption, incubation and translation – transcending time and space. I am like, like everyone, a mobile encoder and decoder, the sum of my social and cultural interactions, which manifest themselves, in the sonic realm, through music production. Consequently, I have become synonymous with a spatial and chronological Sheffield, significantly one that has been central in informing the construction of the contemporary, self-regenerating city. Sheffield’s form, as a northern industrial city, has been mythologized through function. The footprint of heavy industry has remained despite the encroachment of economic rationalization, which left behind its steel mills and factories as empty husks, a reminder of an earlier model of globalization and industrial hegemony. However, as a city it has redefined itself aurally, characterized through a bricolage of archaic industry and shiny technology, the city’s rhythms have reverberated through popular music forms. A paradoxical fusion – the sounds of metal and soul, steel and electronica, industrial bleeps and lyrical mockery – popular culture wrapped in the tarnished glamour of self depreciation: the noise of iron and irony. ‘Sheffield Steel’ became not only a manufactured label for the city, but also a convenient brand, which encapsulated the reification of an urban sound that somehow embraced everything from the post-soul of Joe Cocker and heavy metal of Def Leppard to early techno of the Warp label. The arcane bleeps of The Forgemasters and Sweet Exorcist fused the soulful affections of Detroit and Chicago with sonar pulses of an industrial city in its death throws have continued through to Sheffield’s present incumbent, the specific ‘niche’ sound3. However 3 Emerging from the garage, 2-step and dub-step rhythms, the city’s Niche Club has developed a minimalist sound that has become branded the ‘niche sound’. Mallinder: Sheffield is not Sexy… 295 Nebula4.3, September 2007 this construction of a mythologized city and its onomatopoeic sound fails to address the heterogeneous cultural makeup of an urban centre impacted by cultural forces both real and commodified. A city with a diverse ethnicity, compounded by industry to produce a strong working class bias, Sheffield’s inclusivity has produced complex cultural production and patterns of consumption. The perception of Sheffield’s totemic sound as being self-referential, internally constructed upon industrial idiosyncrasies, problematizes all meanings of the mobility of sound. The city had been mono-cultural in its economic construction, however it was more diverse and complex in its social and ethnic make up. Sheffield, as regional web chroniclers ayup.co observe, had shown an acceptance of cosmopolitan sounds in the prewar period, where the ‘big band’ sound had been swept aside by the influx and impact of Jazz on the city.4 Subsequent post war colonial shifts were beginning to characterize the demographic make up of many urban centres. In the case of Sheffield, the bias towards a primary, rather than secondary, consumer manufacturing, meant that industry did draw fewer and later migrants. Research by Sheffield University’s Paul White indicates early resistance to post-war migration and an untypical ethnic composition, in which migrant figures still lag behind the national average.5 Figures infer but perhaps fail to account for the true cultural effect of migration into industrial regions, which until the post-war period remained largely homogenous. The most recent 2001 census indicated a population of almost one million with 3.7% Black, 7.9% Asian and significantly a full- Source: www.ayup.co.uk. The 1951 census showed only 32 people born in Jamaica and by 1981 ratios of Pakistani and Indian migrant considerably above and below the national average respectively. The 2001 census indicates Sheffield’s migrant population of 5.8% born outside the EEC is below that of comparable cities for example Manchester, Nottingham and Birmingham. Source: P. White and Dr S. Scott, Migration and Diversity in Sheffield: Past, Present and Future, (Department of Geography, University of Sheffield, Monday 20 November 2006) Accessed online: http://www.sheffield.gov.uk/EasySite/lib/serveDocument.asp?doc=92399&pgid=106674 Viewed: 06.08.07. 5 4 Mallinder: Sheffield is not Sexy… 296 Nebula4.3, September 2007 time student population of 25.6%.6 The use of statistical evidence to quantify social and cultural effect is inherently problematic. Within urban centres the very visible and frequently pro-active roles played by migrants in the city’s social milieu and subsequent creative industries are contextual, not merely statistical. During the embryonic period for Sheffield’s popular music in the sixties and seventies, the West Indian Social Club, ironically situated in the industrial heartland of Attercliffe, suggested a nascent cultural fusion and the beginnings of an adjustment to a perceived exotic alterity. With rising purchasing power, white working class youth progressed popular music’s cultural cachet. The city’s position in the Northern Soul circuit was clearly being recognized. Dave Berry, a local R&B singer and an established pop star in the 1960s, acknowledged the growing allure of youth, music and status, describing The Mojo Club as "wild and fashionable", The Esquire as "sophisticated and jazzy", and The Black Cat as, Peter Stringfellow's “thriving club.”7 The predominantly black American music played in these clubs was progressed through fringe scenes such as Sheffield’s, where the post-war growth of a specific consumer demographic, working class youth, in manufacturing regions. Built upon the dancehall and record culture of the big band era, the flow of records through ports into northern cities, where new surplus income encouraged, for both white and migrant communities, increased consumption. Soul, ska, and blue-beat, sold through independent record shops with the most iconic being Voilet May’s8, became a significant component of the city’s cultural collateral. My epiphany, in respect of music’s mobility and cosmopolitan potential, emerged at an early age. Growing up on the adjacent street to my own was a young basketball player, Michael Grudge, who despite failing to make the grade on college circuit, remained in the USA to become a founding member of seminal funk band Brass Construction. An acknowledgement emerges that music, though spatially defined, was nevertheless built 6 Source: http://ukpollingreport.co.uk/guide/seat-profiles/sheffieldcentral Accessed 06.08.07. 7 Interview with journalist Martin Lilleker - www.ayup.co.uk 8 Violet May’s Record store remained the chief stockist of rock and roll, R&B, soul and reggae in South Street in the city’s market area between from the 1950s. Moving in the early 1970s to a city centre location, the store finally closed in the late1980s. Mallinder: Sheffield is not Sexy… 297 Nebula4.3, September 2007 upon a more chaotic cultural collision. Music that I perceived to be cosmopolitan was being created by something as prosaic as a local boy; an innate fluidity that enabled sound to transcend the limitations of geographical place, here reified through the movement of people. Soul music, through its global dissemination, had created a community that reached from the California to South Yorkshire through the shared experiences of consumption and dancing. As a teenager my identity was purposely built upon reggae and soul music; the clubs previously mentioned by Berry were off limits to a high school pupil, but tantalizing nonetheless. The Mojo club was not only on my route to school, taunting me daily with the nocturnal pleasures of soul music, but was also enshrined when at 15 years of age – my age at the time – Stevie Wonder had apparently bewitched the crowd with his piano and harmonica skills. Little surprise then when a year later I risked ejection from the Sheffield City Hall by walking up to the stage to shake hand with soul singer Martha Reeves as she performed with her Vandellas. The need to find some way of grounding this distant and esoteric music was done through a display of physicality that could supersede mere consumption. I was unaware that I was being acknowledged by someone who was from a fragmenting urban environment and comparable economic mono-culture –‘Motor-City’, Detroit – which would later negotiate a parallel sonic path to Sheffield in its techno evolution. If the dissemination and consumption of sounds and rhythms from America and the West Indies, of ska and soul, were evidence of social and cultural mobility, then they were symptomatic of increasing media incursions into urban spaces to fuse with the internal sounds of the city. The reduction of music to merely popular cultural phenomena risks excluding a broader sonic context. The complexity of our reception of sound invariably overlooks the peripheral, environmental and subconscious which can become manifest s in local and regional nuances. Urban ambience can instinctively inform regional sounds and permeate through to popular texts. Traditionally environmental sounds have been translated into cultural forms, indigenous and folk music have grounded their authenticity by their incorporation. Jon Hassell’s9 reading of South East Asian gamelan gives 9 Jazz musician Jon Hassell, spent considerable time incorporating the indigenous music of South East Asia into his recordings. The most notable being Earthquake Island Mallinder: Sheffield is not Sexy… 298 Nebula4.3, September 2007 recognition to the sounds of the elements, in this case water, in indigenous music, and so the elements of the urban environment become more obliquely incorporated into popular music’s syncretic form. The need to find meaning in sound requires wider contextual reading, the incursion of auditory place into the spaces of production becomes part of this constructed meaning. Anthony McCann, in addressing a tangential issue of copyright, cautions against music’s homogenous labeling, to enable convenient compartmentalization suggesting, “in many disciplines, ‘music’ is often analytically separated and abstracted from social context in order to justify the validity of using the category as a universal label.”10 If social and personal components play a formative part, we must avoid, in McCann’s words: A systematic exclusion of people, relationships, power, meaning, emotions, and the dynamics of social interaction from all relevant discussion. 11 The construction of sounds and rhythms is contextual, encompassing all aspects of daily life not merely confined to the perpetuation of existing paradigms. The Sheffield soundscape is as much defined through its work environment and historical narrative as its patterns of social interaction and consumption; the ‘sound’ of the city is framed by its industrial corporeality, its elemental essence contained in rolling mills and blast furnaces. Growing up in the city like my peers who produced music and formed bands in the late seventies and eighties,12 I was suffused with stories of the Sheffield’s recent past. Along with London, Liverpool, Coventry and other strategic centres, the city had been a target for German bombers during Word War II, primarily focused on the industrial epicenter, the Don Valley, but with several incursions into the city’s commercial heart.13 (Tomato Re..."

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