Rock: Sheffield 1980s Overview

Home to the National Centre for Popular Music, Sheffield, England, is the heartland of Britain’s rust belt. Built on coal and steel industries, it was devastated by the tsunami of world economic change in the 1980s. The contemporaneous wave of innovative music produced in the city owed far less to local traditional music—e.g., brass bands—than it did to the musical possibilities offered by the very electronic technology that contributed to the closing of the city’s factories, mills, and mines. Because of its size (Sheffield is Britain’s fifth largest city) and regional significance, this hilly Yorkshire city has long had a substantial local music scene—including the rock blues of Joe Cocker and the archetypal steel-city heavy metal of Def Leppard. But what united the Sheffield music of the early 1980s was that it was all, in various ways, a response to the anarchic call of punk.

Although they never sold many records, Cabaret Voltaire welded punk’s fury to electronic rhythms, creating experimental dance music whose influence was still being felt at the end of the century. ABC, led by Martin Fry, united punk sloganeering with lushly romantic lyrics and strings. The most successful locals, however, were the Human League, who started as an avant-garde electronic group in 1977 before splitting in two in 1980. Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh (who achieved their greatest success as producers, notably by resuscitating the career of Tina Turner in 1983) went on to jointly form the British Electric Foundation and Heaven 17. Meanwhile, the rump of the Human League defined technopop (electronic pop) through the early 1980s; both “Don’t You Want Me” (1982) and “Human” (1986) were major hits in the United States. Formed in 1978, Pulp, with its eccentric front man, Jarvis Cocker, waited 15 years to achieve national recognition in Britain with “Common People” (1995), though its success was not mirrored in the United States.