None of The Human League have any orthodox musical training but prefer to regard composition as an extension of logic, inspiration and luck. Therefore, unlike conventional musicians, their influences are not so obvious.
Fast Product Press Pack, June 1978
Rock ‘n’ roll was never intended to be about virtuosity. It was more a DIY folk music. Skiffle was a 1950s fad championed by Lonnie Donegan, which ignited a thousand ad hoc austerity groups repurposing household items – a washboard, an old tea chest impaled with a broom handle, tension-strung to create a stand- up bass, and maybe a couple of battered acoustic guitars played with more energy than technique. Two decades later, Sheffield created a new kind of electronic skiffle.
Why Sheffield? The M1 slip road 34 takes you into the small South Yorkshire industrial city that has a greater music tradition than that description would imply. We could start with Wurlitzer organist Reginald Dixon: famous for his radio broadcasts from the Blackpool Tower Ballroom. But we probably won’t. Instead, we’ll begin in the beat-boom era with Dave Berry, his distinctive creepy stage persona, and hits that included ‘The Crying Game’, his cover of Bobby Goldsboro’s ‘Little Things’ and the Ray Davies-penned ‘This Strange Effect’. Dave was born in Woodhouse – to the southeast of Sheffield – in February 1941.
Then there’s Joe Cocker, who took the Woodstock festival by storm with his anguished take on The Beatles’ modest sing-along: the Ringo Starr-sung ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’. Joe was born at 38 Tasker Road in the Sheffield suburb of Crookes in May 1944.
Tony Christie might’ve been born in nearby Conisbrough, but his long association with the steel city includes his 2008Made In Sheffield album – produced by Richard Hawley, with contributions from Alex Turner and Jarvis Cocker.
Of course, there’s Def Leppard, jazz guitarist Derek Bailey, singer Paul Carrack, jazz drummer Tony Oxley, Pulp, Arctic Monkeys and beyond. But this book is largely centred around the cluster of electro musicians who were feeling their way through the 1970s to upsurge into the 1980s as the ‘soundtrack for the second industrial revolution: 45 and 33-and-a-third rpm’.
The first time I visited Sheffield – where now there is the labyrinthine Meadowhall temple to opulent consumerism – there were still foundries you could smell in the air and that shook the street beneath your feet, ‘like a metronome, like a heartbeat for the whole city’, according to Human League founding member Ian Craig Marsh. ‘We all come from pretty strong working- class backgrounds’, Ian told me. ‘My Dad’s a bricklayer, and my Mum used to work at Bassett’s Liquorice Allsorts factory. My Grandfather got burned clear down his right side when he was splashed with molten steel at a steel works!’. De-industrialisation left abandoned factory units to colonise as rehearsal rooms and studio space for insurrectionary anti-musicians, who ‘discarded natural sound source in favour of synthetic instrumentation because of its convenience, mobility and vast source of as-yet-untapped potential’ (the manifesto of 1970s Sheffield electronic band Vice Versa). And there was cheap front-room technology easily adaptable, Skiffle-style, sufficient to bend to purpose: original, in the sense of not using drums – which were just too tedious to learn – or guitars, which were considered obsolete. ‘We wanted to sound like a proper pop group, but we were not prepared to put in the five or six years that it would’ve taken to learn a traditional instrument’, explai
