Erstellt am: 15. 7. 2009 - 12:51 Uhr

Music From Sheffield

An open mike on the sound of the Steel City.

Tonight’s Open Mike, which I will be presenting, will be a musical homage to the town of Sheffield – the most bohemian centre of the region where I grew up, Yorkshire.

Sheffield.org.uk

Home to a steel industry whose slow death was chronicled in the hit film “The Full Monty”, Sheffield has also produced generation after generation of unforgettable pop music. The city produced scores of tunes that have pulled off the rare feat of combining often pulsating original sounds with lyrics that are often wry, witty and refreshingly self-effacing.

That, I think, fits the atmosphere of the town, where even the heroes refuse to take themselves too seriously. While self-regarding Manchester has had tomes written about its scene and sound, Sheffield seems oblivious to the need to blow its own trumpet.

Keep your bombastic Gallagher brothers, I want my self-deprecating Jarvis Cocker, the man who is, for me, the cultural icon of Sheffield.

I recently listened to a Guardian interview with He Of The Over-Sized Spectacles And Long Basil Fawlty Legs. Jarvis was musing about the possibility of swapping his chic flat in Paris for a nest in the hilly suburbs of his home town because the countryside “is so beautiful” and with only ten minutes to some café, it might well be the only bit of green oasis where he wouldn't find himself "committing suicide within ten minutes".

But if Jarvis is the pop Godfather of Sheffield, the Arctic Monkeys, who recently visited Vienna, have become its international standard bearers. Alex Turner and his down-to-earth cohorts started to thrash out the beginnings of their journey to stardom in the iconic The Grapes bar on Trippett Lane with what music journalist Stuart Maconie has described as "a witty, punkish tale on modern Britain and particularly modern Sheffield viewed from the bottom of a bottle of Smirnoff Ice.

A whole new generation of bands has grown up alongside the Monkeys – the most notable perhaps being the band Little Man Tate, whose lanky, tank-top wearing front man Jon Windle checked tickets at The Boardwalk – comparable, perhaps, to Vienna’s The Shelter. It's hard to take them too seriously, but it is equally hard, after a few listens, not to sing along.

sheffield pictures

A couple of years ago the Artic Monkeys pipped a fellow Sheffield musician to the prestigious Mercury Prize - singer song-writer Richard Hawley.

Hawley who is now in his 40s, sings beautiful low-toned songs oozing with sumptious melancholy. He has named his latest album - Lady's Bridge - after a local landmark and said in interview that "I couldn't make the music I make in any other city. I wouldn't have the stories and the culture."

Hawley is a survivor of one of my favourite bands of the 1990’s, the Longpigs, whose few months in the sun towards the end of the decade coincided with my last party-fuelled term at school. Yet, despite the patronage of ginger-haired Radio 1 DJ Chris Evans, the band narrowly missed the boat of Britpop stardom.

The Longpigs have a link to Sheffield's past as well as, through Hawley, its present. Drummer Dee Boyle had played in the visionary electronic band Cabaret Voltaire who would pave the way for an extraordinarily influential musical explosion from Sheffield that would dominate the electronic sound of the early 1980's. The synthesiser pop of bands like Heaven 17 and The Human League grew up around the iconic Crazy Daisy, a bar in the basement of an art deco building on Sheffield High Street. The Human League's Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh have said that their music was influenced by a childhood among the turbines, forges and hammers of the steel industry. Their industrial sound is obviously heavily influenced by the pioneers of mechanical sounding electronic music, Kraftwerk, who played a gig at Sheffield University in 1976, but, I think, with a warmer more emotional feel to the sound.

sheffield ski village

If you find time to visit Sheffield, built, like Rome, on 7 hills, and perching on the edge of the dramatic Peak District, there is plenty to see while waiting for the clubs to open. You can watch the world's oldest football club, an amateur team called Sheffield FC which was founded in 1857. Or you can practice your carving on the slopes where I learned to ski - on an abandoned slag heap now covered in watered brushing. Now that's glamour for you!

You'll also see four giant stainless steel drums. They used to house the short-lived National Centre for Popular Music, created by the Blair government in 1999 when it was still drunk on the bizarre idea of 'Cool Brittania'. After the museum went bankrupt barely a year later, the buildings was taken over by the Student's Union of a local university.

Hopefully the students will help create the next new sound to come out of Sheffield - as the academic members of The Long Blondes did back in 2003. It never seemed in the spirit of the constantly evolving city to enclose music in a museum viewing cabinet to be complacently admired.

chris cummins

I hope you have time, however, to come on a tour of my sonic museum of Sheffield tonight. I would take you on an audio tour of my actual Yorkshire village, of course, chosen as the set of the überfunky Calendar Girls movie, but I'm not sure how much brass bands and village choirs you could stand!

Open Mike 15th July (00-01)