There was a lot of interesting British music happening in the early ‘80s. And a fair bit of that interesting music was happening in Sheffield. As electronic rhythms and synths overtook the scuzzed guitars and flying snot of punk, the South Yorkshire City - long the heart of the UK’s steel industry (its cutlery was mentioned as early as the 14th century in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales) - seemed a perfect home for this futuristic machine music.
“Sheffield was right in the middle of a musical explosion,” explains ABC’s Martin Fry, who was then a student living in the city’s notorious Hyde Park. “I suppose all cities have a sound - the Liverpool sound or the Manchester sound - but Sheffield at that particular point in time seemed to be physically dragging music into the new decade. You would be walking down somewhere like West Street and all of the knackered old industrial units were spilling over with noise.”
