Apr 3: Guest blogger Carl Lee #11: What is the Sound of the City?

The latest in a series of guest blog posts from Carl Lee.

What is the sound of the city? 

Can cities ever have a sound? 

Something so distinct and culturally resonating that from the first half a dozen bars, a place, an identity, a city sweeps into your mind? 

Does the Mersey really have a beat? 

Can you trip hop to Bristol, or wallow in grunge on the streets of Seattle? 

Clearly songs can evoke places and times. 

The Clash made sure you knew that London was calling in the early 1980s, and every Christmas since 1987 we have enjoyed/endured a Fairytale from New York. Maybe you can take a different stance and completely diss a city in song as Randy Newman does with finality about Baltimore: 

“Never gonna come back here 'til the day I die.” 

This is probably an outlier as most songs about cities or a sound associated with a city are seen as positive affirmations of the local culture and place. 

Some go further, with Jarvis Cocker’s X-rated homage to his home city Sheffield, ‘Sheffield Sex City’ of which, it might be observed, is more concerned with his idling smutty thoughts whilst in the housing benefit queue than the existential qualities of the city of Sheffield. 

Jarvis’s mate, and occasional musical collaborator, Richard Hawley has probably got a better stake in being considered, if not the sound of Sheffield, at least its preeminent musical chronicler in the 21st century. 

As Hawley himself has said of whether Sheffield has ‘a sound’, “it doesn’t really matter what type of music people make, what matters is that people are eager to play, to make music.” 

For Hawley music is a craft, something that needs to be honed and practiced. And some places, and times, are better at providing the opportunities to craft away, whatever the genre of music. 

In the late 1970s and 1980s a generation of musicians honed their craft whilst living on welfare benefits, Jarvis and Hawley amongst them. Local pubs provided them venues, an eco-system of support was developed, a market forged and sometimes fame found. 

In 1986, Sheffield Council opened the first municipal recording studios, Red Tape Studios, to support musical aspirations in a building that also housed recording studios owned by members of local bands the Human League and Comsat Angels. They were trying to create a burgeoning local music scene. In the next street was The Leadmill, Sheffield’s most famous music venue that at that time was a Sheffield Council supported charity. 

Image: Picture Sheffield.

Ownership of those private studios and the Leadmill has changed over time but Red Tape Studios remains as a local resource for aspiring musicians in Sheffield. 

In 2024 Ed Sheeran popped in to shower some pop glamour around whilst working with students on the ‘Tracks’ course provided by the Sheffield Music Centre. A more recent but equally ambitious project in Sheffield is the Harmony Works restoration of grade 2 listed Canada House into a music education hub with recording facilities and practice and performance spaces. 

This is happening side by side with a significant decline in music education in state schools, with A level music entries declining by 45% since 2010.

Sheffield is but one of many cities across the UK that are investing in their musical talent. 

Liverpool, Cardiff and Newcastle are further examples of local authorities engaging in the development of young musicians. And as Newcastle demonstrated in 2025 when Sam Fender won The Mercury Music Prize in the year it was hosted in his home city, this can be a significant source of local pride and cultural identity. 

As Fender proclaimed on stage in his home city "this region is the best region in the whole damn country".

Developing music craft is not the same as creating a distinctive musical sound that has a clear, unambiguous association to a particular place, even when lyrical references of a place and its culture litter the songs of artists singing about their experience in their home towns, cities and regions. 

Take away Sam Fender’s distinctive Geordie voice and the sound could also be the sound of Springsteen’s New Jersey, a continent away.  

The Arctic Monkeys are another case in point. In their early days they may have sung about the fact that “You’re not from New York City, you’re from Rotherham” but today they are clearly more New York City than Rotherham, and their mantle of South Yorkshire’s working class troubadours has well and truly been usurped by The Reytons who actually are from Rotherham, and very proudly so.  

When The Reytons played to 20,000 in Rotherham’s Clifton Park in July 2024 it was a gig they had organised themselves like virtually all of their career to date. 

Putting out their own music, managing themselves, organising their own tours and not bowing down to a global recording company.  They were the ‘Kids Off The Estate’, where ‘Clifton Park was like Disney Land”, coming home to prove a point that music, certainly their music, was a thing intrinsically rooted in their home even though their sound was not too dissimilar to that of many acts around, Sam Fender for example, who weren’t Rotherham estate kids. 

So the sounds of the city are many and can also sound like the sounds of somewhere else. 

But then there is New Orleans, and Nashville, and Havana, Cuba. All flies in my rhetorical anointment. 

Maybe the notion that anywhere can have a distinctive beat, melody or tone is simply nuanced and complex, like the world of music itself. 

Carl Lee is retired but was a lecturer at The University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University, taught A level Geography for 20 years at Sheffield College, is the author of five books about geography and has a PhD in economic geography. He has been nuts about music since buying his first single in 1973: 10cc’s 'Rubber Bullets' if you were wondering.