Mar 1: Cities and Music #1: Sheffield

"Sheffield's my city, it's where I grew up, and although I've moved away for now, I'd like to try and show you around. Sorry if we get lost, it changes every time I come here."

Jarvis Cocker

I'll have to start this set of posts on musical cities by looking at Sheffield, my home city - Rotherham being my home town. Both have some musical connections and bands who were born there or met there, or recorded their albums there... or a combination of those.

At the GA Conference in Sheffield some years ago, I made a Cultural Geography diagram using Mentimeter of Sheffield for a session I was presenting, and this was the outcome from the people who were at the session, suggesting some cultural connections with the city (not all of which were musical) and a really good range of bands.

Who are the people mentioned?

They include:

• Def Leppard
• Human League
• Richard Hawley
• Arctic Monkeys
• Heaven 17
• Jarvis Cocker / Pulp
• Cabaret Voltaire
• Everly Pregnant Brothers
• Joe Cocker
• ABC
• Self Esteem
• Bring me the Horizon

Wikipedia has a list of Sheffield musicians here.

And here are songs which mention Sheffield. - although the endless pop-ups make it unreadable.

Pulp played their first gig at Rotherham Arts Centre - somewhere I used to visit regularly as it was inside the Public Library (now sadly demolished to make way for a large Tesco...) to borrow records in the days before streaming and when I couldn't afford to buy LPs all the time.

There's an academic paper that you can read here which explores the origins of the musical styles in 'Steel City'...  It does a good job of delving into the musical heritage of the city and the influence of its location and steel-making heritage. The paper is accessible and readable and has lots of interest.

John Schofield & Ron Wright (2021): Sonic Heritage, Identity and Musicmaking in Sheffield, “Steel City”, Heritage & Society, DOI: 10.1080/2159032X.2021.1968227 

https://doi.org/10.1080/2159032X.2021.1968227

I'll be sharing more insights from this paper in other blog posts. I've previously talked about the importance of geographers reading out of field research to help inform their own work.

I'll be back in Sheffield at the GA Conference to share this blog too... perhaps see you there?

So how about my own musical experiences and memories of Sheffield?

There are a number of music venues which stand out.

One of them was the Leadmill which was closed in 2025, and all signs of it removed hastily. I wasn't one of those who saw Nirvana there sadly.

I did however see Davy Spillane and band there, which was excellent, and also Ivo Papasov and his Bulgarian Wedding Band... check them out.

I saw a lot of folk concerts at the Grapes, including Dick Gaughan - of which more elsewhere on the blog.

The City Hall was the venue I perhaps visited the most - seeing all sorts of classic bands there including rock bands, many of whom are no longer around.

My first concert was at the City Hall. More on that in an early post and with more to come.

There were also bands such as Tangerine Dream, Thin Lizzy, Tori Amos, Def Leppard, Clannad and many more.

The Octagon centre was a venue run by the University, and there were some other concerts in the University Union itself, including several with Roy Harper. 

On the edge of the city, close to the World Student Games stadium (where I saw U2 - of which more elsewhere on the blog) was the Sheffield Arena: a reasonable arena acoustically. I saw Peter Gabriel and Rush there on several tours, and also Riverdance.

More on all of those at some stage in the blog.

The city's library archive shared this useful summary:

Sheffield is the home of many well-known bands and musicians including a large number of synth pop and electronic groups such as the Human League, Heaven 17, ABC and Cabaret Voltaire. The pioneering independent record label Warp Records, founded in Sheffield in 1989, has become one of the UK’s most respected dance music labels. Artists such as Pulp, Def Leppard, Joe Cocker, Richard Hawley, Milburn, The Longpigs and Moloko along with many other popular and alternative musicians were born in Sheffield. More recently several indie bands, including Arctic Monkeys and The Long Blondes, have emerged from the city as part of the NME-coined phrase: the New Yorkshire Movement.

Here's Jarvis Cocker's "musical tour of Sheffield"

And here's the Everly Pregnant Brothers' 'You're Yorkshire'...

They also did an excellent song about the 69 bus between Rotherham and Sheffield.

The 69 to Rovvrum

I love the litany of place names near the start which charts the route of the bus.

Pond Street
Darnall
Attercliffe
Brightside
Tinsley
Templeborough
Canklow

This is a bus I used to catch frequently - to and from Sheffield for a night out. We generally headed for the Fat Cat, or the Frog and Parrot, or somewhere along West St. The alternative was the 287, which connected to Wickersley where I grew up.

There were also classic nightclubs like the 'Wap' (the Wapentake - the name for an early division of Yorkshire.

Via Wikipedia.

A wapentake, an Old Norse–derived term as common in Northern England, was the equivalent of the Anglo-Saxon hundred in the northern Danelaw. In the Domesday Book the term is used instead of hundreds in Yorkshire, the Five Boroughs of Derby, Leicester, Lincoln, Nottingham and Stamford, and also sometimes in Northamptonshire. The laws in wapentakes were similar to those in hundreds with minor variations.

A recent band to come through to huge status is Bring me the Horizon. More on those in a future post as well.

Finally, I hope you've been following a whole sequence of guest blog posts from Carl Lee, many of which are firmly grounded in the geography of Sheffield. Check out his books 'Home' and 'So where are you from?'.

And we will finish with another quote from Jarvis Cocker on the difference between living in Sheffield and elsewhere

"I assumed the rest of the world was like Sheffield. The big moment for me came when I was on the bus going to college in London, it was a wet day and it was all steamed up. I noticed that people weren't wiping the windows to look outside. They were so insular and focused on making their way through the day that they didn't take an interest in what else was going on. In Sheffield they're wiping those windows like crazy..."

I've certainly spent a lot of journeys on the bus from Rotherham back to Wickersley wiping the windows on a dark evening. There was a house on the hill out towards Herringthorpe which had an upstairs room lined with books, and a desk with a lamp which I always coveted as a place to work... 

Further reading

Will Hodgkinson - 'The Ballad of Britain: How music captured the soul of a nation'

Jarvis Cocker - 'Good Pop, Bad Pop'