Life After Dark

by Dave Haslam

  There was a sense that much of the music triggered by punk in various towns and cities was a communal enterprise. In Leeds, in their very early days, both the Mekons and the Gang of Four played at John Keenan’s F-Club and shared rehearsal space. Clubs like Eric’s weren’t just spaces for bands to play. Music that didn’t fit with mainstream expectations tended, of course, to attract people who had something different about them too, creating spaces with the potential for creative activity and collaboration.

  In Nottingham, one of the established small venues, the Boat Club – where Pink Floyd had played when it was known as the Britannia Rowing Club (and, later, in 1971, Led Zeppelin, and, in 1976, the Sex Pistols) – booked mostly heavy rock and metal bands. Punks in Nottingham would travel to get their kicks; perhaps to the Grey Topper run by Alf Hyslop in the pit village of Jacksdale, or even to the Ajanta in Derby. But by the end of 1977 the Sandpiper in Nottingham was presenting shows by the likes of Penetration and Buzzcocks. Now an underground car park, the Sandpiper was the low-ceilinged basement of a warehouse. One regular, Steve Fisher, puts it like this: ‘In the Sandpiper at least, the punk movement was a kickback against the disco scene that had overwhelmed all other sorts of popular music. However, most of the live music, but not all, was punk. The quality of the live bands went from tearfully bad to brilliant.’

  These punk venues eschewed the draconian dress codes of high street discotheques and nightclubs. Although it might be supposed the punk ‘look’ of Mohican haircuts and bondage pants was popular, this just wasn’t the case among post-punk audiences at the Limit or the F-Club or the Factory or Eric’s. Girls had role models like Siouxsie Sioux, Debbie Harry, and the Raincoats, and would be out to see the Pop Group, Joy Division or Penetration wearing stilettos or maybe Converse or Doc Martens. Lads liked Doc Martens too, and at clubs like the Limit both lads and girls wore mohair jumpers, small badges and big shirts, and customised school blazers or finds from trips to army surplus stores for something khaki or grey, and to Salvation Army stores for overcoats.

  The heyday of the Limit was probably 1978 to 1983. A typical venue might have random bands booked, but the Limit became known for a certain kind of band and a certain kind of audience. The programming was varied, though; it was the music the DJs played that created a regular crowd and an identity for the Limit. Midweek there would be disc-only nights and at weekends DJs playing after bands, or instead of bands, including DJ Paul Unwin who’d play the Skids’ ‘Into the Valley’, Japan’s ‘Quiet Life’ and ‘Kick in the Eye’ by Bauhaus. The Limit served watery Webster’s beer. Soon the carpets began to absorb some of this beer, as did the dancefloor. The toilets were a disaster zone. Take a listen to Neil Young’s ‘Sail Away’ lyric extolling ‘dives’; he’d have felt right at home at the Limit, and seen its value.

  Cherry Red continued promoting at the Winter Gardens in Malvern, featuring the likes of the Damned, the Stranglers and the Jam while offering support slots to local punk groups like the Tights. In the spirit of the times, Cherry Red decided to release a record by the Tights, the first step in what turned out to be Cherry Red’s metamorphosis into a maverick independent record label. Eric’s was still going strong in Liverpool. Over in Leeds, John Keenan was doing good work at his F-Club. In May 1978, a regular night at the Russell Club in Hulme, Manchester, was launched by some of the characters who’d go on to be integral to Manchester’s subsequent music history, the Factory label, and the Haçienda.

  Factory (Manchester), Eric’s (Liverpool), the Limit (Sheffield), and the F-Club (Leeds); these four key venues were a reflection of and a contribution to the wealth of music happening in northern cities in the post-punk period. There was economic stagnation in those areas at that time with the collapse of manufacturing industries and rising unemployment but, if anything, this desperation motivated rather than destroyed creativity. And the struggles of British industry had one side effect which turned out to be a useful factor in the growth of music in these northern cities: as factories and workshops closed and warehouses emptied, unused buildings became a feature of cities, with no one much interested in them – there were no property developers snapping them up with a plan to build retail malls or apartment blocks – and they were left to rot, or to be populated by self-motivated mavericks who turned them into rehearsal rooms, recording studios, record shops and music venues.

  How the lack of life opportunities in their locality pushed the young and disaffected towards music and other artistic expression has become a powerful narrative in the history of these cities, shaped by journalists at the time like Paul Morley and Jon Savage. The narrative had a ring of truth. Numerous musicians have talked about their desperation, including Martyn Ware of the Human League, here talking about Sheffield at the time: ‘It was a place of great depression because of all the factory closures. Sheffield engendered a certain desperation to get on with something different and creative, because there wasn’t a lot happening.’

  Of all subcultures, Northern Soul was one of the strongest in Sheffield in the late 1970s, partly as a result of the legacy of mod clubs like the Mojo and the Esquire. There were also some midrange live venues in the city, including the City Hall and the Top Rank (where the Damned played), but most of the city centre was a disco stronghold; outside of the centre was a network of working men’s clubs where novelty acts, local crooners and covers bands playing unadventurous oldies and Top Forty hits made up the musical offering.

  In 2012 the University of Sheffield produced a booklet, Sheffield Music City, in a neatly produced limited edition of 600 (describing itself as ‘a beginner’s guide to the futuristic, beautiful and strange music that our city has produced’ and claiming, ‘Culturally, Sheffield is as important as Salzburg’). Cabaret Voltaire feature prominently in Sheffield Music City as innovators and are described as key to music-making in the city. ‘It’s difficult to overstate how important Cabaret Voltaire were . . . A band who had no idea how to play their instruments, so made records using found sounds, cut up and played through ex-army tape machines. Much of the sound that would later define the city.’

  Richard H. Kirk of Cabaret Voltaire recalls you had to look hard in Sheffield in the mid-70s to find musical entertainment that wasn’t mainstream, or obvious. Richard would frequent the Crazy Daisy, a basement club in an art deco building on the corner of York Street and High Street that hosted very popular glam nights. He also used to go to Shades on Ecclesall Road when they had student nights with DJs playing Roxy Music, although Shades was a club where you’d mostly hear soul and reggae. It was owned by Max Omare, who had moved to England from Nigeria. In 1971 Omare financed a record label, Shades Records, which released music by white reggae band the Inner Mind. When Richard was out dancing there, the upstairs was a casino, but after it was rebuilt in 1982 a shop was created on the ground floor and Napoleon’s Casino replaced Shades in the basement.

  Richard Kirk met Chris Watson, who had started using an oscillator, and together they’d listen to the tape loops and record randomly on tape recorders. By the end of 1974 Stephen Mallinder had joined them, and they’d borrowed a state-of-the-art synthesizer from Sheffield University’s music department (an EMS VCS3). Richard bought a drum machine for £40 from a guy who’d been a losing contestant on Opportunity Knocks.

  In May 1975 Cabaret Voltaire played their first gig courtesy of a University of Sheffield student organisation called Science for the People. Their set consisted of a rhythmic tape loop of a recording of a steamhammer, and Richard alternating playing guitar and playing clarinet. It wouldn’t be the last time the Cabs encountered much confusion, and some hostility, from the student audience. It ended with a fight. Chris later recalled they gave as good as they got. ‘To be fair, we did incite a lot of people. Richard throwing his guitar into the audience, I don’t think that calmed people down.’

  When I met Richard for a conversation about all this, it was mid-morning in the bar of the Sheffield venue the Harley, and time had lent some distance to wha
t went on at early Cabaret Voltaire gigs. Richard seemed amused by his band’s use of confrontation thirty-five or more years earlier: ‘Confrontation was always important, I mean that was the whole point of starting Cabaret Voltaire, just to wind people up like the Dadaists had done, you know, many, many years before us.’ The band felt no obligation to conform to punk clichés, or indeed anything much. ‘Even the fact we didn’t have a drummer used to annoy people for some reason,’ says Richard.

  At the beginning of 1978 the live scene in Sheffield looked like it was going backwards; one of the city’s best small music venues, the Black Swan, which had hosted the Sex Pistols and the first Clash gig, had closed. There were sparks of activity in the city, but they weren’t being nurtured. One of the first things to bring some focus and put some momentum into what was happening in Sheffield was a fanzine called Gun Rubber run by Paul Bower. He championed the Cabs from his first issue, and his commitment to the cause increased when the Cabs recorded their first demo, including a number of songs with challenging titles like ‘Baader Meinhof’, ‘Control Addict’ and ‘Do the Mussolini (Headkick)’. Gun Rubber gave a cassette of these tracks a rave review. ‘Relief at last from the avalanche of so-called new wave. No thrashing two chords heavy metal riffs here to pogo to. Disco music for the 90s. Brilliant.’

  Early Cabaret Voltaire shows were ad hoc, at various venues, including a pub called the Hallamshire, which became well known for small gigs. Another early one was in August 1977 promoted jointly with Gun Rubber at the Crucible’s Studio, an annexe to the main theatre. In December 1977 they hired the Penthouse on Dixon Lane (the Penthouse was the last club Peter Stringfellow owned before leaving the city). The gig earned them their first national music press, Andy Gill in NME.

  There was little sense of an infrastructure being built at this time in Sheffield, although a number of semi-derelict buildings were being used as rehearsal spaces. But in 1977 the city had regular venues for up-and-coming punk or new-wave bands and had no record labels of note. In Manchester, Richard Boon had set up New Hormones to release a Buzzcocks single, and although the band soon signed to United Artists Records, he maintained an office on Newton Street in Manchester. Richard had a reputation for good ideas and, with so much of the music industry based in London, was one of the few people with any kind of power base in the North, albeit a tiny, undercapitalised one. Cabaret Voltaire sent a letter and cassette to Richard Boon and a bond of mutual appreciation was established. The month the Limit opened, Cabaret Voltaire, at the invitation of Richard Boon, had a gig at Lyceum, bottom of a Buzzcocks bill that included the Slits and John Cooper Clarke. They were still finding the dominant audience reactions were hostility and/or disbelief, especially on the occasions the Cabs would leave the stage halfway through their set and stand in the audience just listening to the drum machine and tape loops playing.

  We were still some months away from ‘Warm Leatherette’, and over a year from ‘Are “Friends” Electric?’ and ‘New Muzick’, but in Sheffield, at the end of 1977, Paul Bower had identified electronic, industrial, futuristic music close to home. He’d picked up on the Human League (before they’d even played a gig) and made a connection between their work and the Cabs. In the seventh issue of Gun Rubber he declared, ‘There is a brand new wave round the corner and it’s nothing to do with bondage pants and three nights at the Rainbow. Cabaret Voltaire and the Human League are part of that movement. Support them.’

  The Human League had been formed out of a band called the Future, which included Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh (Marsh had previously featured in a band called Musical Vomit). Ware was a fan of pop stuff, soul, Motown, but there was plenty of common ground; for example, both were obsessed with Brian Eno. They recruited singer Phil Oakey, who had esoteric tastes in music – contemporary jazz, and Frank Zappa – and a proper job, working as a porter at the Hallamshire Hospital on Glossop Road.

  Human League started performing live in June 1978 and played at Limit for the first time on 25 July. They soon made their mark, recording a John Peel session that was broadcast on 11 August 1978 and included a version of ‘Being Boiled’. They also supported the Rezillos at the Music Machine in London, where Charles Shaar Murray gave them an enthusiastic review in NME. ‘They whack the shit out of NY’s overrated Suicide simply by dint of intellectual rigour, superior imagination and a far more inspired use of stage non-presentation.’

  With interest on radio, and positive national press, when it came to the Monday-night gig in September with Def Leppard, the Human League were in pole position to headline. Def Leppard had played their first proper gig at an end-of-term party at Westfield School in the Sheffield suburb of Mosborough only a few months earlier. They’d been writing and rehearsing for almost a year though, having found rehearsal space on the top floor of a semi-derelict spoon factory.

  Every Friday Def Leppard met for several hours, mostly concentrating on perfecting cover versions of Thin Lizzy songs; they’d modelled their twin-guitar line-up on Thin Lizzy’s. Bowie’s ‘Suffragette City’ was also in their repertoire. There was much interest in heavy rock in this era in towns and cities but there weren’t many local bands in Sheffield with the vision and desire to become the new Deep Purple, despite, potentially, a big audience; in May 1978 Black Sabbath chose to open their ‘Never Say Die’ tour at Sheffield City Hall (Van Halen were also on the bill).

  The gig at the Limit was a meeting of extremes. The electronic, futuristic Human League clearly rejected rock traditions and were in love with new technology. Def Leppard, on the other hand, embodied heavy rock traditions to the max. By the time of the Limit gig they had amassed fifty minutes of original material, including ‘Wasted’ and ‘World Beyond the Sky’, but still liked to end their set with a version of ‘Jailbreak’ by Thin Lizzy. Def Leppard’s singer was local lad Joe Elliott, who worked as a storekeeper at Osborn-Mushet Tools. At the Limit that Monday, he took to the stage stripped to the waist, with skintight loon pants and a huge wooden black cross hanging round his neck. Def Leppard had two lead guitar players; the Human League had none. The Human League made no attempt to hide the fact they were using tapes and pre-recorded sounds; the tape machine took centre stage. But they also had a strong look, although Phil Oakey’s hair hadn’t yet grown into its full splendour. A few weeks earlier, though, they’d begun to employ a Director of Visuals. Adrian Wright’s role was to source films and slides, and to project them onto the stage as the band and the tapes played.

  Another local lad, Stephen Singleton, had been to school with Joe Elliott but his tastes were more on the punk side of town. Crazy Daisy was his favourite hangout and the inspiration for his decision to form a band. ‘It was the first place I was able to get into. I saw lots of the punk bands; they all had young snotty people in them and I thought, wow, maybe I can be in a band now. The whole punk explosion came along and it showed anybody could do anything.’

  Singleton formed a band called Vice Versa and got a gig supporting Wire at the Outlook in Doncaster, then a gig at the Now Society supporting the Human League in July 1978. Singleton loved Cabaret Voltaire (‘a huge influence’) and was impressed by the Human League (‘light years ahead of us in terms of presentation’): ‘They were both from Sheffield. We’d been working away in isolation but this was revolutionary stuff. It gave us that impetus to go away and work hard.’

  Martin Fry arrived in Sheffield from Manchester in 1978 to go to university there. After he saw a gig by Cabaret Voltaire and met musicians and others on the scene, he started a fanzine called Modern Drugs. He knew Stephen from Vice Versa, as they’d both worked in the Batchelors bean factory, and Fry also interviewed Vice Versa for Modern Drugs. A short while afterwards, Vice Versa lost keyboard player David Sydenham and Martin Fry ended up joining the band. Mark White from the band was impressed with Fry’s leather coat, while Stephen liked that he was well read but also understood songs, ideas and structures and what could be achieved by aiming for intelligent, electronic dance music.


  During the post-punk period, connections were being made, including between Manchester and Liverpool and between Sheffield and Manchester, in all sorts of ways, not all of them strictly musical. Richard Kirk remembers going over to Manchester a lot when punk came along. At one point he and Stephen Mallinder were going out with two sisters from Manchester. ‘We used to go to the Ranch and Pips occasionally. There used to be a two o’clock train back to Sheffield so we’d often just nip over, you know, go for a night out there. Pips used to play great music. There was nothing like that in Sheffield, nothing at all at that point anyway.’

  In Manchester plans grew for a new venue. The Electric Circus had closed, but a few gigs were being hosted at Rafters, a basement club in the building housing Fagin’s, the cabaret club where the likes of the Dooleys had featured earlier in the decade. At Rafters in 1978 Friday and Saturday nights were given over to a successful soul and funk disco hosted by DJs Colin Curtis, John Grant and Mike Shaft. Mike was a respected name on the scene, and was then at the beginning of his extended time as a specialist and very influential black music DJ on the local commercial station Piccadilly Radio. He also played at Pips, and went on in the early 1980s to host the Main Event, Tuesday nights at Placemate 7 (the old Twisted Wheel club). He played outside Manchester too, including Videotech in Huddersfield (an old cinema, now a casino) and Angels in Burnley.

  In April 1978, midweek, away from the soul and funk weekend, Rafters had witnessed one of Joy Division’s most important early gigs, when they took part in the nationwide Stiff/Chiswick Challenge, a battle of the bands contest that had previously held heats in London, Liverpool and Glasgow. The winning artist was promised the chance to record for Stiff Records. Joy Division had already played the venue a handful of times and were picked to close the evening. Taking to the stage a long time after midnight in front of a dwindling crowd, they failed to win over either the judges of the competition or the Sounds reviewer, Mick Wall, who was scathing about their ‘mock heroics’, describing them as ‘Iggy imitators acting out their sons-of-World-War-Two histrionics’.