Which got me thinking. As many of you will know, I went to university in Sheffield, and spent four mostly very happy years there. I loved the city, and I’ve always been pained by the tendency of those who don’t know it to write it off as a typical northern hellhole. While Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds have been rehabilitated in the public eye as they’ve been regenerated economically, Sheffield still seems to exist in some vague collective memory of the unpleasant 1980’s North. Weather maps, that handy barometer of city status, invariably show Leeds before Sheffield. If it wasn’t for The Full Monty, it’s easy to think people would forget the city exists at all.

And yet Sheffield boasts, amongst other things, one of the richest musical underground histories of any city. Beginning with the post-punk era, Sheffield bands have been consistently some of the most challenging and interesting, and often commercially successful: from the Human League, Heaven 17, ABC and Cabaret Voltaire in the early 80’s, to Pulp, the All-Seeing I and its offshoot Eye Monster and Moloko in the 90’s. Plus, as the home of Warp Records, Autechre and Gatecrasher, the city made a vital contribution to the club explosion of the 90’s, with Gatecrasher’s epic 24hr marathon - at which a couple of my braver friends did bar work - probably the dance scene’s most well-known Millenium Eve offering. Not to mention that one of the biggest-selling rock bands of the late 80’s, Def Leppard, and the band behind the fastest selling debut album of all time, the Arctic Monkeys, all hail from the city.

And yet, held up against Liverpool or Manchester, Sheffield is nowhere in public awareness. There are no bus tours, no elaborate BBC Easter programmes, no Mike Winterbottom films, to celebrate the scene (although there’s this reasonable documentary). How many of the bands mentioned above did you know were from the city? Indeed, the city’s attempt to recognise its and the rest of the country’s pop music acheivemetns - the National Centre for Popular Music - was a complete disaster, not in small part because the city’s people saw it as a bit silly. In Manchester, it would have had a chance.

So why this lacklustre performance, if not of the actual artists of the city, then of the idea of the city as a cultural centre? A quick listen to Hawley’s music offers an answer. Rooted in some imagined America, some time before punk and probably before the sixties, the album can’t honestly be said to represent any serious evocation of Sheffield life. And, thinking about it, the same goes for most Sheffield music. The Human League’s eyeliner-soaked energy-synth melancholy reflected the harsh landscape that created it, but sought a distant glamour with its gender-bending style. The Leppard never hid their determination to win an American audience with sounds they’d recognise. Even Pulp generally eschewed geographic specifics for a sort of universalist poor-geek solidarity (most in evidence on “Mis-Shapes”); their most obviously rooted lyrics are about London (”Mile End,” and “Common People”’s references to St. Martin’s College). While Joy Division/New Order confronted a range of apocalytic and fantasy images in their lyrics and videos, their essential misery always seemed to have seeped up from the streets of the then-beleaguered city. And the “Liverpool sound” is incredibly clearly defined, with the La’s and the Coral making no efforts to hide their debt to their Beatle forefathers.

The simple truth is there’s just not enough in Sheffield to build a mythology on. No crucial role in imperial trade; no guilt-ridden involvement in the slave trade, or proud part in abolition. A few closed-down steel factories, of course, but even the major battles of the 80’s industrial decline were fought elsewhere in Yorkshire. The empty building next to the old City Hall, that was built as the HQ of the National Union of Mineworkers but quickly abandoned, neatly summarises Sheffield’s sense of having not quite taken proper part in the industrial boom, and postindustrial decline, that drove British northern pop music for forty years or more.

Hawley’s one clear use of Sheffield detail makes the point. Coles Corner, the nominated album, is named after a meeting point in the city popular with lovers. I’ll admit to racking my brains when I heard this, as I’ll admit to not hearing of it when I was there. It turns out that it’s between two main commercial streets, and is so named because the Cole Brothers department store (the local face of John Lewis) used to be there. Now it’s a HSBC. As a point of collective memory go, it’s fairly mediocre. The Monkeys are discovering this now: in a recent interview on American radio, they blushingly batted away the interviewer’s attempts to pin down details of the “Sheffield scene.” Gatecrasher was referred to as “something our brothers told us about.” Attempts to build some sort of Madchester-style pop moment about Sheffield are doomed to fail when the live scene consists of the Leadmill, the University, and a few small pubs.

Sheffield is pulling itself up, of course, with the usual formula of designer clothes stores, lottery-funded musuems, and trendy branding. But its heart isn’t really in it. The much-heralded cultural industries quarter, designed to use the city’s creative heritage as a springboard for economic growth, was frankly a disaster. The pop museum now a student’s union, the area’s dominating business now is a Spearmint Rhino. Previous attempts at revitalisation, based around the city’s equally under-recognised sporting heritage, were equally doomed. Because Sheffield never found a really strong narrative of despair in the 1980’s, it naturally hasn’t embraced the narrative of rebirth that has captured Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds.

Instead, as always, Sheffield’s mind is on something else. Hawley’s Sinatra impersonation, like Phil Oakey’s eyeliner, shows the Sheffield spirit is still about escape and about fantasy: making something as mundane as a department store and turning it into romance. The Arctic Monkeys do boast a strong sense of place, and it’s lovely to hear the references to Hunter’s Bar and Rotherham in “Fake Tales of San Fransisco;” but let’s not start calling them anything as grand as a Sheffield Sound. The real spirit of Sheffield has one eye on the past, the future, the other side of the sea, wherever. Lying in the gutter and staring at the stars, I suppose. That’s what makes the city so invigorating. That, I think, is why I remember it so fondly: it’s a place that can’t help but encourage dreaming. That’s why it’s Hawley, and not the Monkeys, who really represents Sheffield in the Mercury shortlist. I wish him luck.

Richard Hawley website
Richard Hawley on Myspace
Listen to Richard Hawley
Watch “Cole’s Corner”:

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