Sheffield

I still wouldn't say I'm great at geography but as a teenager I was, I guess, a stereotypical Londoner in that The North was just one great amorphous mass to me. Indeed, when I arrived at university in 1985, I was surprised to find that Liverpool was on the coast and just how close it was to Manchester!

During my teens, we'd go on holiday to the Lake District at Easter but I don't really remember paying much attention to how we got there. It was just a long drive on the M1 and the M6. And once, when I was sixteen, we went on a rugby tour to Hull and I had know idea where it was, I just knew we'd gone a long way north.

When I got seriously into electronic music, around the age of thirteen or fourteen, I don't think any of the bands that I liked came from London so I began to become familiar with some other place names around the UK. I still didn't know where they were or anything about them, and I built up romanticised images of them in my head. I think that, courtesy of the photos in the NME and Melody Maker, a lot of these mental images were black and white, too!

The Human League and Cabaret Voltaire were both from Sheffield, which I saw exactly how it was portrayed in the (London-centric) press: post-industrial, bleak, yet quasi-futurtistic, albeit in a slightly dystopian sense. To this day, that impression remains lodged somewhere in my mind.

The Minx and I have visited Sheffield recently, when we went to see Creep Show, and today I went back again to have lunch with my friend, Mike. In the light of day it is, of course, nothing like my mental image. It was sunny for a start, and the city was colourful and vibrant. 

But as I sit here writing, I still can't quite get that old impression out of my head, of Martin Ware, Phil Oakey, and Ian Craig Marsh, up on the second or third floor of some old factory, a wintry light coming through the windows as they make electronic music, everything in black and white.

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Reading: 'The Testaments' by Margaret Atwood