Made in Sheffield

If you are thinking I 'm talking about metal working, I'm not.

Sheffield in Great Britain was the birthplace of many bands - Cabaret Voltaire, The Human League, ABC, Comsat Angels, Pulp, Artery, Kraftwerk, ClockDVA, Def Leppard, 2.3, Heaven 17, Vice Versa, The Extras, I'm So Hollow, to name a few. A lot more came out of that city than most realise.

I loved this kind of music when it came out in the late 70s. I hated the music of the time - the Disco stuff (I still do; it is useless and not worthy of the label "music") - I loved The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Van Morrison. But the radios had all gone over to Disco music and it was dreadful. The music, the clothes, nothing very good came of that decade. But music suddenly got a slap in the face when the Sex Pistols came along.

I like the Sex Pistols and I certainly appreciate what they've done for music as a whole. But I did not love them. Their music was a little too hard for me. They paved the way, however, for tons of new genre of music to come out and reach many people all over the world. So many bands, songs, kinds of music were set free as a result of the Sex Pistols. That is something incredible and something wonderful.

Sheffield was ripe for an explosion of some kind. It was well-known for the metal working but little else, and kids mostly grew up in a dirty, musty place with only this industry happening. How many generations can grow up with looking forward to one vocation? There were more and more disaffected younger people there and they needed something new. And so Cabaret Voltaire formed.

From them, so many other bands came to be as well. It took time to make it onto the charts but eventually some of them did. Sometimes the most adverse conditions make for wonderful things. Writing, music, art comes more from adversity than it does from a staid life of doing what your parents and grandparents did.

Good thing! Imagine how dull a race we'd be and how far behind from our current society we would be if no one had the imagination to do something else, something new? Too dull - it's bad enough that we are still savages but to not have moved forward...

Thank you, Sex Pistols!