Sheffield 1980s overview

Home to the National Centre for Popular Music, Sheffield, England, is the heartland of Britain’s rust belt. Built on coal and steel industries, it was devastated by the tsunami of world economic change in the 1980s. The contemporaneous wave of innovative music produced in the city owed far less to local traditional music—e.g., brass bands—than it did to the musical possibilities offered by the very electronic technology that contributed to the closing of the city’s...