J is For Jarvis

Written as the final assessment for a La Trobe University Study Tour to Sheffield in June 2015.

Prologue: Trashed on Cider

Fig1: Trashed on Cider. ImageNMJoyce2015

The musical heritage of Sheffield is quite literally writ large on the city walls: a 30 foot high brushed steel poem hangs from student accommodation building The Forge. (Figure 1.) Trashed on Cider was commissioned in 2005 as an attempt to attract a younger audience to Sheffield’s literary festival Off the Shelf. Its author is Pulp front-man and city son Jarvis Cocker. Jarvis has said that he “used to take the piss out of all the clichéd things of Sheffield. Every new building has to be called Steel City something and feature scissors or knives”. Visitors to Sheffield’s Millennium Museum gift-shop can purchase two varieties of prints depicting the city alphabetically. Jarvis icons fill the J space in both, nestled between Ice Hockey and Kelham Island in one, and Industry and Knives and Forks in the other. 

Fig2: Sheffield Alphabet

The literary-minded can order a folded A3 Poetic Tours of Sheffield map upon which Trashed on Cider is a feature.  Local pubs sell A4 prints of Jarvis drawings for £10.He may not be quite a Sheffield cliché ripe for a mocking, but Jarvis has certainly become the iconographic poster boy for a city repositioning itself as one of knowledge and culture. 

Something Changed

In the later decades of the twentieth century, Sheffield shifted from being a prosperous city of quality steel production to little more than a bleak shell of post-industrial gloom. In the twenty-first century however, Sheffield is attempting to take advantage of success wrought by a music industry developed seemingly by accident. How much of Sheffield’s promotion of all things “Jarvis” stems from a genuine pride in him specifically, and the town’s music heritage generally? How much is self-conscious rebranding for a new century?  In considering the circumstances that lead to the positioning of Jarvis as favoured city son, I have examined the specific conditions integral in the organic evolution of a vibrant arts scene in the 1980s; the spectacular failure of the short-lived National Centre for Popular Music; and how Jarvis’s use of Sheffield landmarks and colloquialisms in his lyrics has strengthened his cultural capital for and of Sheffield.

The musical history of Sheffield did not spring forth fully-formed in 1980, from the deserted forge of a steel factory. Dave Russell describes the North as having “had an exceptional capacity for music making and a generally heightened music sensibility” due to the quality of the northern voluntary musical culture – that is, brass bands & choirs. The mid-nineteenth century saw the emergence of brass bands as a response to the working class culture that arrived with industrialisation. In Sheffield and the surrounding areas, collieries and factories maintained work bands - the Loxley Silver Band was established in North Sheffield in 1889 and has played since without a break. Stephen Mallinder charts the city’s musical timeline: from pre-war big-band sounds; the post-war jazz period and subsequent migrant influence on the Northern Soul brand; to soul, ska and blue-beat. By the time work was forcibly removed from the equation, the existing musically diverse atmosphere made space for artistic creativity to flourish.

The Last Day of the Miners’ Strike

Harsh economic conditions influenced by the OPEC oil crises of the 1970s were harbingers for the 1979 election of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister. Thatcher’s term was characterised by the “dismantling of nationalized industries, a push for privatization and reduced public spending.” In 1980, the anti-worker nature of Conservative government policies saw the loss of 50,000 job losses in the Sheffield steel industry alone. Jarvis notes in the documentary The Beat is the Law that he was “not directly affected by the job losses” but the rather by the “general feeling” of the city. Long-term workers’strikes, police action and extreme poverty were unsurprising outcomes of the high unemployment. What was unexpected was the influence the social upheaval had on the city’s music scene:

Being on the dole gave us the time and imagination to get really good, and Sheffield's industrial decline meant there were loads of places to rehearse, cheap. We built our own gear, but money was tight.

High unemployment allowed individuals the time to be creative. Empty workshops provided space for rehearsal, performance and recording. Cheap equipment, used to record industrial found sounds, created a new, electronic beat. These factors were fostered by Sheffield’s unique position as the “heart of the Socialist Republic of South York”, which saw unusually high levels of local government support for unemployed artists. Even the equipment used to make music changed in favour of cheaper, home-made options typically electronic in origin.

Do You Remember the First Time?

Pulp played their first gig at The Leadmill on 16 August 1980. Advertised on a bright red and yellow screen-printed poster, they were billed eleventh out of a dozen acts appearing at the “Bouquet of Steel” album launch. (Figure 3). By all accounts, the band’s performance was a shambles. Future Pulp drummer Russell Senior was in the crowd that day, and his handwritten review noted that while the band was fun and the appearance of the front man entertaining, the keyboardist didn’t know the songs and the guitars were out of tune. Jarvis backs up the assessment: “the drummer forgot some of [the song] and the bass player fell off stage... we went down very well for comedy value.” It’s reasonable to assume that had Pulp not achieved the level of international success that they did, then the specificities of Bouquet of Steel” gig would have been forgotten. Rather, the day would have been absorbed into the collective memory built around the core visual cues of the day – the venue and the art.

Fig 3: Leadmill poster by Martin Bedford, 1980

The necessitous do-it-yourself approach of unemployed artists seeking new forms of musical expression and community support coalesced in the formation of a non-profit community centre. A disused flour mill built around a central courtyard was reclaimed from dereliction by a “disparate group of idealistic hippies and punks” in response to the lack of cultural facilities available.

The afore-mentioned red and yellow poster was one of the earliest examples of almost 2000 posters and fliers produced by artist Martin Bedford, who lived and worked at the Leadmill from its inception. The venue was influenced by similar clubs already running in Amsterdam, London and San Francisco, which prioritised creative environment over financial sensibilities. Bedford feels that the Leadmill community “were doing something in the face of adversity, and [his] job was to add another dimension to the whole experience and brighten the place up accordingly.” Today, the Leadmill is a nightclub with a cartoon Jarvis painted on its front doors. It is recognised, in the same way that the Haçienda was, for Manchester, as being an influential part of the city’s music heritage.  The major difference being, however, that the Leadmill has not been converted into “city centre homes”. Yet.

TV Movie

The industrial landscape of Sheffield literally became embedded within a new sound being assembled by Leadmill artists. The 2010 documentary The Beat is the Law is a catalogue of  musicians extolling the virtues of recording the “found sounds” of power tools, steam hammers, dropped forge hammers, steel works – “the constant noise you went to sleep with” – and turning them into a rhythm. Played on a loop “with some slappin’ bass and a funky drive” the new musical genre of “industrial funk” was born. Senior describes it as a “vivid, excitin’ powerful place that give ‘ee a buzz”.

During the documentary Senior also gives an account of his involvement with the National Union of Miners, which had its headquarters in Sheffield at the time. The Leadmill operated as an active community centre that supported its city’s ailing workforce and benefit gigs for striking unions and unemployed artists were held regularly. Although, as Richard Hawley wryly notes, these were often the only gigs musicians could get themselves booked for. Three decades later, Pulp song Last Day of the Miner’s Strike quietly underscores the documentary film of striking miners, police actions and middle-aged musicians discussing their feelings about Margaret Thatcher. But the song was written in 2001 to fulfil a contractual obligation for a “Best Of” compilation album. Jarvis admits “it’s a bit iffy writing about the Miners’ Strike when I didn’t know that much about it [and] had no interest in politics at the time”. The production of the documentary was partially funded by Urban Splash, the “regeneration company” responsible for the urban renewal project gentrifying the council housing estate Park Hill. Thus, despite its historical nature and value as an oral record, the overall aspect of the documentary is that of a cultural marketing project in nostalgia.

What Do You Say?

Jarvis’s practice of singing in an identifiably Northern accent allows Sheffield natives to easily identify his regionaility. Likewise, his lyrics characteristically make use of Sheffield locations and colloquial speech, providing a kind of coded “insider knowledge” moment of recognition for the home-town fans. The use of localised expression in popular music is relatively uncommon but when it is present, it contributes significantly to the artists’ success. Dave Russell notes that the use of “demotic slang by the Beatles & other Merseyside Beat-Makers of the early 1960s” as significant in establishing and cementing their status locally. Andy Bennett specifically defines Jarvis's “elongated vowel sounds characteristic of his native South Yorkshire dialect” as a focal point for his recognisability. Conversely, the same experience can be expanded to give visitors an “outsider recognition” that can be marketed as music heritage tourism.

Sex City opens with Jarvis breathlessly reading out a list of Sheffield suburbs. DeepFried in Kelvin name-checks a shopping centre and a gigantic housing development built in the 1960s. Wickerman, written in 2001, references at least a dozen specific Sheffield sites and terms, from the Leadmill and the Forge Dam, to little mesters suffering lung diseases. The directions given to a lover’s meeting point are a map that would only be recognised by a Sheffield native:

Just behind the station,

Before you reach the traffic island

A river runs through a concrete channel

I took you there once; I think it was after the Leadmill

A number of the sites name-checked in Wickerman either no longer exist or have changed. It is a song heavy in nostalgia for a recently-past Sheffield that exists only for local fans. The Beatles’ Penny Lane is a “kind of nostalgic” map first shared between McCartney and Lennon, and then with Liverpudlians. Likewise Jarvis charts a coded lyrical landscape that evokes nostalgic responses from Sheffielders able to recognise and place themselves within the song’s scenery. However, Philip Long extends the appeal to the music tourist who seeks images of “cities conveyed through song...fixed and static in the imagination”. Long argues that the attraction of “locations frozen in musical time” contributes to them becoming an “easy sell” for cities wishing to draw what he terms “niche fan tourists”. This is supported by the number of projects promoting Sheffield’s music heritage: the mobile application Sheffield Music Map, based on Jarvis’s “Musical Map of Sheffield” radio program; the website Uncommon People which charts the “DNA of Sheffield music” as a responsive ‘family tree’; and even a Heritage Award plaque for Pulp, installed at the Leadmill.

Yesterday

The Leadmill & Music Heritage Award plaque.

ImageNMJoyce2015.

The Heritage Award ostensibly acknowledges the venue as the site of Pulp’s first gig and recognises the band’s contribution to music in Sheffield. Pulp appeared at the presentation ceremony and while drummer Nick Banks said that the award was “better than being kicked in the shins” Jarvis’s only reported comments were amusing reminiscences of the day. However, as noted in a recent UK Music report, the plaques can also “provide music heritage tourist trails with a key focal point... be used to encourage more visitors [and] are great opportunities to use the media to further promote local music heritage tourism”. According to the same report, “6.5 million music-loving tourists attended a festival or gig in 2012, generating £2.2 billion spending in the process.”  Thus, while name-checking specific locations may give local fans a sense of ownership and belonging, the recognition factor for the niche fan tourist is a commodity with a dollar (or pound) value attached. It is reasonable to conclude that Jarvis is aware of and submits to the hagiographic narrative being imposed by extern interests.

Jarvis introduces his BBC6 radio program Musical Map of Sheffield describing Sheffielders as people seemingly not fond of those who take themselves too seriously:

The good thing about the Sheffield character is that people aren’t impressed with whether you’re supposed to be somebody... they really don’t like people... trying to throw [their] weight around. That’s not gonna get you very far. In fact you’ll just get decked.

The National Centre for Popular Music (The Centre) opened to much fanfare in March 1999. By December of the following year it had closed its doors – almost in embarrassment – as projected visitor numbers failed to materialise. At the time of its opening, Jarvis declared that the Centre was “a complete waste of money”.

Former NCPM, now SHU Student Union. ImageNMJoyce2015

£15 million was spent on new technology and it was heralded as an “interactive temple to pop music” with “few items of memorabilia or waxworks of famous pop stars”. The temple consisted of four strangely compelling, massive drums. Of course, they fulfilled Jarvis’ requirement for Sheffield cliché, being clad in shining stainless steel.

A critic from The Independent expressed displeasure at being offered “the chance to edit a Phil Collins live video” and instead recommended that live music would be of greater relevance to modern audiences. The review hit a nerve: after its closure a Centre board member admitted that a visitor survey had since revealed that “people want to experience live music”. The Centre’s Development Director also claimed that the Phil Collins feature was “one of the most popular’. In 2003 Sheffield Hallam University bought the building for a song at just £1.8 million. It is now occupied by the University Student Union. Mallinder draws attention to the Centre’s lack of any real “celebration” of Sheffield’s musical success and describes the farce as having been “fundamentally due to the Centre itself misreading the public perception of popular music, its representation and consumption.”

There is a certain irony in a city that prides itself on its musical heritage rejecting a national institution for popular music just eighteen months after it opened. The Centre’s failure illustrates how difficult – if not impossible – it can be to demand a specific response from an audience that has not been appropriately engaged or acknowledged. It seems that the greatest error in judgement made by the Centre was taking itself too seriously, and the Sheffield response was a good decking.

Cocaine Socialism

The development of a new sound and music scene in Sheffield throughout the 80s was born of hardship and deprivation. Somewhat ironically, that music scene now provides the basis for Sheffield being positioned commercially as a niche destination for music tourism. Sounds and images identifying Sheffield as uniquely ‘Sheffield’ were used by an independent art community to create a distinct identity that become recognisable beyond the city borders. Sheffield’s musical heritage is now being neatly and successfully  packaged by commercial and local government interests as a contained nostalgia product. It is designed to appeal to that specific breed of tourist who experiences an auditory response to nostalgic prompts, and so seeks connections with sound, as well as place and time: “I was here at this spot, mentioned in this song, that I can now hear and sing to myself and remember what it was that made me love the song.” Jarvis flourishes as commercial collateral because Sheffield sees itself in his irreverent, self-aware aesthetic and the ‘niche music fan’ that identifies with that aesthetic wants to visit the town that developed it.

Epilogue: Don’t Let him Waste Your Time

Record Not For Distribution. Paris.

ImageNMJoyce2015

It seems Jarvis’s marketability has value even as a foreign import. He no longer lives in Sheffield and has moved to France, where this year an energy drink company selected Jarvis to ‘soundtrack’ its Paris exhibition space. He also designed “invented record labels” which would be exhibited in the company gallery. Visitors would be given free soundtracks! The appropriate media went out and niche music fans as far abroad as Australia learned of the exhibition and made plans to attend. It is possible that something was lost in translation, or that Jarvis’ appeal isn’t as universal as assumed. The gallery was closed to the public and the “free soundtracks” were for display purposes only. Cunts are indeed still running the world.

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