One of the key figures in this story is Richard Barratt aka DJ Parrot, producer with seminal Warp Records duo Sweet Exorcist—with Cabaret Voltaire’s Richard H. Kirk—and founder of the historic Sheffield club Jive Turkey. “During that period, Sheffield City Council had set itself up to be seen as the antidote to everything Tory [Conservative], flying the red flag over the town hall and all that,” he recalls. “So being young and idealistic, growing up in a very working-class place like that with a long history of trade unionism and activism, it becomes part of the way you identify yourself. Specifically, if a powerful right-wing zealot [Thatcher] is attacking the things that you feel part of and have pride in.” Out of these harsh times, there grew a single-mindedness and fierce creative spirit. “The caring welfare state of the time was open to a bit of creative abuse, and you could get your dole and housing benefit paid, no questions asked,” Barratt recalls. “My only ambition at the time was to avoid doing a boring job that I hated. Not having much money wasn’t a problem, to be able to use time as you wanted seemed to have far more importance than getting a wage. I liked to view it as a working- class equivalent of the student grant that posh kids who went to university got. It allowed us the freedom to broaden our minds through the study of things that interested us.” It was through the Northern and Midlands All-Dayer dance and DJ scene of the early to mid-1980s that Sheffield’s future electronic pioneers coalesced, in a culture that refused to be part of Thatcher’s divided Britain. This network of parties in ballrooms like the Ritz in Manchester, Rock City in Nottingham, Tiffany’s in Leeds, and Powerhouse in Birmingham were home to crews from across the country dancing to jazz-funk and fusion. “The All-Dayers played a major role in bringing people together from all the different areas,” explains Greg Wilson, DJ at Manchester’s Legend and Wigan Pier. “This was a dedicated crowd that was totally prepared to travel in order to hear the latest tunes. We were living in Thatcher’s Britain, and jobs, especially in the Black areas, were scarce. A large percentage [of dancers] would have been unemployed.” One of the dancers at the All-Dayers was Winston Hazel, Barratt’s partner in Jive Turkey and member of pivotal Sheffield electronic trio Forgemasters. “The All-Dayer scene was where we all went as a crew who had met up at youth clubs prior to
that,” he recalls. “I had started to DJ around Sheffield at clubs like Maximillions [owned by Sheffield nightclub impresario Max Omare], but a lot of my friends who liked the music couldn’t get in because they were Black. So the All-Dayers became very, very important to us. We used to go as a coach posse across the country, and it was such an energizing and inspiring environment to to be in—very natural and free.” While Hazel and his friends were serious dancers, he recalls watching in awe at rival crews taking to the floor to the heavy jazz-fusion of Colin Curtis, original DJ from Rafters in Manchester and later Berlin: “In Birmingham, you had jazz-fusion crews called the Convicts and Brute Force, and in terms of freestyle dancing, they were off the scale. They mixed contemporary jazz styles with fusion foot tapping—just really funky but also very elegant.” Somewhere between the contemporary balletic style of the Jazz Defektors from Manchester and the fierce fusion stepping dancing of IDJ (I Dance Jazz crew) from London, Hazel’s Sheffield crew found their own style. “We were exposed to all those different styles and came up with our own thing, which was more funk-based, both fast, slow, and expressive with poses and injections of moves for the opposition to beat,” Hazel explains. The All-Dayer scene mutated when a new electronic music emanating from America hit England. In a front-page article from May 1984 entitled “Electro: The Beat That Won’t Be Broken,” The Face magazine captured the arrival of this new alien electronic music: “Rapid and solid, fast and frantic, the Electro beat is the new Sound of the City—as stimulating as the urban jungle that spawned it. Dismissed as a craze, a novelty, denounced as sinister robot music devoid of ‘real’ emotion, it proved to be a tough seed that took root on England’s pavements.” Richard Barratt remembers the arrival of this raw soulful sound. “Just the sheer impact of hearing [Afrika Bambaataa and the Soul Sonic Force’s] ‘Planet Rock’ or [Man Parrish’s] ‘Hip Hop, Be Bop (Don’t Stop)’ on a big system blew me away,” he says. Many of the dancers who graced the floors of the All-Dayers now battled through break-dancing at key venues like Rock City in Nottingham, home to DJ Jonathan Woodliffe. “With the electro came the dancing,” says Hazel, “and I remember exactly when that shift happened for the younger crowd that I
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