was a part of on the All-Dayer scene. What happened was, the first portable video machine became available to venues, and they had one at Birmingham Powerhouse. It was like a jukebox and they had Malcolm McLaren’s ‘Buffalo Gals’ on there, and that was it, you couldn’t get near it for the kids watching. They’d be like, ‘Man, I can’t believe it, he’s spinning on his head, rewind it.’ It really was mind-blowing.” For Hazel and many of his contemporaries, electro became the soundtrack to a whole new culture. “We went back to Sheffield and, like all the other dance crews, began practicing what we had seen,” he recalls. “By the next All-Dayer, you had kids there in tracksuits doing the acrobatics they had been practicing. Soon the circles became bigger and bigger and the noise in the rooms was incredible as everyone watched the break-dancers and body poppers. So the electro really did bring in a rapid change around.” All the Northern towns had their own dance crews with often very young breakers competing on lino (linoleum) laid down outside shopping centers and in schoolyards. “The first crews soon began to emerge—Broken Glass in Manchester, Rock City in Nottingham, Solar City Rockers in Leeds, and us SMAC 19 in Sheffield,” says Hazel. Their name came from the initials on the ex-Navy waistcoats they wore. “SMAC 19 was basically the Sheffield Jazz Funk dance crew who had been dancing together at the All-Dayers. We used to practice our moves at this place called Chatoos, a reggae [shebeen] club. This is where we gelled as a dance unit.” One of the key clubs for this new electro-funk movement was Legend in Manchester, where Hazel and his crew made a regular pilgrimage. “Legend was massive for us, totally off the scale, as it had that subsonic sound system, and when they played things like Hashim’s ‘Al-Naafiysh,’ everyone would go ballistic,” says Hazel. “We used to go there all the time and sleep at the station waiting for the train back to Sheffield in the morning.” For Legend DJ Greg Wilson (whose mixes for Mike Shaft’s show T.C.O.B – Taking Care of Business on Piccadilly Radio began in the pivotal year of 1982), rather than being a footnote in the history of U.K. dance music overshadowed by house, the era of electro and electro-funk was the missing piece of the jigsaw. “The electro-funk era was the catalyst that enabled the old to become the new—it was right at the crossroads as
far as British dance culture is concerned,” he says. “However, because it was Black-led, at a time when Black people were still very much marginalized in this country, the whole era has been obscured. But in places like Manchester, Nottingham, and Sheffield, where the Black scene was strong, the lineage of the house scene connects directly to the electro-funk era.” It wasn’t long before Winston Hazel started spinning similar electro-funk sounds in the clubs of Sheffield to a predominantly Black crowd of dancers from the All-Dayer scene. “Turnups was a reggae venue with this massive, amazing sound system, and when I started playing there, it began to attract the Black soul heads from the All-Dayer crowd,” says Hazel. “So it gave me the opportunity to play a lot of the new electronic music I was buying at the time.” It was at Turnups that Parrot first heard Hazel spin. “I knew of ‘Winni’ because he’d been around and doing stuff from the early days of electro with SMAC 19, and I can honestly say that I’ve never met anyone who was more driven to get to the future than Winston Hazel in 1980s Sheffield,” says Barratt. “I suppose one could muse about what drove that and whether it sprang from a need to escape a gray, mundane, and racist present and how it fits into an ongoing twentieth-century narrative of Afrofuturism... Ultimately, Mr. Hazel was a man who lived for future-music and had a tremendous enthusiasm to play the records that excited him to as many people as he could.” While the All-Dayer scene and the arrival of electro-funk had a profound effect on Sheffield’s new school of electronic producers, their foundations were also laid in the creative uproar of post-punk. Alongside the Human League (who would mutate into Heaven 17, pioneers of Sheffield’s electronic soul along with ABC), the group at the head of this revolutionary pack was Cabaret Voltaire. Taking their group name from the famous early 1900s Dada nightclub in Zurich, school friends Richard H. Kirk, Stephen Mallinder, and Chris Watson began experimenting with sound collages, musique concrète, and processing in the bedroom of Watson in the mid-1970s. But it was after setting up their own studio on the top floor of an old industrial building and former cutlery workshop on Portobello Street that the group’s DIY creativity was really let loose. “It was about all these little studios and rehearsal spaces in old factory buildings, a bit like
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