promoter Matt Swift started a new weekly party called Jive Turkey at Mona Lisa’s, a small venue above Maximillions. “I’d never had any ambitions to DJ before but was totally bored with what was or wasn’t going on in Sheffield at the time and felt I had to make an effort to change things,” says Barratt, who began as the sole DJ. “The club itself was tiny with a really low ceiling. A backdoor venue up a couple of flights of stairs that hadn’t been refitted since the ’70s. Excellently seedy.” One of the early visitors to the club that became known as Jive Turkey was Winston Hazel. “When I first went, there were only a handful of Black people, but the crowd was very funky and alternative in their fashions. Not mainstream at all, and that resonated with me,” he recalls. “I felt very at home there. To begin with, it was just a place for me to go and dance and feel free, but soon Parrot invited me come and play some of my music.” The night grew slowly but started to attract more dancers who embraced the eclectic soundtrack. “I was playing a mishmash of things at first partly because I wasn’t fully up to speed with current releases. Winston wasn’t really interested in any of the older music; it was all about what had come out that week,” says Barratt. “What I brought was the electro and the English street soul, and after a while, more of my crowd of dancers started to come down,” adds Hazel. While Barratt began by mainly playing jazz, funk, and soul against the electro-funk of Hazel, he soon began to search for the new electronic sounds he heard
through his DJ partner. “The slant of the night rapidly became more about new records than old records,” Barratt says. With the premise that “anybody could get in, and you could do whatever the fuck you wanted,” Jive Turkey moved to the much larger neo-classical Sheffield City Hall in 1987. There it welcomed a multicultural crowd of dancers at a time when Sheffield nightlife was pretty much segregated. “When the All-Dayer scene died,” says Hazel, “Jive Turkey became one of the only places in the country where the Black crowd could get the fusion of music and people they liked and were used to. Importantly, it also had a dedicated jazz room, which drew jazz dancers from across the country.” Although they were much older than most of the young dancers, Kirk and Mallinder of Cabaret Voltaire were regulars. “Richard and Mal came to Jive Turkey right from the off, and were very friendly and easy to get along with,” says Barratt. “Totally into the kind of music getting played and really interested in anyone who was attempting to do different stuff in the town. I reckon the importance of the Cabs and their willingness to embrace and give space to younger musically minded people in the city can’t ever be overstated.” Alongside the jazz, soul, funk, hip-hop, disco, new wave, and whatever Parrot and Hazel picked out of their crates, Jive Turkey was now rocking to the new DIY sounds arriving from America. “The timing of house music was totally accidental. But what was deliberate was the explicit connection made between the electronic music of the city and the music of Black
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( above and following ) Dancers at Jive Turkey at Sheffield City Hall Ballroom, 1987.
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