sadly passed away in 2001. Released with the iconic purple Warp logo stamp, designed by Ian Anderson, “Track With No Name” became an immediate anthem at Jive Turkey and clubs across the North. With the success of Funky Worm, Richard Barratt was both surprised and more than a little deflated after seeing the reaction on the dance floor to his friends’ raw, homegrown electronic sound. “I was like, fucksake, I’m stuck in a waste- of-time contract with a major label and my mates are having a right laugh,” he says. For his own foray into bleeps and bass, Barratt would turn to his old friend from Western Works, Richard H. Kirk of Cabaret Voltaire. “Richard was in a slightly similar contractual situation, so we decided to go undercover and make a record for Warp to put out,” Barratt recalls. “I was really into that idea of joining the dots between the original electronic pioneers and what was happening in Sheffield now. That did seem like an interesting message to send through the music, even though we were initially trying to be incognito because of the major- label issues.” Taking their name from a favorite Curtis Mayfield LP, Sweet Exorcist , the pair entered Western Works studio for what would become the seminal bleep techno track, “Testone.” It was to be the first record that either of them had sequenced using an Atari computer, one of the main tools that liberated dance music. “Having the computer was a nightmare, to be honest,” says Barratt. “Richard had only just got it, and neither of us had a clue how to use it. I’d got the name of the act, the name of the tune, the sample off the dodgy old disco record... But the music proved a little evasive. Can you believe we were fucking about for a week? And we still ended up putting sections down on to quarter-inch tape and editing it together because we couldn’t make the bleeding Atari do what we wanted it to do.” The “dodgy old disco record” was the vocal from Gene Page’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” that opened the track. Sampling the bleeps from Yellow Magic Orchestra “Computer Games,” “Testone” was a stark but sublime piece of electronic soul that, in the words of Simon Reynolds in De:Bug magazine, was “a classic example of bleep’s sensual austerity: the barest components (growling sub-bass, a rhythmic web of Roland 909 klang and tuss , and a nagging sequence of five bleep-tones) are woven into something almost voluptuous.” Hazel’s show on SCR helped spread these early Sheffield sounds across town. “It was a good time,” says Barratt. “Thanks to Winston, people were getting to hear the tunes on the radio as well as at the nights. Plus, the energy that the Ibiza lot brought with ecstasy was flowing through the scene, and it felt like things were really coming together.” Warp followed “Track with No Name” and Sweet Exorcist’s “Testone” with a string of bleep 12-inches from dance renegades across the North including LFO and Nightmares on
Wax from Leeds. Another important testing ground for these Northern electronic sounds was a Wednesday-night session at Occasions (the renamed Mona Lisa’s where Jive Turkey moved back to after the council restricted numbers at Sheffield City Hall) called Cuba. “[Promoter] Matt Swift and John Matten [aka Gypsy John], who ran Jive Turkey with Parrot, had got enough money together to buy a sound system to put into Occasions, which had been refurbished by then,” recalls Hazel. According to Matt Anniss in his book Join the Future : “The importance of the party was first outlined six months earlier in Jocks magazine, when Robert Gordon explained the role Cuba played in shaping the Yorkshire bleep and bass sound. ‘About thirty percent of the stuff played at Cuba is Sheffield originated,’ he explained. ‘A lot of demo tapes are tried out, it’s total hard-core dance.’” Based around a visit to Cuba, Simon Dudfield of i-D magazine wrote the seminal article on the Sheffield bleeps scene. In it he pointed to how the music was a result of the cross-pollination of the city’s White electronic heritage and the bass-heavy Black sounds of the sound systems and subsequent hard-core scene. “It felt like ‘Track With No Name’ brought together the indie crowd and the dance crowd at Jive Turkey and really was a beautiful marriage of the cultural youth camps in Sheffield,” says Hazel. The circle that connected the old and new school was completed when Richard H. Kirk and Stephen Mallinder entered the FON Studios in 1990 for a session with Rob Gordon and Mark Brydon. Subsequently produced at Western Works, Cabaret Voltaire’s 12-inch “Easy Life” was a bleep house classic dedicated to Jive Turkey. In response to what they saw as a formula being applied to what was originally very free and organic, Barratt and Kirk came up with the name Clonk for their next project. “It was just a pisstake of the bleep thing, to be honest,” laughs Barratt. “It seemed pretty daft to us that all these records were getting lumped together as ‘bleep,’ which was a very limited definition of what was going on and what the roots of the music actually were.” Released on Warp in late 1990 and remixed by Robert Gordon, Sweet Exorcist’s “Clonk (Freebase)” b/w “Clonk (Homebass),” was a minimal slab of alien techno—built around off-kilter rhythms, unsettling synth stabs, and a “mmm mmm- mmm ahhh” sample from Blue Rondo a La Turk’s “Klacto Vee Sedstein.” They followed this with the Per Clonk EP, most notable for the completely off-the-wall “Samba,” a fusion of abstract techno with Brazilian rhythms and chants that still sounds like the future today. Then came the CC EP—short for Clonk’s Coming —a resolutely uncommercial first (mini) LP for Warp consisting of seven versions of raw “jackin’” vocal and rhythm tracks. It was to signal the beginning of the end of the Sheffield bleep and bass pioneers’ relationship with Warp. Sweet Exorcist’s
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