subsequent and final 12-inch, “Popcone,” was released in the Plastex label, and Parrot, Hazel, and Brydon’s 12-inch “Yeah You!” under the name the Step was to be their final association with the label. Soon after, Rob Gordon also withdrew from Warp after various disagreements over label content. While Warp continued to release a swathe of Northern electronic records, after the closure of Jive Turkey in 1992, Barratt pursued an ever more eclectic take on dance music including a chart hit with the All Seeing I’s “Beat Goes On” on his own Earth Records label. Today, his Crooked Man dance project, picked up by DFA for albums in 2016 and 2018, has seen him reach a new generation of house heads. He is also producer for his old friend and veteran Sheffield clubber Róisín Murphy who formed Moloko in the ’90s after meeting Mark Brydon at a party. Barratt also released an EP of Hazel’s productions under the name Supafix (with Hazel’s production partner Ross Orton) on Earth Records. It was one of a number of Hazel’s post–Jive Turkey dance productions including two abstract techno 12-inches for Birmingham’s Network label with Rob Gordon. With this period of Sheffield’s electronic history starting to get the same sort of attention as the post-punk pioneers who laid the foundations, I ask Barratt what he thinks looking back on the scene he was at the forefront of. “For a few years, things were really good, disparate strands of Sheffield came together,”
he says. “Avant-garde electronic musicians, a previously marginalized group of Black kids, and the hooligan jet set (back from Ibiza) rubbed along together and created something great, a feeling and a sense of place that crystallized into the sound and attitude of Warp Records.” His old friend and DJ partner also views this coming-together as the root of what happened during those fertile years. “For the first time in Sheffield, there was unity, and it was completely natural as people began mixing in circles they would never have previously imagined,” Hazel says. “It suddenly became time for a proper reflection of the urban experience of all the youth coming through at the time and what was coming from across the water in the States.” .
Andy Thomas would like to thank Matt Anniss.
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( above ) Hazel and Barratt, originally shot for NME , 1990.
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