[matilda] EVE WOOD FILMING

[worldwarfree at riseup.net]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/southyorkshire/films/2002/09/made_in_sheffield.shtml
Is a review more on richardhawley

http://www.richardhawley.co.uk/

I aint suprised atw you aint sure but in my world he rocks nick has it
more or less right the man aint any superstar etc.. Eve is doing an
interview with the man to a plug here new project and get fuding etc which
leads on from here last film..

Why Sheffield?" is a question Eve Wood neither poses nor answers in Made
In Sheffield, her 52-minute documentary on the steel city synth boom of
the late 1970s-early 1980s, but she leaves enough circumstantial evidence
lying around for the viewer to form their own conclusions.

During the years 1977-1982, three hugely important bands (Cabaret
Voltaire, the Future/the Human League/Heaven 17, and Vice Versa/ABC) along
with countless non-household names (pub rockers the Extras, the luckless
2.3, and the Joy Division-esque Artery) emerged from this apparently
unpromising environment.

Article continues
There was so little to do in 1970s Sheffield, says Heaven 17's Martyn
Ware, that the youth had to make their own fun (Gunrubber, Sheffield's
answer to Sniffing Glue fanzine, and the oddball-friendly Limit Club being
two crucial examples). This, however, surely applied to any
culturally-barren provincial town.

It may purely be a quirk of demography and pop culture that this
average-sized Yorkshire city, and not, for instance, its slightly smaller
neighbour Bradford, or the slightly larger Leeds, should have provided
such fertile soil for electronic music, but you always suspect there's
more to it than that.

"You'd go to sleep at night," says Ware, "and hear the drop forges
hammering away like a metronome. It was like a heartbeat for the whole
city." A causal connection between the rhythms of heavy industry and
brutalist/minimalist music is an interesting theory (and one Iggy Pop has
made about the motor works in Detroit).

Similarly, during a section on Kraftwerk, Wood does not make an explicit
analogy between industrial post-war Sheffield and industrial post-war
Dusseldorf, but she barely needs to. Grim surroundings, it seems,
invariably give birth to futurism, to art which aspires towards utopia.
One only need glance at the giant Soviet-style council blocks on the hill
overlooking Sheffield railway station - the optimism of 1960s civic
planning turned sour - to see where these bands were coming from
(literally and figuratively).

This is, of course, why the received wisdom that new romantics were
southern, cocktail-quaffing Thatcherites is so far wide of the mark: most
of the era's finest bands came from the depressed north.

The main players, however, weren't fond of the new romantic tag. "We
thought we were the punkiest band in Sheffield", says the Human League's
Phil Oakey in his enjoyably dogmatic manner. "They used three chords. We
used one finger."

Adi Newton of the Future (the League in larval form) claims his peers had
an even more radical year zero agenda than the guitar-based punk rockers.
"We were sonic terrorists," he claims, over slightly naff reconstruction
footage of a guitar being hurled from a tenement walkway. "We thought we
were destroying rock'n'roll."

There are entertaining anecdotes from the likes of Jarvis Cocker and his
sister Saskia, but the film ends suddenly in 1982, "when the bubble
burst", denying us, among other things, the tale of the greatest ever
chroniclers of Sheffield life: Cocker's own Pulp.

The arrival of a new wave of Sheffield synth fiends (Jarvis' buddies the
Fat Truckers, and the freakishly fantastic Pink Grease) suggests that a
new bubble may be forming. Time for Part II?

Thats more or less what the next film aims to do..