BEATS OF LOVE
150. Studio Electrophonique : The Sheffield space age, from The Human League to Pulp By Jamie Taylor.
FEEL I know a lot more about Sheffield thanks to reading this.
I loved reading about Southport and Blackpool in Bedsit Land: The Strange Worlds of Soft Cell by Patrick Clarke. The places that shaped their eccentricities and work ethic, and his vividly painted picture of maverick teaching methods in Leeds, the springboard which gave the group the confidence to take the stage. Then it unravelled.
Only James Young's handling of Nico has handled waste and decadence with the irreverence to make it laugh out loud funny. Clarke, with the protagonists closing up on the subject, didn't even make it interesting. This is masterful. Everyone and everything is fair game for Taylor's observant wit. Every page is a work of wonder that is both provocative and warm. His tendency to apologize prior to snipping at his prey is very effective.
Refreshingly, everyday folk are every bit the equal of artists which help when making the goings on in Ken Patten's Sheffield council house the thread, but other peripheral places and people also fascinate. He has a gift for sitting you in the room to really convey memorable sensory perceptions on fellow obsessives without allowing sensitivity. Obsessives unafraid of work and standing out from the crowd.
Keeping Sheffield as his focus creates unlikely asides and bedfellows; Ken Patten's daughter Michelle, hobbyists and academics, fanzine culture and indoor markets, decline and invention, Brutalist architecture and glam styling, to name but a few. Less reliant on maverick teaching methods while counterbalancing economy with imagination, gave folk the front to repurpose past art movement ideas and really push themselves over the edge, often toward the mainstream.
The great challenge was to gravitate them back toward a nondescript council house. That there's no unravelling, just a riveting read from start to finish, is a minor miracle.
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