Music
A chat with Sheffield dance pioneer Winston Hazel
The Jive Turkey DJ and founder of Warp Records bleep pioneers Forgemasters talks the many currents running through the city’s club culture – and the origin of the distinctive “Sheffield Clang”.
Winston Hazel is an absolutely vital force in Sheffield's music scene. He is a founder of the Music City Foundation, which aims to "develop a music economy within Sheffield to generate social cohesion and create employment". He continues to DJ, produce and mastermind releases, both recording solo and as part of his aptly named new collaborative project The Originators – an outfit bringing together members of Unique 3, Altern-8, LFO, Rhythmatic, and more.
RBMA's Paths Unknown series is coming to Sheffield. Buy tickets here
But as that list of collaborators – every one a vital nexus in the very birth of British rave music's unique identity – suggests, Hazel is very much in touch with his own musical past. After all, this was a man who was one of the first to bring house music to the north of England, a good couple of years before the acid house explosion, thanks to his residency at Sheffield's unique and much beloved Jive Turkey club. And alongside Robert Gordon and Sean Maher he was one third of Forgemasters, whose Track With No Name became the first release on Warp Records, becoming a keystone in the Yorkshire bleep'n'bass sound along with LFO, Unique 3 and co, and lighting the touch paper for the whole electronic musical explosion of the 1990s.
These achievements still inform Hazel's music, and still echo through the UK and the world's underground to this day - but how much, we wondered, did these sounds owe to the culture of their home city? On November 9, Hazel appears on a panel at Sheffield’s Trafalgar Warehouse as part of Red Bull Music Academy’s Paths Unknown series (sign up for free here).
Beforehand, we caught up with him to discuss the roots of Sheffield’s unique dance culture, and his place in it.
Is there a particular character to Sheffield's musical culture?
Yes, there is, there is. People say Sheffield is built on seven hills, though it's actually about nine. So it's kind of like an island, almost like a hill fortress, and it can be quite inward looking. Here we feel “whatever people outside can do, we can do it better.” Also, because of the geography of the land, during the steel industry period when the drop hammers in the forges were going off to the east of the city, you'd get the industrial sounds ricocheting off the hills, and bouncing back across the city, so it surrounded you – it was something people used to sleep to, even.
When the drop hammers in the forges were going off to the east of the city, you'd get the industrial sounds ricocheting off the hills
My dad worked in the steelworks. You'll find similar with a lot of the legacy artists who've come out of the city. It became known as the heartbeat of the city, and no matter what you'd try and do in your music you couldn't help reflecting something of that sound: what we called “the Sheffield clang”. I think that flows through all the music here. It still exists, it reared its head properly when electronic music started to roll out, but even in people's lyrics and voices I think you can hear it. I think it knitted the city together in a lot of ways purely because you could hear it wherever you were in the city, and even if it's not there now, something of that hangs on.
So you were born and grew up in Sheffield then?
Born and bred, yep. For most of my youth I lived in a block of flats that overlooked the east end, and because we had nothing blocking our view the industrial sounds that travelled up the valley would echo off our block: it really was the sound we went to sleep to, you couldn't get away from it, it created an audio landscape.
And what about music? What did you first soak up?
For me, anything soul-based was what got my attention. My baptism was soul and funk, my preference as a youngster was leaning towards funk, disco and especially p-funk. I was never really into my parents' musical heritage, which was reggae, obviously, coming from Jamaica. I rejected that in a lot of ways – so when I got my first Amstrad [budget home hi-fi] I wouldn't let my sisters play anything but funk on it. Nobody could play reggae on it! Maybe that's just standard rebellion, as a kid that's into music you push away what's on offer until you can find your own niche.
Sheffield had a big reggae soundsystem culture from early, though – were you really not interested in those parties?
I wasn't. It just didn't reflect my experience in this grimy, dirty northern industrial city. The music didn't lend itself to what I experienced... I suppose sonically it did, and the bass culture was something I did always appreciated about reggae, but lyrically and musically it didn't ring any bells in me at all. I didn't feel like I needed to maintain the culture of my parents, it felt irrelevant for me at the time. They'd created a niche for themselves in the city as West Indians coming to the UK, a great niche that supported their needs and the needs of their peers. But although I existed within the "black ring of security" as I described it – a protective ring of culture that we existed within as young West Indian kids - we quickly tried to create our own existence here. We knew the difficulties our parents faced, but our attitudes were "that isn't happening to me, man".
I went to a predominantly white school, I didn't experience much direct racism. The language that was used was "you're like us, Winnie". I always felt like I was a part of something. When my parents talked about the difficulties they faced, and their reggae records referred to racism and stuff, I honestly felt like it represented a kind of weakness.
It's interesting you mention p-funk as a particular favourite – did you have any understanding about the fact that came out of Detroit, another industrial city?
Not in the slightest. I used to read album covers avidly, and probably p-funk ones the most. But I didn't really understand the Detroit thing, I didn't know the parallels. It wasn't just p-funk really, I loved jazz funk, I loved all the new electronic funk that was coming out as the instrumentation changed. I was always looking for the next new thing. What drew me to p-funk was it was quite a punkified approach – it wasn't constructed the way music was supposed to be, it always threw something new at you whether that was sonically or in terms of arrangement. I think more than anything it was the spontaneity of it that attracted me.
And you went dancing to this stuff? Am I right you were a roller-disco aficionado?
That's right – dancer first, then roller-skater, then DJ.
And you were wrapped up in funk, but did you have any interest in punk, post-punk, and stuff like Cabaret Voltaire which was happening in Sheffield?
A bit. But we had to put up with the ignorance of people who, if I told them I was into funk, said "does tha mean punk?" Nobody really understood what I was into, outside, as I say, the black ring of security. It was a national scene, not a local one, so we'd travel to certain pockets if we wanted to hear funk. These were hidden away, most people didn't know about funk and soul. So even though I knew punk existed, I rejected it because it wasn't funk, because I couldn't dance to it. It wasn't because I disliked it, it was because I was a funkyman, and that was it – I didn't entertain anything else. The first time I did acknowledge it was when I started working in studios. That's when I was made aware of Cabaret Voltaire and the whole Sheffield industrial, post-industrial sound. That was mainly through meeting Parrot [Richard Barratt] for the first time, and his sphere of influence, and also through meeting Rob Gordon who worked with a lot of those bands. Mid ‘80s, that was.
We had to put up with the ignorance of people who, if I told them I was into funk, said "does tha mean punk?"
There was also a chap called Phil Wolstenholme who designed the sleeves for Warp’s Artificial Intelligence albums – I'd go and sit with Phil and he'd play me things like Frank Zappa, Ozric Tentacles and Can, but also local stuff like Cabaret Voltaire and Chakk, stuff like that. We'd sit, we'd smoke together, and he'd verse me in his sound in his flat. That blew my mind, because then I could make the connections between the punk, the funk, the jazz – which I loved - and the psychedelia, to the point where I stopped seeing the difference.
By this time I'd broken away from that black ring of security, I stopped thinking that if I didn't do things "the black way" that it would challenge my blackness. I think Phil Wolstenholme was probably the most instrumental in my becoming woke within that spectrum of psychedelic music that encompassed jazz, encompassed funk, encompassed soul, encompassed punk and electronic and all those other styles.
Parrot and Winston Hazel DJ on the London Eye
© Sarah Ginn
We never had any idea we were making Sheffield music – me and Parrot were just responding to the fact that great stuff was out there that we were inspired by
When did DJing become important for you?
Early ‘80s. I used to play parties, because there weren't any local clubs to hear the music we wanted. So it was house parties, birthday parties, any excuse for a party in the black community, and we'd put as many bits of hi-fi as possible together, with just one turntable and play the way a soundsystem would play. I got known on that circuit, and for playing in my school youth club, then I got a break at a club called Maximillions run by an African guy called Max Omare. That would be about 1982, 1983.
And when did Jive Turkey start?
That was 1985 I think. Electro was dominant then. Hip-hop was still in its infancy, and there was a lot of that electronic disco funk, where disco had been superseded because of the electronic instrumentation that allowed this amazing synthesised sound – bands like D-Train and Shannon, that Prelude and Epic sound was massive. That resonated with me because it was sonically exquisite, every time something came out it was like "wow, music can't get any better and more advanced than this". It was a mind-blowing time really. I was so far into that by that time, into collecting music, that whenever anything happened in Sheffield, I was the first guy people called. I had a monopoly almost, for having the biggest range of black-influenced music in the city.
And house and techno records fit into that mix naturally?
Yeah, we didn't hear them as anything separate at first – they were just extensions of electro or that synthesised soul.
So when did you think about making tunes yourself?
My very first time in a studio was Rob Gordon's home studio. As you'll know he was one of the owners of FON Records in the days of Cabaret Voltaire and Chakk and so on – he'd become a studio hand down there because of his technical expertise, and he ended up recording all the big independent bands in Sheffield at the time. That was alongside Mark Brydon who would go on to define the whole acid jazz sound and then to form Moloko. So while I was DJing, techno in particular was just starting to take a hold in the UK and I'd been playing all these bits to Robert a lot of this stuff. He wasn't really into the house sound, but techno resonated with him in terms of its sparse nature, there being a lot of space in there, the use of sound to punctuate silence, and that chimed with his experience of working with reggae and dub.
We'd known each other from infants' school, we knew each other well, and we talked about how these sounds correlated to our tastes and experiences. So when he got his hands on some new equipment, I think it was the one of the first Akai samplers, he invited me round his house, I brought a record to sample Manu Dibango's Abele Dance, we found a sample out of that, and I think Track With No Name was born in about four hours.
Forgemasters
© Warp Records
Whatever we did always sounded unlike everything else
At the time I was working on Sheffield Community Radio, SCR, which was a pirate station - we could reach as far as Leeds on a good day with the wind blowing in the right direction. People could get it all round Yorkshire. I was playing all round town too, and I had a reputation, and people knew they could hear new music from me. Now this radio station predominantly played reggae music, I was one of the first soul-funk-electro DJs on there, on a Saturday night. I played Track With No Name for the first time off cassette the day after we recorded it, and the phone lines went absolutely ballistic. So yeah, that was my first studio experience!
Doing stuff like that with Robert in his home programming suite carried on for quite some time. I'd visited where he worked at FON, and I was blown away by the complexity, by the way the environment was set up for purified listening to music. But I was quite happy to work under his wing in his house, because that allowed me to learn the ropes yet be really experimental and creative.
And did you have a sense of this fitting into the Sheffield sound or mentality?
Well whatever we did always sounded unlike everything else, and we made our peace with that quite quickly. But we never had any idea we were making Sheffield music – people like me and Parrot were just responding to the fact that great stuff was out there that we were inspired by, we had an opportunity thanks to people like Rob Gordon or Richard H Kirk giving us studio space and tutoring, we had a monopoly on people's ears because we were DJing and I was on the radio, we had people willing to put our music out and see what happened. All of that added up to an opportunity to take a chance.
We were a bit puzzled when the music media started describing it as being part of a sound, but of course looking back it's clear that we couldn't get away from that Sheffield clang. Add to that Rob Gordon's absolutely unique ability to turn the bass in anything into something really monumental – he knew how to get bass out of equipment nobody else could – and you got a warmth that was maybe missing from a lot of the other rave records of the time. Later on we might've tried to fit in with the whole rave thing more generally. A bit more euphoric at the high end, a bit more crescendos, a few more gimmicky sounds. But no matter how hard we tried we ended up sounding really deep and sonic and soulified and reggaefied and sparse.
Paths Unknown is coming to Sheffield November 9-10 with a lecture, live studio workshop and live music from Toddla T, Mist, C Cane, Steel Banglez and more. Buy tickets.
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