I, me, mine: Sheffield’s rock outcrop and the pit dispute

Many British cities possess a distinctive musical character but few have seen their rock’n'roll evolution shaped so profoundly by the prevailing political climate as Sheffield’s was during the early 1980s as the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire took on the might of Thatcherite Whitehall.

And this clash was more than just the locking of horns between regional and central bureaucracies. For this ideological prize-fight took place in the shadow of the most significant industrial dispute most of us can remember.

If Sheffield and its council stood resolutely for the values of old Labour and staunchly against the free market strategies of the Conservative government, the battleground was not the corridors of power but the very heartland of blue collar production – the coalfields of the North, of Wales and Scotland.

The pits stood for a dying ideal: heavy industry as the lynchpin of British commercial muscle. But the UK’s first woman prime minister saw them as an over-subsidised hotbed of trade union militancy, a relic of the Industrial Revolution and an anachronism in the age of a white collar-dominated economy.

But the mines were more than just symbols of a successful past – they were also the fulcrum at the heart of hundreds of working class communities. They were a place to work, yes, but also the centre-piece of the villages, the working men’s clubs, the shops, the schools and churches that grew up around them. To kill the pit was to kill the very reason for those knots of human activity.

The fact that Sheffield was also home to the headquarters of the weighty National Union of Mineworkers, the fiefdom of their controversial yet charismatic leader Arthur Scargill, meant that the city – surrounded by collieries – became both the nerve centre for the battle of attrition that was played out during 1984/5 and also the core of the drama.

The musical output of these times was also significant – the Human League, Cabaret Voltaire and Heaven 17 all come to mind. But there were a number of less heralded acts who became embroiled, to a greater or a lesser degree, in the political machinations of the day. Clock DVA, Hula and Chakk, industrial funksters all, took the independent spirit of greater Sheffield and transported it to their recordings.

Meanwhile Pulp, in one of their early and many incarnations, came face to face with with the realities of the pit-head struggle. Guitarist and violinist Russell Senior recalls rushing to the NUM headquarters on the first day of the dispute and volunteering for action. The next months would see him play the role of flying picket as strikers attempted to persuade strike-breakers from going into work.

In neighbouring Nottinghamshire, the coalfield where miners snubbed the workplace walk-out because Scargill had failed to call a national ballot, tensions ran highest, as the second largest body of pit workers continued to toil throughout the year of the dispute.

These stories, both musical and political, are captured with great power in a new film that featured, at the weekend, at a conference in Leeds commemorating the 25th anniversary of the end of the Miners’ Strike. The Beat is the Law – Krushed by the Wheels of Industry, directed by the Dutch film-maker Eve Wood, is both arthouse celebration and gritty documentary account as rock culture meets the frontline of an extraordinary tussle for the soul of Britain.

Jarvis Cocker and Richard Hawley join a cast of dozens who speak articulately, with passion and with insight, about the stresses of the time but also the paradox that most musicians were wanting to run a mile from the steel and coal industries that had dominated South Yorkshire life for decades. As Nick Banks, Pulp drummer, comments and not without a certain irony: ‘The dole culture of Thatcher’s Britain was perhaps a great supporter of the arts’.