Sheffield-born author Matt Anniss wants Yorkshire's dance music contribution in the history books

Anniss, a music journalist, believes that it not only inspired the development of more celebrated styles of British dance music but should also be considered the foundation of what many now call ‘UK bass’.

His interest in this culture started when he was growing up in Nether Edge in Sheffield, a city that was then home to the label Warp Records, which had a shop on Division Street and put out music by bleep acts such as LFO and Nightmares on Wax from Leeds.

Anniss says: “At the time, as a teenager, the fact that there was this leading electronic music label that was founded in the city that I lived in, and there was this record shop I could go to, was a really big thing.

“In terms of the music itself and the importance of it, for a long time I was a bit puzzled as to why there wasn't much reporting of this music and it didn't really appear in histories of British dance music. Because there's a very particular narrative about how, for example, house music came to first be played in the UK. Whereas if you look into it, actually it wasn't really embraced, initially, in London. It was embraced initially within black communities initially in the Midlands and the North of England, so it was very strong in places like Manchester, Sheffield and Leeds and to a lesser extent Nottingham,” he says.

“This has never really been reflected in the narratives, in books or documentaries, which tend to repeat the same stories. You get that across all history, really, all cultural history, but as a proud Yorkshireman I guess that irritated me.

“My theory was always, well actually, this was the first distinctly British form of electronic dance music and was massively influential at the time yet sort of being written out the narrative.”

He eventually laid out his argument in dance music publication Resident Advisor but thought “wait a minute, I've barely scratched the surface here. There's a great story to be told.”

Anniss - whose father Ian was a history teacher who taught the musician Richard Hawley - says bleep techno emerged between 1988 and 1990, peaking that year.

“The first record was a track by Bradford act Unique 3 called The Theme that was basically made one afternoon in a spare bedroom and one of the Unique 3 members’ mum's houses. It combined elements of Detroit techno, kind of sci-fi and futuristic, and electro, which sort of comes from an electronic form of hip hop, a few nods to house music from the United States, but most importantly, big, heavy sub-bass.”

However, it was influenced by sound system culture happening in communities like Chapeltown in Leeds, Burngreave in Sheffield or Manningham and West Bowling in Bradford.

“In Jamaican sound system culture, there's this history of people DJing and talking on the microphone and kind of having battles against each other, where basically you would have two sound systems and they would take it in turns to play music. So sound systems basically emerged in Jamaica and was brought over to the UK by the Windrush generation and their descendants.”

Unlicensed functions often took place in terraced houses.

“They would basically open late and stay up all night,” says Anniss, 44. “So when you got to the period where dance music was starting to boom in the late 80s and early 90s, when there were very popular clubs in the centre of cities like Bradford, Leeds and Sheffield, they would end up being somewhere that also catered for people that wanted to keep going after they'd finished at the club at two in the morning.

“So you started to get regular dance music as well as reggae being played over the sound system.”

Because the sound systems were built to be bass-heavy, that influenced how new dance music was being made.

“It was the first time that that influence from reggae and dub music had been expressed within electronic dance music. And that's something that since then has been associated with dance music through a lot of other styles that came afterwards, things like jungle and drum and bass, but also other styles of music that had their roots in Yorkshire in the Midlands.”

Anniss, who lives in Bristol, says the process of writing the book “reconnected” him to Yorkshire.

It was important to the author that his father, who had got Anniss into music, was also able to read the first edition before he died of prostate cancer in 2020.

“I think he didn't necessarily understand why I devoted my life to dance music culture because if you're somebody that grew up in the 50s and 60s, why would you?” says Anniss. “After reading the book and hearing a compilation that came out a few months afterwards, a couple of months before he died he sort of said: “Yeah, I get it now.”

Matt Anniss will be talking about his book and the history of dance music in Yorkshire, alongside DJs Winston Hazel and Katie Matthews, academic Desiree Reynolds, and host Daniel Dylan-Wray, in Sheffield on Saturday, March 18. For free tickets and more information, head to www.jointhefuture.net