The brilliant book has been written by Martin Lilleker, who has a unique insight into that period having been the local music journalist for Sheffield since 1978. Packed full of fascinating info, anecdotes and photos from the bands (over 350 mentioned) from that golden age of Sheffield music including the famous and not so famous…
So reads the review on one local shop selling copies of this now out of print title. Martin had already covered the early years of Sheffield music in his first book and we were chatting about it one day. I knew him well enough to say I didn’t think the cover did the book justice at all and offered to do one for his second book gratis if he wanted, just as a fun project (he certainly wasn’t doing this to make himself rich!). By 2005 Martin had finished this labour of love and took me up on the offer.
He had also assembled a huge box full of images and let me rifle through this to take a dozen or so home to scan. So all the images on the cover relate to Sheffield groups in their early days, even the disembodied hand (I can’t now recall whose that was!). I wanted a montage but decided to go to town on this and treated each image individually, adding colour (most of them were mono) before bringing them together as layers in a Photoshop file and working with the blending, fade options and masks then carefully moving parts around so it eventually achieved some sort of balance. I usually then leave jobs alone and revisit a few days later to see if it still works! Obviously Phil Oakey is one of the cities best known musicians, so I thought he deserved a central role in the cover, and then the text block needed to be legible above all this. It features my usual fondness for white rules, titles which justify, etc. Martin seemed pleased with the result and went with it unchanged. As with his previous book, he had assembled a collection of rare demos and tracks and again I produced this for him using our regular suppliers (I was running a CD label at the time) so he could get decent prices on this. The CD was then inserted by hand into the inside cover. As before Martin worked with a local printers, Juma, to print the final book.
Martin organised a launch evening and we had the cover made into posters for the night which I was pleased with, and we manned his “shop” for the evening too (which being an antisocial sort of person got me out of having to mix with folk too!). It’s always fun to help out on things like this and contribute. And Martin was one of those blokes who you were always happy to help. His early death of dementia a few years ago was a real blow to the city, a fact shown by the funeral service which was literally standing room only.
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