It’s 1984 and you're sitting in a darkened room, watching Jarvis Cocker about to do the unthinkable. He sits with a turd on a plate in front of him and prongs a piece, holds it up to his mouth, considering, perhaps, not going through with it — before steeling himself to take a nibble. The audience squirms, some cry out in disgust, others walk out, while objects are thrown at the stage. This might sound like the stuff of fever dreams, but was in fact a moment that played out in the upstairs room of the Hallamshire Hotel.
It's easy to think of the past when you visit today. Walking into the West Street venue is like taking a time portal to another decade. Disco balls and infinity mirrors glisten above a black and white chevron floor, as warm and enveloping hues of orange radiate out of everything, from the wall of speaker cones to the lighting that was sourced from an old cruise ship that was being decommissioned. “We wanted people to walk in and go: wow,” says operations manager Will McMahon. “We wanted it to have this kind of 70s weird disco fever vibe.”
The venue opened as a pub back in 1903 but for the last 20 odd years it’s been a pizzeria and cocktail bar, operating under names such as BrB and Bloo 88. Although after it closed last year, the team behind the longstanding Sheffield music pub, The Washington, decided to bring it back to life in a different guise.
It’s now been freshly open again for a month after undergoing a significant refurbishment, with the aim of connecting it back to its roots. “We believe it's bad luck to change a pub name,” explains McMahon as we sit in the neon pink and blue beer garden, as the sunny California sounds of the 1960s psych-pop band Love plays over the speaker. “It used to be called The Hallamshire Hotel and it’s written in beautiful Grade II listed tiling on the front of the building. We can’t get rid of that, so we thought: let’s lean into it.”
This approach did come with its own drawbacks however. “A big fear was that people would think we were a hotel,” he laughs. He tells me that the concept was nodding to the fact of the venue being called The Hallamshire Hotel without making it too hotel-y. “So we looked at some famous hotels, like the hotel from The Shining, and the Tranquility Base Hotel [from the Arctic Monkeys’ 1970s-drenched concept album]. It’s not a theme bar by any means, we were really conscious of that, but we just have very similar tastes to the aesthetics of that album.”
However, it’s not just the name of the building that the new space is reconnecting with but also its musical history. Now described as a late bar and music hall, the upstairs of the venue now contains a freshly kitted out 100 capacity gig room. “Downstairs is about wowing people and having fun and then upstairs it's just live music, live music, live music,” McMahon says. “Sheffield is steeped in alternative music history and we really wanted to champion that.”
This isn’t a new angle for the venue: a healthy chunk of the city’s alternative music history actually took place in this very building. While it may be The Leadmill that has the heritage plaque outside as the home of Pulp’s first Sheffield gig back in August 1980, The Hallamshire played as much of a role in the story of the beloved Sheffield band.
Pulp’s first ever gigs weren’t wasn’t the most auspicious of beginnings. For their first, in Rotherham, they turned up stinking of cabbage because they’d borrowed a grocer’s van to take their gear to the venue. While their next, at The Leadmill, the bass player fell off the stage during the show. However, the very next day after that milestone gig they were back up on stage for their second ever Sheffield gig, this time at The Hallamshire — a venue they would play a huge number of times over the coming years. “It was very crucial in the band’s evolution,” says Candida Doyle, Pulp’s keyboard player. “I saw Pulp there before I joined them and it became a venue where we felt at home and had a supportive audience.”
The venue itself has musical roots going back to the 1950s, with everything from jazz clubs to brass band rehearsals being held here. But it was during the 1980s that it became something of a musical mecca for a younger generation. Upstairs now, the gig room is very slick and professional. There’s a custom-built sound desk, a booming in-house PA, a variety of lights, under stage storage for equipment, and even its own bar and box office. But 40 odd years ago, it was a different story. “There was no proper stage lighting, it was just a normal ceiling light,” remembers Nick Taylor, who was a regular attendee and played there in various bands. “There were wooden pub chairs and a couple of round tables and there was old fashioned flock wallpaper on the wall.”
In many ways, The Hallamshire was more akin to a DIY venue than a professional space for bands. It was the upstairs room of a pub with long draping cigarette smoke-stained orange curtains that blocked out the streetlights from West St and where people would come and pay 50p to take a punt on a gig. While it was a prevalent space for countless local bands to play, it would also act as a stop-off for touring bands on their way up, with everyone from the Manchester indie outfit the Inspiral Carpets to the hugely successful Irish group The Cranberries, all performing here.
Taylor was not just an avid attendee and performer at the pub, but he would also take his recording gear down with him. He now runs the Bandcamp page and record label, The Sheffield Tape Archive, which features numerous live recordings from The Hallamshire. He even put together a compilation, Live at the Hallamshire Hotel 1981-85, which features live gigs of Pulp, Bogshed, The Membranes, Heroes of The Beach, and The Blimp.
Heroes of The Beach was a fun side-project featuring Taylor, along with Jarvis Cocker. The concept being that because everyone was already in other bands, they would form this one and everyone would play an instrument that they didn’t in their other bands. So, if you’d like to hear a young Cocker stab away at the guitar while taking on a rendition of Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer”, you can also find that over at the Sheffield Tape Archive.
The Hallamshire was a go-to spot for gigs but it was also a crucial pit stop on West Street that many would make before going to the nearby Limit club, which was a hugely important space for punks, goths and general oddballs to go and hear music that no other clubs would touch. And with incredibly strange synchronicity, The Limit is also returning, kind of, with a 50 capacity basement venue in the Firepit Rocks bar on West St having been turned into The New Limit as a homage to the original. “The Hallamshire was of equal importance to The Limit,” Doyle says. “I have very fond memories of The Hallamshire and spent my formative years there. I was even arrested for underage drinking in there.”
While the upstairs room in the pub was a haven for bands, it was also home to some more experimental and strange goings on that leaned more towards performance art. “There was some pretty far out stuff,” Doyle remembers. “Jarvis did a poem about a car crash or something like that. My brother Magnus did some weird things with an orange and me and my friends did a song from the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Thank God that was never recorded.”
Taylor was also involved with some avant garde-performances too, in outfits with names like Fish & Bread Cake, which involved people playing various percussion instruments, along with an air raid siren and tape recorder loops (this too can be heard on Sheffield Tape Archive). One performance, Taylor recalls, even involved someone cutting their toenails and putting them into jars on stage.
Russell Senior, who would later go on to be in Pulp himself, would host some especially odd performance nights. He even held his own play there at one point called Fruits of Passion. Simon Hinkler, who had a stint in the Sheffield post-punk band Artery along with working and playing with Pulp, recalls seeing this play. “Jarvis played someone applying for a job and Russell played the interviewer,” he recalls. “After a series of questions, Russell put a plate on the table with what looked like a turd on it and said, ‘just one last thing, I’d like you to eat this.’ Jarvis smelled it and said ‘but that’s shit…’. ‘Yes that’s right, could you eat that for me please?’..” You may be relieved to find out at this stage that it was crunchy peanut butter that Cocker was chomping into.
Doyle’s brother Magnus was often involved with Senior’s avant-garde open mic performance nights. One night his performance involved putting a metal bucket on his head and pinballing himself off the walls until the entire room was cleared, while another night in The Hallamshire involved him being introduced as a “famous rapper”. That performance then entailed him putting on records via a Dansette turntable and scratching them while wrapping gifts. Senior later described that moment as having “the disquieting air of a David Lynch film.”
Along with the nearby Beehive pub, or other more alternative-leaning gig spaces like Marples — home to a famous gig by Artery where the singer Mark Gouldthorpe climbed out of the first-floor window mid-show, screamed at people down in the street, briefly considered hopping on top of a bus, before returning in through another window — The Hallamshire was a really vital space for those who maybe didn’t fit in in more conventional spaces. “We felt safe going in The Hallamshire in contrast to some of the townie pubs,” recalls regular Lesley Burgess. “In other places you may get unwelcome comments or abuse.”
Despite it being a very basic room in the upstairs of a pub, it gave many local artists the chance to play, experiment, fail and develop. “There was a lot of thoughtful, original and experimental music that was prevalent there,” recalls Hinkler. “The Hallamshire was a real hub of the Sheffield scene.” And as someone who saw Pulp play there a lot in their early years — they performed seven times there in their first year as a band alone — Taylor saw how crucial a space it was for a band like that to grow. “Playing several gigs at The Hallamshire honed their sound and set the trajectory for their future success,” he says.
Even when Pulp were far too big to be playing the venue they came back to do so, even performing there as late as 1991 when they were already being booked to play in large University halls. They had to play two shows that night to meet demand. “We did that as a thank you,” recalls Doyle. “Plus there was such an amazing atmosphere there. Now we play these huge stages and you're miles away from the rest of the group and you can't really chat to them because everyone has in-ears [monitors] in. There's something about playing in a tight space. I miss the intimacy of that.”
Gigs continued throughout the 1990s but by the end of the decade it didn’t possess the same reputation as a go-to venue and soon its era as a place for students to buy 2for1 pizza began. However, prior to this, Hinkler says it played a significant role in shaping a feeling of community and camaraderie in the city amongst people. “It wasn’t just the bands,” he says. “But others on the scene too: small-time promoters establishing relationships, people with a van, people with a PA, people designing posters and putting them up around town.”
He also tells me about a conversation he had one night with the landlord of the Hallamshire, Jim and his wife. “They were very nice people but quite straight laced and a generation or two older. I was asking what they thought of having all these odd people in their pub but they both agreed they just liked to see young people enjoying themselves.”
And for McMahon and the rest of the team, the aim is to try and recapture a little of that spirit and magic. “We’re trying to give something back,” he says. “We’ve got this space to offer and we want it to benefit you just as much as it benefits us, so the venue is currently free to hire to put on gigs midweek. But on top of that, a big part of the drive to do this was people talking about how much fun they used to have here back in the day. We want to bring that back.”
However, the aim of the current incarnation of The Hallamshire is not rooted purely in nostalgia or to try and resurrect the past. The noise, confusion, innovation, and wild experimentation that spewed out of the original venue was a byproduct of the times, environment and circumstances. To attempt to mimic that would be both foolish and futile. Instead, Sheffield has gained a greatly needed new live music venue that is fully kitted out and sharply-designed, and is likely to be hugely attractive to touring bands. Whether it inadvertently turns into an anything goes space that also doubles up as a creative incubator for future pop stars pretending to eat faeces — that remains to be seen.
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