The only picture we had seen of Ken’s studio was a photograph of Stephen Singleton, Mark White and David Sydenham arranged artfully in a nest of cabling, reel-to-reel tape machines and closed-circuit TVs. Ken received all these bands with an encouraging practicality and never balked at their mad ideas or musical ineptitude. This is the story of Sheffield in the space age; Sheffield characters and the character of Sheffield. Sheffield in the space age was, for many, a desperate place but, as Kierkegaard said, “given a possibility, the desperate man breathes once more”. Studio Electrophonique: The Sheffield Space Age From The Human League To Pulp by Jamie Taylor is published by Manchester University Press.