There’s little the world needs less than a freshly-filmed succession of music industry talking heads jabbering about how punk rock smashed all the boundaries and opened up everything. Happily, the obligatorily regurgitated tip of the cap to punk only steals about 5 minutes from Made in Sheffield’s 52, and the black sheep nature of this particular musical offspring—the birth of electronic pop in Sheffield, England—has been a mostly unexamined watershed in pop history.

“We were laughing at bands that bothered to learn three chords,” says the Human League’s Phil Oakey, who’s got all this movie’s best quips: “We just used one finger.” Comments like these, and a reverently staged, unintentionally funny heaving of a guitar from the roof of Park Hill flats, signal the kind of cloistered self-importance which prevails in rock documentaries. Every apelike mashing of synth keys and childishly curious twisting of effects knobs is awarded a revolutionary significance, but this unchecked hubris can be forgiven with the realization that all of these buzzes and chirps did in fact combine to produce something like the democratization of electronic music and the necessary humbling of guitar-based rock.

It’s this knowledge of worth—the confidence that the Sheffield scene in the late Seventies/early Eighties mattered—that makes it easy to forgive and perhaps even admire first-time director Eve Wood’s often shabby DIY aesthetic. Key players (Cabaret Voltaire’s Richard Kirk, all of Clock DVA) are missing, live footage is sparse, and space-filling street photography looks as if it were edited by a Final Cut Pro beginner—but you’re still inclined to give this budgetless love letter a chance. When set beside something like the polished /i>Live Forever, John Dower’s uproarious but completely meaningless ego parade about the completely meaningless (though not worthless) nineties “Britpop” media fantasy, Made in Sheffield takes on a noble gleam.

Through interviews, archival, and live footage, and some jerkily edited scraps of around-town scenes, Wood captures the experimentation and energy of this new, alien sound that rose out of industrial Sheffield, a city whose dungeon-like, fire-spitting factories were a “vision of hell” to its trapped youth. Cabaret Voltaire, represented here by early member Chris Watson, emerge as the scene’s most avant-garde energizers; their dark, unschooled digressions still sound scraped from another planet’s surface. The Human League’s Martin Ware and Ian Marsh, who would later go on to form Heaven 17 and record “(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thing”, the definitive Sheffield pop anthem, provide the documentary’s linear history with a cheerily apparent, clear-eyed grasp of all the wiry details.

The live footage, both in the movie itself and the extra features, provides perhaps the biggest revelation in the form of Artery, whose brief appearances will lead you to believe you’ve been missing out on one of the most brilliant bands ever, unless you’re more clued in than I am. Singer Mark Gouldthorpe moves and sings like Ian Curtis, but he can scream a lot louder, and on “Into the Garden” Artery work up a swell of guitar squall and Doors-ian keyboard-organ madness that allows Made in Sheffield to hit the emotional peak that its cooler electronics have subversively repressed.
­JUSTIN STEWART