A band turning up for a session at Studio Electrophonique within the late Seventies might have been forgiven for pondering they'd the flawed handle. An unusual Sheffield council home with a caravan parked on the driveway, it was semi-detached with deep pile carpets and a toy poodle with a bark like a wildebeest.
However behind the chintzy curtains, an RAF veteran and panel-beater referred to as Ken Patten had handbuilt some of the pioneering digital studios in Europe. In return for a £15 recording payment, he helped a few of Sheffield’s most vital bands kind their nascent sounds – from Pulp to ABC, Heaven 17 and the Human League, in addition to much less heralded acts such because the Doncaster Wheatsheaf Ladies Choir.
Now, two former lecturers from Sheffield have made a documentary celebrating “one of many nice untold tales of British pop music”. Premiering on the Sheffield DocFest this week, they paint Patten’s dwelling on the Ballifield property in Handsworth because the unlikely crucible of Yorkshire’s electro scene and Patten its thrifty resident genius.
A Movie About Studio Electrophonique is narrated by Sean Bean, who grew up in Handsworth. “I had no thought when my dad despatched me round to Ken Patten’s to pay his storage invoice that Ken had constructed his personal inventive world in his downstairs extension,” he says. “None of us knew that he was recording the sounds of space-age Sheffield or certainly that that space-age sound would turn into the way forward for British music.”
Martyn Ware, who went on to kind the Human League and Heaven 17, recalled visiting together with his first band, an experimental collective referred to as The Future: “We knocked on the door and his spouse was there. She stated, ‘Oh whats up lads’, and supplied us a cup of tea and confirmed us into the entrance room and it was all chintz and voluminous armchairs and a espresso desk with a four-track recorder on it. I keep in mind going: ‘The place can we put the synths?’ I believe he should have had some keyboard stands sitting on the deep plush carpet and I keep in mind pondering: that is manner too snug for recording one thing as avant garde as this.”
Although he specialised in digital music, Patten would document anybody who answered his categorized adverts within the Sheffield Star. Jarvis Cocker, who made a demo with Pulp in 1981, remembers: “We turned up and he was sort of bemused. I don’t assume he realised how younger we have been. I used to be the oldest within the band and I used to be perhaps 17.” The demo led to the nonetheless unsigned band getting their first John Peel session on Radio 1.
“It turned out that the primary recording place was going to be the bed room. That was the place the drum equipment was arrange. Our drummer, Wayne, went up there and I believe we have been within the kitchen however via some inventive use of wiring he might hear us,” Cocker says.
“The factor that actually impressed me was [Patten] turned on this transportable little black and white TV and we might see the drummer, up within the bed room on TV. This was one thing for communication however his spouse had insisted on it to verify folks didn’t misbehave themselves within the bed room.”
Cocker additionally remembers Patten’s delight in his home made vocoder, which he cobbled collectively for 50 pence utilizing two rest room rolls and outdated throat microphones pinched from fighter pilots in his RAF days.
The hour-long movie takes the type of a detective story as James Leesley – a provide trainer turned solo artist who has adopted the stage title Studio Electrophonique – tries to trace down Patten’s kin and collaborators.
The pair recorded all of it on an iPad “utilizing a £20 microphone and edited it utilizing a £3.99 app”, says director James Taylor, an English trainer who now does outreach work at Sheffield Hallam College.
Patten, who died in 1990, deserves to be higher identified, says Leesley: “I’ve requested just a few individuals who have been round Sheffield music for about 30 years and so they’ve by no means even heard the title Studio Electrophonique and even Ken Patten, so I assume that makes it one of many nice untold tales of British pop music.”
A Movie About Studio Electrophonique is obtainable to look at on-line and exhibiting on the Sheffield DocFest on Tuesday at 3.45pm.
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