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. The picture of the three teenage musicians was taken in 1979 when Vice Versa travelled to Ken’s to record their Music 4 EP. A year later, two of these men would play their part in one of the most audacious manoeuvres in British pop, spinning the threadbare electronic experimentation of Vice Versa into the gleaming, white-scratch-funk of ABC.

We knew that Ken had recorded bands in this tiny room for at least 20 years and we were convinced that there must be many stories to tell. I was tortured by the image of lofts all over South Yorkshire concealing the artefacts we were after and by the fact that I had no radar to detect them. Through the 1970s and 1980s, hundreds of bands trooped out to Ken’s to capture their art on tape and, although only a handful were launched into the pop orbit, they all knocked on that front door with the same creative commitment, preparing with a gulp to expose their unformed artistic frailties to a middle-aged stranger in a C&A cardigan.

Looking through a roll call of these bands, one can only imagine the range of micro-genres Ken had managed to coax onto tape: The Electric Armpits, My Pierrot Dolls, Blue Ice, Bangkok Shock, Grasping The Pineappleness, The Naughtiest Girl Was A Monitor and Systematic Annexe, whose track “Death Trades” was recorded by Ken in 1984 yet failed to arouse the interest of those compiling Now That’s What I Call Music 4. Ken received all these bands with an encouraging practicality and never balked at their mad ideas or musical ineptitude. The tape made at Ken’s by The Future in 1977, for example, contained a track called “Looking For The Black Haired Girls” featuring Adi Newton growling lyrics about the Son of Sam murders in New York City over a backing track of bleeps and distortion manipulated by Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh. These formative forays into the world of sound production and creative expression from the artists who later formed Clock DVA, The Human League and Heaven 17 were patiently patched together by Ken with little care for convention or, indeed, for Lorna, doing her knitting on the other side of the louvre doors.

Ken was an honest worker, well accustomed to putting a shift in at his garage and, to him, the work he did in the studio was no different; if you were going to take hard-earned money from young musicians, you were going to do your best to give them the tape they dreamed of.

These were the tapes we dreamed of finding even if we still had no real idea about what had happened to Ken or the recordings his studio had magicked into existence. Our next step was to find the artists who had put their trust in Ken at the outset; the ones whom Ken had boosted into stardom and the ones who, perhaps, had been left behind on the launchpad.

Céline wrote that “kids are like years, you never see them again”, but we were groundlessly hopeful that we would track them down and see what had become of the kids of the space age. Perhaps we would even be allowed to gaze upon some relics: mouldering tape boxes and handwritten manifestos that mapped out what the route into the future had looked like back then.

We knew, of course, that Ken had been dead for many years and that a search for the hardware that had comprised Studio Electrophonique was probably as foolish and futile as a search for the final resting place of the Ark. Ken never sought attention or praise and his work had never been catalogued or explored. While his gauche apprentices were rubbing gold lamé shoulders with Andy Warhol, guesting on the Band Aid single, or shifting units with Penthouse And Pavement or The Lexicon Of Love, Ken had already shifted back to his own unit under Norfolk Bridge, knocking out dents in his garage.

Some of the artists we met are older now than Ken was when he was presented with their futuristic masterplans in the 1970s and 1980s, yet we noted a distinct correlation in Sheffield’s artistic attitudes across the generations.

Creative people in Sheffield have always cracked on with their work, away from the cultural gaze and, often, without the training, education or equipment that would normally be a prerequisite before the impulse became an action. People in Sheffield are, famously, makers, and if they can’t afford to buy the latest means of artistic production, they will make something or make do with something else.

“Part of that Sheffield thing,” said Martyn Ware, “is being producers of product rather than being delicate artists who are maybe too delicate for the world and need approbation all the time. That’s not a Sheffield thing at all.”

Ken started his odyssey into sound by cannibalising two old tape recorders so they would do something they weren’t designed to do. These traditions were handed down and honoured by artists such as Cabaret Voltaire, The Future, Vice Versa and others who, like Ken, found themselves existing in a grey, cheerless city but found within themselves the capacity to dream up singular visions where Sheffield could, for a time, be left behind.

This is the story of Sheffield in the space age; Sheffield characters and the character of Sheffield. Ken Patten returned from the Second World War and settled down to family life in Ballifield; to the wider world, his life rolled out evenly, an adventureless tale. His inner life, however, was a perpetual engine of ideas and invention, ignited by the rocket ship glamour of the atomic age and fuelled by the ungraspable allure of the sounds of tomorrow. In the 1970s and 1980s, a new generation of creators, charged by the cathode voltage of TV, science fiction, pop music, art and the Apollo moonshots, made Sheffield the unlikely epicentre of a movement defined by Ken’s principles of tape manipulation, DIY sonics and a general determination to make machines bend to the will of the artist.

Sheffield in the space age was, for many, a desperate place but, as Kierkegaard said, “given a possibility, the desperate man breathes once more”. The advent of relatively affordable electronic musical devices after the Second World War made the creation of music possible for many imaginative but untrained artists, persuading even those in a city as modest as Sheffield that they could add their visions to the time capsule.

Referring to Sheffield as a modest city is not to suggest that it is a small or insignificant place, but rather that its people don’t like to go on about the wonderful things they are capable of. In 1982, for example, acts from Sheffield made up five per cent of sales in the UK singles chart but, of course, they didn’t like to mention it. Glenn Gregory of Heaven 17 captured the grounding effect of being a successful working class Sheffield artist perfectly when he recalled the greeting he habitually received from his dad’s steelworker mates when he used to visit the local pub at the height of his fame. “Whenever I used to go to The Bridge Inn, which was my dad’s local, they used to shout, ‘Here y’are, look. Fuckin’ Beatles are here.’”

Although the impulse to downplay or diminish any creative pursuit is hardwired into most people from Sheffield, there are some stories that cry out to be told. Ken wouldn’t have countenanced the idea of making a big deal out of one of his ‘hobbies’ but, when the cultural map of Sheffield is spread out before you, the blast circles his work generated can still be traced today. For this reason, I decided to tell his story for him.

Studio Electrophonique: The Sheffield Space Age From The Human League To Pulp by Jamie Taylor is published by Manchester University Press.

You can read Leah Kardos’s review of the book in The Wire 496. Copies are available from our online shop. Wire subscribers can also read the review online via the digital library.