Author

Daniel Dylan Wray Audiobooks

Groovy, Laidback and Nasty: decades of independent music in Sheffield

1 audiobook reviewed

Main genres

Classics & Heritage

Who is Daniel Dylan Wray?

Sheffield has an outsized claim on British music, and Groovy, Laidback and Nasty sets out to explain how one post-industrial city produced so much of it. Daniel Dylan Wray has written a proper history here: electronic futurism, post-punk, pop, metal, bleep techno, bassline and indie, traced across decades rather than cherry-picked into a greatest hits.

What gives the book its authority is testimony. It rests on a very large body of first-hand interviews with the people who were actually there, which turns what might have been a chronology into something closer to oral history with an argument running through it. Our shelves file the title under classics and heritage, and for once the label is exactly right, because this is cultural heritage documented before it disappears.

Daniel Dylan Wray in audiobooks

The audiobook comes in at a round ten hours and is read by the author, which matters more than usual with music writing. Any narrator can pronounce the band names correctly. A writer who has spent years in the city puts the affection and the scepticism in the right places, and Wray does.

It is a new release, so listener scores have not accumulated yet, and no prior knowledge is required beyond a willingness to be curious about a place. Records at the ready. The audiobook is below.