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Dirty Stop Outs

Dirty Stop Out's Guide to 1980s Sheffield

Are you ready to re-discover your mojo?

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  • Guaranteed to bring the memories flooding back!
  • Packed with scores of photos, rare memorabilia and more
  • The perfect gift for anyone that remembers Sheffield in the 1980s
  • This critically acclaimed book features The Roxy, Josephine’s, the Limit, the Leadmill, Rebels, X Clothes, Rebina shoes and more
  • A fascinating nostalgia trip.

The eighties were a decade of mixed fortunes for Sheffield. It was never particularly top of Margaret Thatcher’s Christmas card list – in fact the city spent most of the decade at loggerheads with the Tory Government.

We had a far better relationship with Top Of The Pops.

In fact, a former hospital porter and two schoolgirls with zero vocal or dancing training did much to rescue the sanity of the city's youth. Phil Oakey's Human League introduced the world to electro-pop in jaw dropping style as their 'Dare' album hit the shops in autumn of 1981 and 'Don't You Want Me', their most successful single ever, followed in December.

The city had a stranglehold on the UK charts like never before for much of the era.

We might have had no money, no jobs and no future but we could shift vinyl like it was going out of fashion with the likes of Heaven 17, ABC, Clock DVA, Artery, Comsat Angels and others notching up impressive sales.

Whilst many venues were struggling in the early eighties as the redundancy pay-packets ran out for thousands of steelworkers thrown onto the dole, Josephine's thrived with its own in house champagne league.

Mass market entertainment was provided at the sprawling Roxy, Cairo Jax and others whilst The Leadmill became a beacon for protest, utopian ideology and a cheap night out.

Rebels did it for the rockers; The Limit did it for anyone and everyone left of centre whilst Def Leppard took Sheffield metal to the States and the Bailey Brothers conquered Europe.

X Clothes and Rebina were fashion Ground Zero whilst the Hole In The Road, once a proud symbol of civic pride and post war regeneration, was left to fall into rack and ruin and became eerily symbolic of the mood in the city for much of the era. 
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This book will be the perfect gift for anyone that remember the 1980s in the Steel City.


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M
Maggie Murphy
Brilliant book!

brlliant book would recommend it to anybody especially if you went in the pubs lke I did even recognised some people.took me back in time and loved it