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“I heard a guy on the radio recently say Sheffield was never known for clashing,” says 58-year-old selector Prento, audibly irritated, during our chat in SADACCA, the Afro-Caribbean community centre on the Wicker. “I thought ‘you don’t know nothing!’ At one time, this was the capital for clashing. In the 70s and 80s, everybody wanted to come here and play.” As proof of this interviewee’s unforgivable ignorance, he apparently then began discussing the local “blues” scene from the 80s: underground parties hidden in cellars from Pittsmoor to Broomhill where said clashes — essentially head-to-head DJ competitions — often took place. “He could only remember two,” Prento says, “and one of them was Donkey Man’s.”
This, for those unfamiliar with the history of Sheffield’s Caribbean community, is equivalent to being asked to name a reggae artist and reaching for Bob Marley. Back in the 80s, everybody went to Donkey Man’s, located in a basement on Rock Street in Pittsmoor. Winston Hazel, co-founder of the popular electro-funk night Jive Turkey, even alleges he was held at gunpoint once while DJing there. “An old Sheffield gangster put a shotgun up to us insisting that we played Mr. Fingers’ ‘Can You Feel It,’ which we did of course,” he told an interviewer a decade ago. “He walked off shooting it into the fucking ceiling.”
Though the scene was inherently illicit and sometimes attracted pretty shady characters — for example, locals reminiscing online recall one blues’ owner allegedly murdering his cousin with a sword — Prento tells me the community organised these unlicensed parties because they had no alternative. “In those days, black people weren’t allowed in a lot of the city centre clubs because of racism,” he says, “so we had to have our own parties at home.” While the few violent incidents are what people remember decades later, most were peaceful and cheerful affairs. The only memory that stands out to Prento is seeing a couple enthusiastically wining at a party, hips locked together with the man’s back pressed against the wall, before realising after they moved away that the wallpaper had been rubbed off.
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