Sheffield Books

The Foreword to this Violet May book is written by Richard Hawley “Violet May was a pivotal figure in the development of the music scene in Sheffield. Not only in what people bought in terms of records for their listening pleasure but in how that music influenced countless musicians as well. Without her I’m sure that I wouldn’t be making music today, although I never had the pleasure of meeting her but my father did and some of the music he bought in her shop still informs many of my ideas to this day. She widened the sonic palette of thousands of people from Sheffield and other places in Britain as you will see in the pages of this book. In this age of instant access to virtually any recordings at the touch of a button it is hard to imagine a time when you could spend months, often years, tracking down a rare record by an obscure artist you may have heard only snippets of their music, or had a cursory and rather vague knowledge of, but it really was like that and Violet May was a light in the darkness for the avid record collector and the developing musician. How she got those records is still a mystery to me and this book, written by my good friends “Gaspin” Gus Chapman and John Firminger, at last sheds some light on that closely guarded information.

£9.99