Made in Sheffield: the steel city's essential albums

Before there was a Sheffield sound there was Cabaret Voltaire: three men with tape machines and a Dada streak, running a studio called Western Works out of a loft. Red Mecca (1981) is their bleakest and best, all dub-damaged funk, shortwave hiss and Stephen Mallinder's voice buried like a confession you weren't meant to hear. Everything downstream, the synths and the bleeps and the industrial unease, starts in this room.

In 1980 the League split down the middle. Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh walked out to start Heaven 17; Phil Oakey kept the name, recruited two teenagers he'd spotted in a nightclub, and made Dare (1981), the record that taught the charts a machine could have feelings. 'Don't You Want Me' went to number one almost against Oakey's wishes. Synthpop's blueprint, drawn in a city watching its steelworks close.

The great lost Sheffield band, named after a Larry Niven story. The Comsat Angels made post-punk that sounded like a power cut: Stephen Fellows's guitar ringing out in an empty stairwell, the drums landing like slammed doors. Sleep No More (1981) is claustrophobic in the best way, and the reason half the gloom-merchants who came after owe them a pint they'll never collect.

Adi Newton was in the proto-Human League outfit The Future before he left to do something colder. Thirst (1981) is jazz-inflected post-punk gone paranoid, all skittering saxophone and Newton intoning like a man reading surveillance transcripts aloud. It barely sold and has aged like uranium.

Ware and Marsh landed on their feet. Heaven 17 added Glenn Gregory's croon and turned synthpop into boardroom funk: sleek, sardonic, aimed straight at the Thatcher years it lived through. Penthouse and Pavement (1981) opens with '(We Don't Need This) Fascist Groove Thang', which the BBC promptly refused to play, rather proving the point.

Martin Fry traded the wiry electronics of his old band Vice Versa for a gold lamé suit and a full string section. With Trevor Horn producing at Cinemascope width, The Lexicon of Love (1982) is heartbreak rendered as a Bond theme. 'The Look of Love', 'Poison Arrow', every ache buffed to a high shine. Sheffield's most glamorous export, and it still glitters.

Richard H. Kirk of Cabaret Voltaire and DJ Parrot built 'Testone' out of studio test tones and a sample of Close Encounters, and in January 1990 it became the third record Warp ever released and a founding text of bleep techno. RetroActivity gathers those early sides in one place. This is the missing link between the city's industrial past and the dancefloor it was about to invent.

Pulp spent seventeen years being ignored before it all happened at once. Different Class (1995) is Jarvis Cocker's revenge on everyone who underestimated him: class war disguised as a disco, 'Common People' the decade's sharpest words about slumming-it tourists. The longest apprenticeship in British pop, repaid with a Britpop record that quietly outlasts the ones that sold more.

Róisín Murphy met producer Mark Brydon at a Sheffield party and opened with the line 'Do you like my tight sweater?' That became a band. Statues (2003) is their farewell, made as the couple came apart, and the heartbreak runs right under the gloss; 'Forever More' is a breakup you can dance to. Murphy's whole solo strangeness starts here.

Dean Honer and Jarrod Gosling's other Sheffield outfit, best known for 'Daydream in Blue', a hazy rebuild of a forgotten 1960s pop oddity. Neveroddoreven (2003), a palindrome of a title, is sample-stuffed psych-pop that's funnier and stranger than its one famous song ever let on.

Post-rock crescendos spliced with glitchy breakbeats, made by four Sheffield kids who decided Mogwai needed a drum machine. The Fall of Math (2004) is all nervous energy and math-rock angles. A decade later they would score the video game No Man's Sky, an entire procedurally generated universe built to match their churn.

Hawley played guitar in the Longpigs and toured with Pulp before stepping out as a crooner from another century. Coles Corner (2005), named after a spot in Sheffield where couples once met before dates, is Roy Orbison rebuilt in the steel city's image. When Arctic Monkeys beat it to the 2006 Mercury Prize, Alex Turner grabbed the mic: 'Someone call 999, Richard Hawley's been robbed.'

The band that turned passed-around demos into the fastest-selling debut in British chart history. Whatever People Say I Am (2006) is Alex Turner at nineteen, narrating taxi ranks and bouncers in a High Green accent he flatly refused to sand off. Kitchen-sink realism at full tempo, and the moment Sheffield indie went global.

Kate Jackson fronting the sharpest-dressed band in mid-2000s Sheffield, writing post-punk about older women and bad decisions with a novelist's eye for detail. Someone to Drive You Home (2006) should have made them huge. A stroke that left guitarist Dorian Cox unable to play ended the band in 2008. One nearly perfect record, then silence.