The Crackdown

The Crackdown is Sheffield industrial discovering funk, the pivot that made bleep possible, Cabaret Voltaire finding the groove inside the noise. It's the record where the city's harsh electronic tradition learned to move, and that lesson fed directly into the Yorkshire bleep techno that followed. It ranks at a hundred and forty-eight because on this list it's a precondition rather than a rave record itself, but it's a genuinely good album, and its influence on what came after is direct.