This thesis examines ideas of ‘Yorkshireness’ and how Yorkshire identity is constructed and negotiated for post-punks, with a specific focus on the Bradford group 1919 – the group that the researcher has been the vocalist for since their reformation began in 2014 – and from there a spiralling outward of other musicians of the post-punk era, which is usually considered to be between 1979 and 1984. In taking this approach, the thesis prioritises the voices of artists and groups with mostly limited commercial success and that, while important, have until this point escaped critical attention. Fundamentally, through the lenses of class and post-punk (sub)cultural memory, myth, and music, this research seeks to identify and unpack essential myths of Yorkshireness in constructed notions of self, place, and of individual and communitarian responses to the fundamentally inauthentic environment of the culture industry.
Much of the history of post-punk, either from a broad historical perspective or a specifically regional one, is usually written in terms of a specific group of stakeholders. Where the cultural output of the “north” is discussed, it has tended to be centred on Manchester and Liverpool: in Yorkshire’s neighbouring – and historically rival – county of Lancashire. In the post-punk era, where Yorkshire has had critical attention, it has tended to focus either on Leeds’ art-school groups or the electro-industrial acts of Hull and Sheffield. This leaves a substantial gap in knowledge of groups that are resolutely working-class, Yorkshire, and post-punk. Therefore, this thesis takes an ethnographic approach that prioritises the co-production of knowledge with working-class musicians, recorded as accurately as possible in spoken dialect, while autoethnographic field notes document the researcher’s accounts of Yorkshireness in the international post-punk community. This work demonstrates the subcultural characteristics of Yorkshire identity, challenges the hegemony of larger metropoles in musical heritage, and elevates working-class contributions to post-punk discourse, while the ongoing negotiation of the mythologising tendencies of working as a musician provide a key original insight.