Sheffield produces music that is about Sheffield. This is less common than it sounds. Most cities produce music that happens to have been made there, shaped by the scene and the economics and the specific studios and producers and clubs, but not necessarily about the city as subject. Sheffield’s most interesting music – the work that Pulp and Richard Hawley produced – is different. The city is the material as well as the location.

Pulp formed in 1978 when Jarvis Cocker was fifteen, but the version of the band that matters began to crystallise in the late 1980s and reached its fullest expression with His ‘n’ Hers in 1994 and Different Class in 1995. Cocker grew up in Sheffield – Intake, in the city’s south-east, working-class terraced streets – and attended Sheffield City Polytechnic, where the student experience of being working-class and intellectually ambitious in a city that was simultaneously suffering mass deindustrialisation informed everything he wrote.

Common People, the 1995 single that became an anthem of a specific class resentment, is a Sheffield song in its bones: the polytechnic, the observation of class performance, the particular bitterness of someone who knows exactly where they’re from and is watching someone else play at it. The song’s subject is a Greek art student, but its emotional logic is Sheffield. Cocker’s genius was to take the local and specific and make it universal without losing any of the local specificity – a Sheffield lyric that everyone who’s ever felt out of place in a social class not their own immediately understood.

Richard Hawley’s trajectory is different and in some ways more purely Sheffield. He grew up in a steel-working family in the city’s north, played guitar from adolescence, became a member of Cabaret Voltaire’s touring band and then the touring guitarist for Pulp, before beginning a solo career in 2001 that has produced a body of work unlike anything else in British music. His albums are named after Sheffield locations – Coles Corner (a famous Sheffield meeting point), Lady’s Bridge, Truelove’s Gutter – and the music is correspondingly local in its emotional register: cinematic, melancholic, deeply rooted in a city imagined as both real and mythological.

Hawley’s sound draws on a tradition of lush, orchestral popular music – Burt Bacharach, Roy Orbison, Scott Walker – and transplants it into the specific landscape of Sheffield. The songs are love songs and loss songs set against the Don Valley, the steel heritage, the specific light of a northern English post-industrial city. They are very beautiful and very Sheffield and the combination, in the wrong hands, would be parochial sentimentality. In Hawley’s hands it becomes something genuinely affecting.

The lineage continues. The Arctic Monkeys are Sheffield’s biggest band but their relationship with the city as subject is more oblique – Turner’s Sheffield is the Sheffield of West Street nights out and taxi ranks, a specific social observation rather than a mythologised landscape. The tradition of Sheffield music as self-portrait – as the city examining its own face and finding something worth looking at – is the thread that connects Pulp, Hawley, and the Monkeys across three decades of genuinely significant music from a city that keeps producing it.