Derek Bailey: the strange world of Sheffield’s avant-garde pioneer

Posted On July 12, 2024July 12, 2024

There must be something in the water in Sheffield. Over the years, the Steel City has produced an astounding array of incredible musicians, from the blues-infused vocals of Joe Cocker to the indie rock prowess of the Arctic Monkeys. Along the way, the city’s streets have hosted countless innovative artists who have forever altered the trajectory of popular music. Perhaps the most original and inventive musician to emerge from South Yorkshire, however, was an unassuming bloke from Abbeydale named Derek Bailey.

Bailey was born in 1930 to a musical family, with his uncle George being one of the first people in the city of Sheffield to get their hands on an electric guitar. Clearly, this early exposure to the music world influenced Bailey’s own life path, as he began to learn the guitar himself at the age of only ten. This talent for the six-string led the Sheffield lad to become a session musician, like so many other underappreciated guitarists during the 1950s. However, it was this session work – often playing for big names like Morecambe and Wise or Bob Monkhouse – that allowed Bailey to hone his craft even further, influencing the next stage in his development.

The life of a session musician is a noble one, but Bailey was always destined for something greater. During the 1960s, after years spent as a session player, Bailey began to focus his attention on his true calling: the world of experimental improvisation. Improvisational music was, by no means, a modern creation during the 1960s, having been around in the jazz world for decades prior. However, Bailey, along with some other like-minded musicians, attempted to revolutionise expectations of improvisational guitar.

Initially, Bailey’s work in the improvisational field was limited to free jazz, performing alongside Tony Oxley and Gavin Bryars in a musical trio by the name of Joseph Holbrooke – taking its name from the often overlooked English composer. As Bailey began to find his feet as an improvisational player, though, his compositions became increasingly experimental, bordering on the avant-garde at points. Bailey later claimed that this switch towards experimental music came as a result of his own “impatience with the gruesomely predictable”.

If there was one thing that Bailey’s work was not, it was predictable. After relocating to London in 1966, the guitarist was able to seek out and work with like-minded people. Most musicians, when moving down to London at the peak of the swinging sixties, might have immersed themselves in the modernist subculture or devoted themselves to the complacent world of youth fashion. Bailey, on the other hand, only had eyes for inventive composition. Thankfully, he was able to scratch that itch by forming the Spontaneous Music Ensemble.

It was with this group that Bailey was first able to establish his unique guitar playing on a larger stage. Particularly after the release of Karyobin on Island Records in 1968, devotees of free jazz improvisation and the avant-garde finally began to take notice of the Sheffield composer. Rather than sitting back and soaking in this newfound acclaim, however, Bailey continued in his revolutionary quest, establishing Incus, the first artist-owned independent label in the history of British music.

Throughout his life, Bailey tirelessly dedicated himself to the world of improvisation and experimentation, even hosting an annual improvisational music festival, Company Week, which lasted until 1994. It is truly difficult to think of any other individual musicians who made as much of an impact on the world of improvisational guitar music as Derek Bailey; he forever altered the ways in which musicians are able to think about music and songwriting.

Okay, his music might not be as danceable as Heaven 17 or as commercially successful as Pulp, but Derek Bailey should still be heralded as one of the all-time greatest musicians to arise from the steel city of Sheffield.

Related Topics