The New Clean: An Oral History

The New Clean sets out to assess the complex legacy of a cultural wave whose reverberations are still being felt. It brings together contemporary accounts from the New Clean movement’s main voices, and draws on previously suppressed archival material, to present a comprehensive overview of the conditions which brought it to life in the unlikely environs of industrial Sheffield, and the events which precipitated its demise.

It began in the early 1990s with a musical movement which rose in opposition to the dominant cultural paradigm. But it is a story that has been expunged from the historical record.

In a culture of escalating global tension, hardcore punk became the dominant musical genre. Hardcore invaded the mainstream in 1985 with the surprise success of Black Flag's Loose Nut album. But hardcore was quickly co-opted, commodified, and reduced to a set of empty signifiers fit for mass consumption. Black Flag were transformed into a diamond-certified pop behemoth.

The New Clean movement rose out of the grime in opposition to the rigid orthodoxy hardcore had inculcated. The New Clean wave was led by Wrecks Monday, who challenged the sonic, aesthetic and ideological consensus engendered by the hardcore acquisition spree which followed Black Flag's breakthrough. The New Clean uprising explicitly rejected the shibboleths of hardcore.

Guided by their manager, Terry Malvern, Wrecks Monday become the vessel for a new pop consciousness which, to quote Malvern associate Peter Howe, 'was nostalgic for a kind of neoliberal aesthetic that was verboten on these shores after the collapse of the Thatcher Counter-Revolution. In the context of the country at that time, it was genuinely transgressive.'

Malvern founded Contumely Records, and opened Contumely House as a hub for the city's youthful energies. Contumely set about upending the existing order; harnessing the symbolic power of 'the North' to create the testing ground for a new kind of social insurrection; waging war on 'the crushing orthodoxy of solidarity and realism; of smut, smog and a job for life.'