(Joanne:) But Sheffield isn’t just about that; obviously you’ve got the Arctic Monkeys as well. It’s a very, very arty town. It’s a bit dull...
(Susan:) I think it is because it’s a bit boring. There isn’t much going on. You only have to go across the Pennines to Manchester and suddenly you're in a different world; it’s very cosmopolitan. You come back to Sheffield and it’s a bit... boring! And I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing because it creates creativity.
But that’s why good bands don’t come from London. Ambitious bands move to London to become famous but that’s not the same thing... even during punk and post-punk when you had a lot of people coming through, a lot of these bands were more associated with places like Bromley, which are satellite towns or else they came from squatted communities where people couldn’t afford any of the entertainment options that London offered.
Perhaps it depends on how far the creativity present is removed from the creative process. If it's something like Melbourne's "little band" scene or Portland's zine culture, where the audiences are the participants, it could be different than an industry/marketplace town like London, where the packaged end results of creativity are made available for consumption.
There's a lot of anecdotes and opinion to this effect. It used to be said about Brisbane for example. But I'd want to see stats, because I think one could just as easily claim that cities that are already full of creativity inspire creativity - eg Melbourne and New York.