As a teenager in 1970s Sheffield, Pete Hill had two main interests: music and photography.

He got his first proper camera for his 15th birthday and went to his first concert, Nazareth at Sheffield City Hall, in 1974. Queen followed soon after. Before long, Hill was sneaking his camera into gigs, carrying the body in one pocket and the lens in another so the door staff would not notice.

By the late 1970s, he was photographing bands across Sheffield, at a time when the city’s music scene was beginning to shift from local noise into something much bigger. After leaving school and working as an assistant in a commercial studio on London Road, Hill started shooting friends’ bands, including The Push, who were connected to Mr Kites, one of Sheffield’s key meeting places at the time.

His photographs soon began appearing in the music press, including Melody Maker, NME and Sounds. Around the same period, Hill took on an old little mesters workshop in the centre of town as his studio, close to what is now Cambridge Street Collective. By day he photographed commercial products. Around that work, he documented the musicians, venues and characters moving through Sheffield’s post-punk and new wave scene.

The archive includes early Sheffield bands such as Cabaret Voltaire, Pulp, The Human League, ABC, Vice Versa, Artery and Clock DVA, alongside touring acts passing through the city in the late 1970s and early 1980s, including The Clash, The Jam, The Beat, The Selecter, Echo and the Bunnymen, and Siouxsie and the Banshees.

There was no grand plan at the time. As Hill puts it, “There wasn’t any sense of destiny, we were all just trying to get by.” Sheffield was still a hard, industrial city, but for a short period it became one of the most important music cities in Britain. Hill was there with a camera, close enough to the people involved to catch it before it became history.