‘An entire community fell apart’: inside the Sheffield-set musical taking on Margaret Thatcher

• Richard Hawley, the Sheffield-born singer-songwriter, is reflecting on the “strange, upside-down” nature of the modern music business. With streaming platforms now the norm and public attention hard to leverage, it’s a far cry from the Britpop fray he entered in the mid-1990s with a lesser-known band called Longpigs. He recalls how Shakespears Sister singer Siobhan Fahey once told him that: “Back in the day with Bananarama, they’d do four interviews, two TV appearances and sell millions of recor