Prof Tim Wall’s presentation at The Business of Live Muic conference, Edinburgh, 31st March – 2nd April 2011.

Tim Wall at the Business of Live Music Conference, Edinburgh 1st April 2011 presenting his paper: Contemporary Live Jazz Scenes in the UK regions.

Date: 8–9 September 2011
We invite proposals from a broad range of academic disciplines for a 2 day symposium examining sites of popular music heritage: from institutions such as museums, to geographic locations, websites and online archives. Papers are welcomed that explore popular music within narratives of heritage and identity, real and imagined geographies, cultural memory and contested histories.

The event will focus on three thematic areas:

Popular Music Heritage in the Museum

In recent years museums have increasingly engaged with popular music heritage, as evidenced in a proliferation of exhibitions including those in the UK such as Kylie: The Exhibition at the V&A and the British Music Experience at the O2. Museum interaction with popular music heritage enables methods of narration beyond traditional written histories, engaging visitors with objects, sounds and images. The place of popular music in the museum raises issues of how music is both represented and used to represent and explore social histories, personal and collective identities, memories, and geographies. Possible themes for papers include:

• Popular music and locality in the museum
• Disseminating popular music heritage in museums beyond text
• History and memory in popular music exhibitions and collections

Heritage, Place and Local Identity

While ideas of heritage and cultural memory play an increasingly important role in popular music historiography, the spatial and geographic frameworks underpinning the production of popular music histories remain comparatively under-examined in studies to date. The spatial embedding of popular music heritage raises questions as to the ways in which ideas of local, regional and national identity are shaped by geographies of music and place; the role of mobility practices in the production of local music histories; and the capacity for popular music memoryscapes to stimulate (and sustain) embodied and emotional attachments to places and localities. Possible themes for papers include:

• Contested geographies of popular music heritage
• Routes of popular music heritage: mobility, migration, wayfinding
• Cartographies of popular music history

Digital Archives and Online Practice

Heritage practices have proliferated in the digital age and a large part of related activity online is devoted to popular music. ‘Authorised’ or otherwise, social media groups, blogs and web pages are organised and defined by, amongst other things, genre, artist, period and geography. Sites dedicated to the popular music of Birmingham, Manchester, Sheffield, Coventry, Bristol, Woolongong, Brisbane or Detroit speak simultaneously to the hyper-local and global quality of popular music culture. The nature of such online practices raise questions about the ontology of the archive, the digital ‘artefact’ and collective memory. In light of the challenges presented to the music industries by digitisation, key questions concern the role of music and related intellectual property in online ‘folk’ histories. Possible themes for papers include:

• Contested geographies of popular music heritage
• Authorising popular music heritage and archiving practice online
• Building music cultures and communities of memory online
• Online music heritage, music industries and ownership

Please submit proposals for papers (300 words max) to

Dr Rob Knifton (robert.knifton@liverpool.ac.uk ) and Dr Les Roberts (les.roberts@liverpool.ac.uk).
Deadline for abstracts: 30 April 2011

Date for registration: 30 June 2011

Deadline for submission of draft papers: 01 Aug 2011

• Further information and registration details will be posted shortly at www.liv.ac.uk/music/
• Papers presented at the symposium will be considered for publication.

This event is co-organized with the Centre for Media and Cultural Research at Birmingham City University.

Investigating Northern Soul
 panel discussion/Q&A by Interactive Cultures

Following a screening of Tony Palmer’s 1977 film ‘The Wigan Casino’ the panel comprising
Prof Tim Wall, Dr Nicola Smith, Dr Lucy Gibson, Ady Croasdell (Ace Records) and Prof David Sanjek discussed the film and responded to comments from the audience.

Investigating Northern Soul
, Visual Representations of Northern Soul – Panel discussion by Interactive Cultures

The film is on YouTube. Not a great copy but it is there.

Ady Croasdell
Rare Records and Raucous Nights: Investigating Northern Soul symposium, University of Salford, 4 November, 2010

Ady Croasdell went to this first “Old Soul” all nighter in 1969 and now bosses the longest running Northern Soul club/all nighter of all time (31 years and counting) at the 100 Club in London’s Oxford Street. He has worked for Ace Records since 1982 compiling Northern Soul LPs and CDs for their Kent subsidiary. He oversees the production of these from concept to product and actively seeks and negotiates deals with the US owners.

Dr Lucy Gibson at the Rare Records and Raucous Nights: Investigating Northern Soul symposium
4 November, University of Salford

Lucy Gibson is a temporary lecturer in Sociology at the University of Manchester. Her doctoral research explored popular music and the life course, which included ethnographies of Northern Soul and rare soul, rock music, and electronic dance music scenes and interviews with over 70 adult fans. She is particularly interested in how ageing shapes participation in music scenes and music taste and is currently working on publications in this area.

Lucy’s slides are unreadable on the video so we have reproduced them here:

Rare Records and Raucous Nights: Investigating Northern Soul
Robert Powell Theatre, 4 November, 2010; 1-5 P.M.

A spirited examination of dance culture, record collecting, and the perpetual British love for American Rhythm & Blues

Programme

1:00 Tim Wall, Birmingham City University

“Northern Soul: There’s Nothing Northern About It (And While We’re At It, It Isn’t Soul and the Dancers Aren’t Break Dancers”)

1:30 Nicola Smith, University of Wales Institute Cardiff

“Dancing Alone, Together: Pleasure, Competency and Competition On The Northern Soul Dancefloor”

2:00 Screening “The Wigan Casino” (Tony Palmer, 1977)

2:30 Panel Discussion of visual representation of Northern Soul

3:00 Lucy Gibson, University of Manchester

“Nostalgia, Symbolic Knowledge and Generational Conflict: Contentious Issues in Contemporary Northern and Rare Soul Scenes”

3:30 Ady Croasdell, Ace Records

“Acquiring Rights and Righting Wrongs: The Copyright Clearance of Northern Soul”

4:00David Sanjek, University of Salford

“Over & Over & Over: Repetition, Reanimation and Northern Soul”

4:30Open Discussion

For more information, please contact d.sanjek@salford.ac.uk
Speakers

Ady Croasdell

Ady Croasdell went to this first “Old Soul” all nighter in 1969 and now bosses the longest running Northern Soul club/all nighter of all time (31 years and counting) at the 100 Club in London’s Oxford Street. He has worked for Ace Records since 1982 compiling Northern Soul LPs and CDs for their Kent subsidiary. He oversees the production of these from concept to product and actively seeks and negotiates deals with the US owners.

Lucy Gibson

Lucy Gibson is a temporary lecturer in Sociology at the University of Manchester. Her doctoral research explored popular music and the life course, which included ethnographies of Northern Soul and rare soul, rock music, and electronic dance music scenes and interviews with over 70 adult fans. She is particularly interested in how ageing shapes participation in music scenes and music taste and is currently working on publications in this area.

David Sanjek

David Sanjek is a Professor of Music and Director of the Popular Music Research Centre at the University of Salford. Previously, he was Archives Director of Broadcast Music Inc., the performance licensing agency. He has advised many organizations, including the R&B Foundation, the Blues Foundation, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, the Library of Congress and the Experience Music Project. He is currently readying a collection of essays (Always On My Mind: Music, Memory and Money), a special issue of Popular Music & Society on copyright in sound recordings, and a conference collection on music documentaries for publication.

Nicola Smith

Dr. Nicola Smith is Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Popular Culture at the University of Wales Institute Cardiff. Her doctoral research explored the British Northern Soul scene and she writes widely on ageing music cultures, adult-frequented music scenes and the performance of identities within fandom and popular dance. Her current research is aimed at convincing people that popular music is not just for the under-25s.

Tim Wall

Tim Wall is Professor of Radio and Popular Music Studies and Director of the Birmingham City Centre for Media and Cultural Research at Birmingham City University. More importantly, he’s been dancing to Northern Soul since the early 1970s, even if it is a little less energetic these days. He’s written widely on the relationship between African American and white popular culture, including an analysis of Northern Soul dancing. He may play some Northern records, but he won’t be dancing himself today.

Jez Collins, the originator of the Birmingham Popular Music Archive chaired a panel consisting of: Dr Marion Leonard, who was the curator of Liverpool’s The Beat Goes On, and who oversees on ongoing project to examine how museums collect and preserve (or not) popular music; Alison Surtees of the Manchester District Music Archive; Eve Wood, the director of the documentary Made in Sheffield (2001) and Mike Darby of Bristol Archive Records.

Speakers offered insights into each of their projects, revealing the variety of practices in this field, the public appetite for music heritage and the innovations and connections that curation has been making. Surtees for instance outlined how the online MDMA had generated input from around 2000 individuals, half of which regularly posted material on the site. Some of these were members of the bands featured and indeed, these explorations of music past also connected with the present scene in ways that avoided the potential necrophilia of such work.

The dynamic aspects of each of these projects was evident in the way in which they plugged into and galvanised cultural memory and generated positive responses from users and contributors. Each of course was located very firmly in the character of its respective location and had a part to play in civic and community identity. Many of the core activists worked on the archives as a labour of love (there was very little financial support available here) and a belief that music and its attendant cultures and meanings transcends the demands of the industries alone. This was an important point as one of the potential problems of work in this field is presented by copyright issues, not only around recordings but the attendant artefacts – album covers, posters, photographs etc. For many projects, the involvement of so many ‘forgotten’ bands and their good will means that these challenges can be overcome. Indeed, it is interesting to note that while one would expect such projects to feature more well-known (and potentially litigious) bands, public interest has tended to focus on some genuine retrieval work in digging up lost names, venues and events.

As a filmmaker, Eve Wood had some interesting points to make however about the cost involved in repurposing archive footage in her work. This was particularly striking with regards to the BBC and she quoted a standard rate of £3000 per minute for the use of footage (and that is exclusive of any further rights complications that may arise).

In addition, Wood also outlined some of the problems filmmaker-historians have with commissioning bodies. This related to the way in which there was an expectation that narratives should revolve around famous names and faces, although it was often the case that in pursuit of interesting stories, obscure yet interesting material would demand attention and explanation. Notwithstanding the paucity of funds available for the archiving projects, Wood’s experience also raised questions around the other kinds of pressures impacting upon these projects. Where they seek alliances with city agents and established museums and so on, there were potential demands on the nature of the stories one could tell.
All of these points of course highlighted the ways in which any kind of historical work is always inflected by a politics of practice -whether between contributors and users (why is X and not Y covered), or even by greater institutional powers.

Certainly, the growth of heritage projects around popular music is part of a challenge to the more formal and conservative ways in which archives and museums are perceived to have pursued their agendas (although I think this was a little over stated at this event). While the projects discussed on this panel have sought to expand the domain of the archive, where they have also proven to be innovative is in their participatory nature and use of online sites. In this, and given their ad hoc, enthusiast-driven origins, they have something important to impart to established institutions.

Overall, there was much to take away here for further discussion and thought.
The Bristol project for instance offered an intriguing model for collecting and making available its artefacts and of course, Leonard’s academic research activities were of great interest to me.

This handful of projects is indicative of a much more widespread international practice that has a relationship with the music and leisure industries but also operates independently of them (sometimes at odds with them), demonstrating the value of what Interactive Cultures researchers label music as culture. In light of the loss of so much material in the archives of the music business, the activities of the enthusiast, and fan, in informal (sometimes semi-legal ways online in file-sharing sites), performs an important job and indeed does much to underline the importance of popular music to communities to us.

A fuller version of this report can be found on Paul Long’s blog Media, Culture, History.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Home of Metal: Heavy Metal and Place
Capsule and the University of Wolverhampton

Location: University of Wolverhampton

Date: 1st – 4th September 2011

Key note speakers:
Prof. Scott Wilson, Kingston University (TBC)
Prof. Deena Weinstein, DePaul University (TBC)

The Heavy Metal movement is littered with accounts of its birth, not
only concerning the origins of the sound, but also the geographical and
political locations from which the music evolved. The now global
phenomenon of Heavy Metal culture has seen much change in the sounds,
styles and fashions over its 40 years of history, but is simultaneously
acutely aware of its origins in Birmingham and The Black Country (UK).

This conference on Metal and place aims to explore and evaluate the
important role that location, heritage and place have in the origins of
Heavy Metal and music in general. It will serve to engage in debate
concerning values, histories and myths in the foundation of this
movement and looking at the wider role of archiving music histories and
current practice surrounding this.

Home of Metal aims to celebrate the musical heritage of Birmingham and
The Black Country. This conference forms part of the “Home of Metal”
exhibitions and festival taking place across Birmingham and The Black
Country in the UK throughout 2011.

Home of Metal is a celebration of the music that was created in the West
Midlands, its legacy and influence across the world. Bringing people
together to share their passion by creating a digital archive,
exhibitions, heritage tours and ultimately a permanent collection
dedicated to telling the story of Metal and its unique birthplace.

The Home of Metal programme 2011 will consist of 3 core exhibitions, 4
heritage exhibitions, a film tour, conference and concerts.
The organising committee is inviting submissions initially in the form
of abstracts of no more than 300 words. Suggestions for panels will also
be considered. W

e are interested in contributions from areas of
expertise in both academia and music and related professions, so that
the event can speak to a range of participants.

Examples of possible topics for presentation
* Heavy Metal origins and heritage
* Heavy Metal and belonging / sense of place
* Heavy Metal myths
* Heavy Metal identity / issues of gender / tribal association
* Heavy Metal and Class politics
* Heavy Metal and Aesthetics / influence on design / influence
on contemporary art practice
* Music archives and exhibition / current and new methods in
archiving practice

Please send abstracts by email by 17th December to:
Dr Niall Scott : nwrscott@uclan.ac.uk
Dr Mark Jones : markjones@wlv.ac.uk

I was asked to talk about music fanzines at the Birmingham Zine Festival. This informal presentation relates my experiences of music fanzines around the end of the 1980s.

The Ins and Outs of Music Fanzines by Interactive Cultures