Call for Papers – UB40 Symposium.

Posted on September 8, 2010 by Rob Horrocks

Venue: Birmingham City University, UK.

Friday 18th March 2011.

Organizers: Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research in association with Birmingham Popular Music Archive.

This year, the Birmingham-based band UB40 celebrates the 30th anniversary of the release of the album ‘Signing Off’.
The band gained its name from an unemployment benefit form and achieved fame and notoriety in the ‘post-punk’ era. Known for a dedication to popularizing the sounds of reggae music the band has maintained a commitment to political issues through its music as well as cultural and social action.

Over 30 years the band has sold over 100 million albums and continues to tour extensively around the world. While the band’s star has waxed and waned in critical favour at home in the UK, it maintains a global fan base, which is particularly strong in the Third World.

This symposium seeks to bring together researchers with an interest in the band in order to consider its place in various scholarly contexts.
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On, Archives! conference report

Posted on July 23, 2010 by Rob Horrocks

Professor Tim Wall & Dr Paul Long, recently presented a paper at a ‘On, Archives!’, a conference that took place at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA from July 6-9.
This is Paul’s report.

On, Archives! was hosted by the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research (WCFTR) and also contained within it a dedicated symposium on ‘Broadcasting in the 1930s’ organized by Hugh Chignall (Bournemouth) and Jamie Medhust (Aberystwth).

En route to Madison we stopped over in Chicago. Now Chicago is undoubtedly a ‘cinematic’ city, so mythologised in American and wider cultures as to be already familiar to new visitors like me. We arrived on Independence Day which meant that the Stars and Stripes was ubiquitous and firework displays abounded.

Given the tendency to wax lyrical about such places in comparison to the familiarity of home I’ll reserve further remarks for another occasion. However, and acknowledging the trompe l’oeil effect of the cityscape and delights of wandering the streets in sweltering heat, what impressed were the various ways in which the cultural heritage of the city was celebrated.

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Tony Palmer’s All You Need is Love

Posted on July 15, 2010 by Rob Horrocks

Tony Palmer’s – All You Need is Love from Interactive Cultures on Vimeo.

Prof Tim Wall and Dr Paul Long presenting to the Sights and Sounds conference, University of Salford, June 2010. All You Need is Love is a 17 part documentary covering the Story of Popular Music. The program was originally broadcast between 1976 and 1981, but since that time it has neither been commercially released or repeated.

Symposium report: Popular music fandom

Posted on June 29, 2010 by Rob Horrocks

On Friday 25^th June Matt Grimes attended a one-day symposium on Popular Music Fandom. Here is a full report from his blog.

Popular music fandom: a one day symposium, took place at the University of Chester and was organised by Mark Duffettfrom the School of Media at Chester. As I will be conducting some research around fans as part of my PhD research I thought it would be useful to attend.

The keynote presentation was from Matt Hills from Cardiff University who is one of the UK’s key thinkers in Fan Culture and Fan studies. I had worked with Matt in the past as part of a research team that conducted some research about audience/fan online interaction with the BBC Radio websites as part of a Knowledge Transfer Project. Matt’s presentation was around considering new ways of looking at and researching fan culture based on three ideas of post-popular music, mnemic communities and intermediary fandoms. What I particularly liked was the area of mnemic communities drawing on the work of Bollas (1993) and how music has personal and/or community memory stored within it. He also touched on the idea of whether those memories are imagined and /or a community narrative. I thought this would be very useful to my research as my object of study centres around cultural/popular memory.
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Made in Birmingham – music documentary

Posted on June 1, 2010 by Rob Horrocks

A new one hour film about Birmingham’s music heritage called Made In Birmingham: Reggae, Punk, Bhangra received a private invitation only premiere recently.

Introduction to Jez’s premiere from Andrew Dubber on Vimeo.

In the video above, Jez Collins of interactive cultures explains the purpose and the genesis of the film, and how it connects with the Birmingham Music Archive.

Mediating Popular Music Heritage: British television’s narratives of popular music’s past

Posted on July 15, 2009 by Andrew Dubber

We’re at the IASPM Conference in Liverpool, where Tim presented a paper on the ways in which popular music histories are portrayed on public television. Here’s the video.

A Letter from Manchester

Posted on April 15, 2009 by Nick Webber

Among other things, we’re in the midst of putting together a funding proposal for a study of Music Consumption in the Digital Age, in partnership with Fat Northerner Records. We recently went to Manchester to meet with a group of music industry representatives, to generate interest in the project and, hopefully, to attract people who would act as an advisory board, if the bid is successful. We asked Ruth Daniel of Fat Northerner to reflect upon the proceedings.