Remembering Popular Musics Past: Memory-Heritage-History

By Anthem Press

‘Remembering Popular Music’s Past’ capitalises on the growing interest, globally, in the preservation of popular music’s material past and on scholarly explorations of the ways in which popular music, as heritage, is produced, legitimised and conferred cultural and historical significance. The chapters in this collection consider the spaces, practices and representations that constitute popular music heritage in order to elucidate how popular music’s past is lived in the present. Thus the focus is on the transformation of popular music into heritage, and the role of history and memory in this transformation. The collection is particularly interested in the ways in which popular music’s past becomes enacted in the present.

The chapters discuss a diverse array of topics but are unified by inquiry into the construction, curation, display, negotiation and perception of popular music’s past. The collection presents a critical perspective on academics’ involvement in ‘historian’s’ work of ‘reconstruction’ of the past through archival and analytical research. The cultural studies framework adopted in the collection encompasses unique approaches to popular music historiography, sociology, film analysis, and archival and museal work. Broadly ‘Remembering Popular Music’s Past’ deals with issues of precarity in popular music heritage, history and memory. The collection is a timely addition to a subfield of popular music studies and critical heritage studies that has grown exponentially in the past ten years.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Jun 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781783089710

Book preview

Remembering Popular Music’s Past

Remembering Popular Music’s Past

Memory–Heritage–History

Edited by

Lauren Istvandity, Sarah Baker and Zelmarie Cantillon

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2019

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

© 2019 Lauren Istvandity, Sarah Baker and Zelmarie Cantillon editorial matter and selection; individual chapters © individual contributors

The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Istvandity, Lauren. | Baker, Sarah, 1977– | Cantillon, Zelmarie.

Title: Remembering popular music’s past : memory–heritage–history / edited by Lauren Istvandity, Sarah Baker and Zelmarie Cantillon.

Description: London, UK; New York, NY: Anthem Press, 2019. | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019020671 | ISBN 9781783089697 (hardback)

Subjects: LCSH: Popular music – Historiography. | Popular music – Exhibitions. | Popular music archives. | Music museums.

Classification: LCC ML3470.R47 2019 | DDC 781.64072/2–dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019020

ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-969-7 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78308-969-5 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

List of Figures

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1. The Precarity of Memory, Heritage and History in Remembering Popular Music’s Past

Lauren Istvandity and Zelmarie Cantillon

Part I.

MEMORY

Chapter 2. Consuming Popular Music Heritage

Paul Long

Chapter 3. ‘Back in the Day’: Experiencing and Retelling the Past as a Claim to Belong in the Current Northern Soul Scene

Sarah Raine

Chapter 4. Resilience and Change: Popular Folk Songs in a Cultural Landscape

Ashton Sinamai and John Schofield

Chapter 5. Remembering the Independent Record Shop: The Ordinary Affects of Leedin Records

Adele Pavlidis

Chapter 6. Mean Streets as Heritage Object: Music, Nostalgia and the Museumification of Martin Scorsese

Amanda Howell

Part II.

HERITAGE

Chapter 7. Mark II: Reworking the Heritage B(r)and

Shane Homan

Chapter 8. The Continually Precarious State of the Musical Object

Charles Fairchild

Chapter 9. Showing Off: Taking Popular Music Research into the Museum

Peter Doyle

Chapter 10. Preserving Icelandic Popular Music Heritage: Issues of Collection, Access and Representation

Zelmarie Cantillon, Bob Buttigieg and Sarah Baker

Chapter 11. Questioning the Future of Popular Music Heritage in the Age of Platform Capitalism

Raphaël Nowak

Part III.

HISTORY

Chapter 12. Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train (1989): Representing the Memphis Music Legacy on Film

Adriano Tedde and David Baker

Chapter 13. Phenomenology of the Surf Ballroom’s Winter Dance Party: Affect and Community at a Popular Music Heritage Tourism Event

Sheryl Davis, Sherry Davis and Zelmarie Cantillon

Chapter 14. Disappearing History: Two Case Studies on the Precarity of Music Writing

Ian Rogers

Chapter 15. Great Albums, Greedy Collectors and Gritty Sounds? A View from ‘Snobbish Connoisseurs’ on the Canonization and Archivalism of Korean Pop-Rock

Hyunjoon Shin and Keewoong Lee

Chapter 16. Towards a Feminist History of Popular Music: Re-examining Writing on Musicians and Domestic Violence in the Wake of #MeToo

Catherine Strong

List of Contributors

Index

FIGURES

2.1 Looking down on the exhibition space

2.2 Original Click Clubbers in front of a wall of fly-posters advertising original gigs at the venue

5.1 My mother, Cristina Pavlidis, standing outside Leedin Records, Footscray, Melbourne, Australia

5.2 Left to right, Sonia Tasev, Kylie Minogue, Frank Vella, Glenn Forsyth

8.1 Outside wall. Tina Turner Museum at Flagg Grove School

8.2 Interior display 1. Tina Turner Museum at Flagg Grove School

8.3 Interior display 2. Tina Turner Museum at Flagg Grove School

13.1 Official logo for The Surf Speaks

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We extend our thanks to the contributors to this volume for their efforts and for their continued work in the field of music heritage.

We wish to acknowledge the editorial team at Anthem Press for their guidance, and recognize the backing of the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research, the Queensland Conservatorium Research Centre, and the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science at Griffith University.

Chapter 1

THE PRECARITY OF MEMORY, HERITAGE AND HISTORY IN REMEMBERING POPULAR MUSIC’S PAST

Lauren Istvandity and Zelmarie Cantillon

Introduction

The growing interest, globally, in the preservation of popular music’s material past is beginning to yield a substantial range of scholarly explorations into how popular music, as heritage, is produced and legitimized (Brandellero et al. 2014) in ways that confer ‘critical acclaim, historical importance and cultural value’ (Bennett 2009, 478). The chapters in this collection all have as their starting point Les Roberts’s (2014, 276–77) assertion that we must ‘break[] down music heritage discourses into the spaces, practices and acts of transfer that play performative host to the cultures of popular music pasts’ in order to ‘gain a better understanding of how these pasts […] are lived in the present’. Hence, the focus here is on the transformation of popular music into heritage, and the role of history and memory in this process. The collection is particularly interested in the ways in which popular music’s past becomes enacted in the present, and explores the condition of this heritage. Despite the overwhelming permeation of popular music into everyday life, the ephemeral nature of both tangible and intangible aspects of popular music’s past foreshadows the reality that the items for preservation – and preservation practices themselves – are in danger of partial or complete loss. What were once considered the disposable by-products of popular music and culture – ticket stubs, posters, photographs, limited issue records, personal stories – have now become the target of enthusiast and expert efforts to preserve the artefacts, music and oral histories of our recent past. Such items are often located in ambiguous places – hidden under the bed, boxed in the garage, forgotten in the attic. Some of these objects eventually make their way into the collections of museums, archives and halls of fame, but many, once discovered lurking in those out-of-sight, out-of-mind places, become designated as ‘rubbish’ and end up as landfill (Baker and Huber 2015).

In this collection, we emphasize the interrelated nature of memory, heritage and history, which work alongside one another, particularly in the context of the recent past, where heritage and history of popular music is both lived and remembered by communities, subcultures and societies. The following chapters focus on a diverse array of topics but are unified by inquiry into the construction, curation, display, negotiation and perception of popular music’s past. The collection presents a critical perspective on academics’ involvement in historians’ work of reconstruction of the past through archival and analytical research. The cultural studies framework adopted in the collection encompasses unique approaches to popular music historiography, sociology, film analysis and archival and museal work. The breadth of popular music’s influence is recognized in the range of formats and mediums that serve as chapter topics. From physical and built heritage – photographs, objects and buildings – to the intangible – soundtracks, online writing, tributes and commemorations – this collection underscores the rich origins of popular music heritage. Other chapters traverse the theoretical, looking to both the past and the future to understand possibilities in construction and preservation of popular music’s past.

The Precarity of Popular Music Heritage

This collection centres on the notion that popular music heritage is precarious, by which we mean it is at risk, fragile and insecure, in its tangible and intangible forms. The state of heritage as needing protection is widely recognized, including through major conventions and guidelines released by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), for example. The idea of heritage as precarious has been drawn upon in other academic work, such as the intersection of tourism and heritage, where popular physical heritage sites are at risk of damage due to not only foot traffic and adjacent architectural development but also the stories and myths that are perpetuated about these places (e.g. Dines 2018; Fisher 1996). The concept of precarity has also been applied to intangible forms of heritage, particularly languages and ethnomusicology, where indigenous forms of communication and expression are easily endangered through the loss of oral traditions (see Grant 2010; Howard 2016; Nettle and Romaine 2000). Kurin (2004) notes the problematic nature of intangible heritage, such that only some forms are recognized by the 2003 UNESCO Convention (e.g. stories or sayings are considered intangible cultural heritage but a language in itself is not). Rather than protect intangible traditions, such attitudes can further entrench the precarious existence of significant cultural histories.

Through the chapters in this book, we present the broad argument that popular music heritage, despite originating in the recent past, is especially precarious due to a range of factors, including its global and local circles of dissemination, the ephemeral nature of music, the fallibility of paper or material records on which it is recorded and its changing value to societies from the past to the present. The subtitle of this book, ‘memory–heritage–history’, suggests there is not just one lens through which to view popular music heritage. Rather, the challenges and futures of popular music’s past can be readily assembled within and between these three areas.

Memory

Memory – in both personal and collective forms – is a key component of understanding popular music’s past. Through lived experience and collective reconstruction, we draw on memory to get a sense of the impact of popular music, and the influences on individual lives through large communities. Memory also encourages the affective reimagining of the past in the present, where personal recollections can be triggered by music in unexpected ways (Istvandity 2014). Because of its overtly human nature, emanating from within individual and collective psyches, memory is not always a reliable record of the past – it is fallible and sometimes erroneous, prone to romanticization and the power of suggestion, and easily eroded by time and the processes of ageing (Schacter 2001). Processes of forgetting, alongside remembering, shape the way we receive and review histories presented to us. What we are told, or choose, to forget is often reflected in the dominant voices, ideologies or discourses that represent history and heritage over time (Harrison 2013). Memory is therefore a precarious resource in preserving popular music’s past: while the truths within it must be treated carefully, without its collection and preservation, knowledge otherwise untraceable may be lost permanently.

Chapters in this volume represent diverse approaches to working with memory in tandem with issues facing popular music heritage. We begin with Paul Long’s examination of the connections between original audiences and heritage materials (Chapter 2), where memory of popular music experience is both sought and elicited. Focusing on a recent exhibition documenting the role of the Click Club in shaping the music scene of Birmingham, United Kingdom, Long considers how affect, memory and nostalgia are enacted for visitors of the 1980s club in the exhibition. In particular, he questions what co-authorship of heritage – by visitors and curators – produces in terms of how popular music’s past is remembered. Also looking to UK music scenes is Sarah Raine’s chapter (Chapter 3), which considers how scene membership can extend beyond its original patronage via an exploration of the British northern soul scene. Raine describes how older generations mediate the experience of the soul scene in the 1970s for newer members, all of whom engage regularly in activities of tribute and celebration, helping to maintain the dominant narratives of the scene’s past.

Often manifesting as intangible heritage, music can prove one of the most problematic, yet highly informative, sources of local heritage. In Chapter 4, Ashton Sinamai and John Schofield examine the survival of folk songs in Yorkshire, northern England, for the ways in which they evoke regional and national memories of place, acting as significant points of the cultural landscape alongside physical features and sites. Also drawing focus to more local forms of popular music heritage is Adele Pavlidis’s autoethnographic exploration of affective interaction with music heritage borne of experiences within a retail record shop in Melbourne, Australia, in the 1980s (Chapter 5). Reconnecting via Facebook, workers of Leedin Records recall shared memories of the shop’s atmosphere and significant events. With the passage of time, these memories become part of the fabric of popular music heritage on the macro level, where personal lives become intertwined with national and global cultural trends. In contrast, the final chapter in this section (Chapter 6) considers the pastiche of movie soundtracks as a form of personal and public heritage, focusing on Martin Scorsese’s film Mean Streets (1973) as a case study. Author Amanda Howell discusses issues surrounding nostalgia, and how carefully selected popular music can engender a time, place and imagined experience when placed alongside film scenes of sometimes jarring dissimilarity.

Heritage

Popular music heritage takes both tangible and intangible forms, encompassing material artefacts and physical sites as well as memories and cultural practices. This heritage is documented, preserved and displayed through diverse products (documentaries, books, album reissues) and institutions (museums, archives, halls of fame). Thus, heritage is the way in which people use history (Harvey 2008, 19). Since heritage has conventionally been understood as that which is singular, unique and belonging to a distant past, popular music – characterized by mass-produced, mass-consumed ephemera and a relatively recent history – has had to grapple with gaining recognition as a legitimate form of heritage, and with securing appropriate levels of funding and resources for its preservation. Although often undervalued in comparison to traditional, older forms of heritage, popular music is historically significant in that it constitutes a core element of everyday life and cultural expression across the globe in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These histories are in a precarious position, at risk of being lost if not recognized as significant and adequately protected. Precarity also arises within the field of popular music heritage itself. What constitutes ‘heritage’ is not pre-given, but rather is ‘invented’ (Kong 1999) or constructed. Therefore, issues can arise surrounding what is deemed worthy (or not) of being collected, preserved, displayed and celebrated. Such decisions can ultimately shape what is remembered and valued into the future.

This section opens with Shane Homan’s chapter (Chapter 7) on the modern tribute act as a form of heritage. Homan explores how the influence of revered popular music icons is maintained in part by modern renditions of both their songs and stage presence. Using 1970s Australian band Skyhooks as a case study, this chapter aims to further understand the role of tribute acts in contemporary perceptions of cultural value and rock music heritage. Turning attention to heritage institutions, Charles Fairchild’s chapter (Chapter 8) considers how heritage is constructed and experienced in physical museums, specifically looking at sites that were once part of the personal life of the popular music celebrities they aim to represent. Taking the Tina Turner Museum in Brownsville, Tennessee, United States, as an example, Fairchild discusses how these places and the objects within them are said to embody a sense of atmosphere, meaning and authenticity in the way they present popular music’s past to the public. Continuing this exploration of curation and authenticity, Peter Doyle (Chapter 9) investigates the complementary relationship between popular music exhibition curation and popular music scholarship. Doyle suggests that, at a time when museums are moving towards the anonymous voice in curation, popular music scholarship could provide the authorial, positioned voice that can so effectively endow related exhibitions with a greater sense of authenticity, and invoke new methods of curatorial practice.

In the following chapter, Zelmarie Cantillon, Bob Buttigieg and Sarah Baker (Chapter 10) examine some of the challenges facing popular music preservation and documentation in Iceland. Although the country has a rich music history and enthusiastic heritage practitioners, issues surrounding collection practices, exhibition styles, public access and preservation strategies pose significant problems for how heritage is being used and represented. Cantillon, Buttigieg and Baker discuss the potential implications of these issues in terms of how Iceland’s popular music history will be engaged with and collectively remembered into the future. To close this section, Raphaël Nowak’s chapter (Chapter 11) also looks to the future assemblage of popular music heritage. In an age where digital music and streaming platforms have drastically altered the way we consume music, Nowak argues that contemporary practices, which leave fewer tangible artefacts yet greater amounts of data, will challenge the ways in which we understand, preserve and document popular music in the twenty-first century and beyond.

History

If heritage is thought of as the tangible and intangible materials of the past, history can be defined in contrast as the events that occurred in this past, and the core resource of heritage construction (Ashworth 2013). The development of popular music has occurred in-step with social, political and economic developments (predominantly in the West) which continue to influence the ways history is retold and presented as it continues to evolve. Just as with modern histories of any kind, popular music history is fraught with contention, particularly at a time when recent trends in human rights and gender and racial equality spotlight the shortcomings of recently canonized histories. Popular music histories are transmitted in part not only through forms of heritage presentation, such as museums, galleries and archives, but also via popular media, such as documentary, film, journalism and biographies, including from unauthorized, fan-driven sources. While the core discourses of popular music have become well-covered in these places over the past 50-plus years, the emergence and, indeed, the celebration of marginalized or ‘lost’ elements of this history highlight its nature as precarious and, at times, erroneous.

Authors Adriano Tedde and David Baker consider the role of film in representing the events of popular music’s past. Their chapter (Chapter 12) examines the impact of popular culture on cities, particularly the influence of popular music in creating place-based narratives of identity. Tedde and Baker analyse Jim Jarmusch’s film Mystery Train (1989), set in Memphis, Tennessee, United States, in terms of its storyline, themes and popular music discourses, arguing for the contribution of such mediums to the greater realm of popular music heritage. In Chapter 13, Sheryl Davis, Sherry Davis and Zelmarie Cantillon also explore how popular music histories become associated with particular places through their analysis of a site of commemoration for a now famous last performance. In 1959, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J. P. Richardson performed at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa, United States, almost immediately before their untimely deaths in a plane crash. Now, the Surf Ballroom hosts the annual Winter Dance Party to memorialize the musicians’ deaths and celebrate this era of rock ’n’ roll, attracting attendees who live out old memories while creating new ones. This chapter explores attendees’ subjective and affective experiences of the event, and underscores the importance of preserving the intangible cultural heritage of historically significant places.

Despite the multiple modes through which popular music history is documented and transmitted, these histories are nonetheless at risk of being erased if not properly preserved. Although digital technologies have, in many ways, enabled more advanced forms of preservation (e.g. through the digitization of deteriorating material artefacts), Ian Rogers’s chapter (Chapter 14) highlights some of the ways in which digital media is largely insecure in its record. Rogers examines the decline of music writing in the digital age with reference to two key examples: The Vine and Pitchfork. Once at the forefront of online music journalism, both websites underwent the purposeful and political deletion of digital content from years past. Rogers observes that this has implications not just for the sites themselves, but for the ways music history, of which journalism is a critical part, can or cannot be traced in the future. In Chapter 15, Hyunjoon Shin and Keewoong Lee tackle the ethics behind the creation of the Korean pop music canon and the influence of ‘greedy collectors’. They argue for the canon’s reconsideration in light of the greater music trends which could, and should, form part of it. This chapter also discusses the rise of pop music archives as a result of canonization processes, and the role of archivalism in Korean pop music history and heritage. In the final chapter of this collection (Chapter 16), Catherine Strong draws our focus to feminist frameworks for interrogating popular music history, which has conventionally been dominated by men’s creative outputs. Strong specifically explores discourses surrounding sexual misconduct and violence against women perpetrated by male musicians, using Axl Rose and XXXTentacion as examples. This chapter asks readers to look towards a reimagined record of popular music history in which parameters are readjusted to recognize the value of women and to condemn acts of violence against them.

While varied in focus, concepts and methods, each chapter in this collection draws attention to the particular nature of popular music’s history and heritage – how it is collected, preserved and remembered, and the representations, objects and places through which it manifests. In highlighting the risks, gaps and issues with popular music heritage, this book seeks to position popular music as a fragile yet influential element of contemporary society, the significance of which will only increase in decades to come.

References

Ashworth, G. J. 2013. ‘From History to Heritage – From Heritage to Identity’. In Building a New Heritage: Tourism, Culture and Identity in the New Europe, edited by G. J. Ashworth and P. J. Larkham, 13–30. London: Routledge.

Baker, Sarah, and Alison Huber. 2015. ‘Saving Rubbish: Preserving Popular Music’s Material Culture in Amateur Archives and Museums’. In Sites of Popular Music Heritage: Memories, Histories, Places, edited by Sarah Baker, 112–24. London: Routledge.

Bennett, Andy. 2009. ‘Heritage Rock: Rock Music, Representation and Heritage Discourse’. Poetics 37: 474–89.

Brandellero, Amanda, Susanne Janssen, Sara Cohen, and Les Roberts. 2014. ‘Popular Music Heritage, Cultural Memory and Cultural Identity’. International Journal of Heritage Studies 20, no. 3: 219–23.

Dines, Nick. 2018. ‘An Irreconcilable First-Place: The Precarious Life of Tourism and Heritage in a Southern European Historic Centre’. International Journal of Heritage Studies 24, no. 2: 142–53.

Fisher, Lewis E. 1996. Saving San Antonio: The Precarious Preservation of a Heritage. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press.

Grant, Catherine. 2010. ‘The Links between Safeguarding Language and Safeguarding Musical Heritage’. International Journal of Intangible Heritage 5: 46–59.

Harrison, Rodney. 2013. ‘Forgetting to Remember, Remembering to Forget: Late Modern Heritage Practices, Sustainability and the Crisis of Accumulation of the Past’. International Journal of Heritage Studies 19, no. 6: 579–95.

Harvey, David C. 2008. ‘The History of Heritage’. In The Ashgate Research Companion to Heritage and Identity, edited by Brian Graham and Peter Howard, 19–36. Hampshire: Ashgate.

Howard, Keith, ed. 2016. Music as Intangible Cultural Heritage: Policy, Ideology, and Practice in the Preservation of East Asian Traditions. New York: Routledge.

Istvandity, Lauren. 2014. ‘The Lifetime Soundtrack: Music as an Archive for Autobiographical Memory’. Popular Music History 9, no. 2: 136–54.

Kong, Lily. 1999. ‘The Invention of Heritage: Popular Music in Singapore’. Asian Studies Review 23, no. 1: 1–25.

Kurin, Richard. 2004. ‘Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage in the 2003 UNESCO Convention: A Critical Appraisal’. Museum International 56, no. 1–2: 66–77.

Nettle, Daniel, and Suzanne Romaine. 2000. Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World’s Languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Roberts, Les. 2014. ‘Talkin Bout My Generation: Popular Music and the Culture of Heritage’. International Journal of Heritage Studies 20, no. 3: 262–80.

Schacter, Daniel L. 2001. The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Part I

MEMORY

Chapter 2

CONSUMING POPULAR MUSIC HERITAGE

Paul Long

‘Is There Anyone Out There?’ is the title of a single released in 1986 by Mighty Mighty, a pop band based in the city of Birmingham, United Kingdom, and which achieved some success as part of the then burgeoning independent sector (Hesmondhalgh 1997; King 2012; Ogg 2009). The lovelorn lyric captures youthful romantic angst, but was more recently coined as a rhetorical challenge in the title of the exhibition ‘Is There Anyone Out There?’: Documenting Birmingham’s Alternative Music Scene 1986–1990 which took place at the Parkside Gallery, Birmingham City University, in May 2016. This exhibition sought to document aspects of the city’s music scene by focusing on the Click Club, a venue brand and alternative disco night founded in the same year as the Mighty Mighty release (the band played at the venue several times) by entrepreneurs Dave Travis and Steve Coxon. ‘Is there anyone out there?’ was a means of asking who was out there that might know about and contribute to an understanding of the Click Club and, indeed, was there anyone else who would be interested in this as the subject of an exhibition?

Following a mould now familiar to popular music heritage practice, the exhibition was a means of retrieving the intangible culture of the Click Club and celebrating its 30th anniversary. For the author, by no means incidentally an original attendee of the Click Club, involvement in the origination and curation of this exhibition presented a number of research opportunities regarding popular music heritage.¹ It allowed an exploration of the club’s wider place in the culture and economy of Birmingham and assessment of its significance for original attendees. As an experience of curation as public history practice, developing the exhibition also prompted questions about the nature of visitor engagement and responses to music heritage as concept and event.

This chapter first outlines some salient historical details about the Click Club and the origins of the exhibition, which lie in the formation of an online archive and community of interest. The process of exhibition development is contextualized in relation to current scholarly perspectives on popular music heritage, archives, history and memory, positing curation as a research method. The chapter then explores empirical encounters with this music heritage activity. It seeks to understand the nature of the experiences this exhibition offered to visitors in terms of the memories and sensibilities engendered that are particular to this historical instance, a wider music culture and its heritage practices in general. The primary question concerned with the experience here asks, What is the affective nature of the sounds, artefacts and mediations of the past and how do these have meaning for consumers?

Locating the Click Club

Writing about the newly established Click Club in the New Musical Express (NME), D. J. Fontana (1986, 53) (aka club regular Derek Hammond) described its ‘Parasitic residency in an up-market meat market’. It was hosted in Burberries-on-the-Street, a nightclub that expressed 1980s ideas of glamour and aspirational culture manifest in its plush carpets, mirrored walls and an exclusive door policy. Authorized by the club owners to make use of Tuesday nights – the quietest of the week – Travis and Coxon created a space with an alternative kudos measured against how this site, in spite of its aspirations, signalled the generic mainstream. They programmed acts that reflected the plural culture of the independent music sector of the 1980s. Acts included those bands associated with the C86 collection issued by NME: Primal Scream, We’ve Got a Fuzzbox and We’re Gonna Use It, The Mighty Lemon Drops and the aforementioned Mighty Mighty (Taylor 2017). The club supported the emergence of a group of ‘grebo’² acts from the Black Country region of the UK Midlands, including Pop Will Eat Itself, The Wonder Stuff and Ned’s Atomic Dustbin. It scheduled gothic rock bands like Balaam and the Angel, Fields of the Nephilim and Rose of Avalanche, as well as nurturing the so-called baggy scene with appearances from The Charlatans, James, Ocean Colour Scene and Blur (all subsequently captured by the label Britpop). The heterogeneous nature and reach of the independent scene was further underlined by bookings for US acts Jane’s Addiction, The Pixies and Throwing Muses; homegrown hardcore punk bands like The Stupids; acid jazz act James Taylor Quartet and DJ Fatboy Slim; as well as Zimbabwean music from The Bhundu Boys, a band which holds the record for the venue’s best attended gig.

The Click Club was important locally, nationally and internationally. It played a role in the touring circuit, for distributors and local retailers, a feature of a music economy in which the record was still the organizing principle and commodity. It was a central feature in a local music scene often functioning on a do-it-yourself (DIY) basis, independent of major labels and