Dave Laing

• University of Liverpool

Nicola Spelman, Popular Music and the Myths of Madness . Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 1994. 194 + xi pp. £95. ISBN 978-1-4094-1831-3 (hbk). Simon Frith and Simon Zagorski-Thomas, eds, The Art of Record Production: An Introductory Reader for a New Academic Field . Farnham: Ashgate, 2012. 301 + xix pp. £20. ISBN 978-1-4094-0678-5 (pbk). Larry...

This paper explores the role of intermediary institutions in promoting creativity and cultural diversity in the music industry, and the impact of cultural policy on the performance of those intermediaries. It reviews some of the existing literature on the relationship between economic conditions and innovation in music, and argues that too little a...

Drink, song and disorder: the sorry saga of the Licensing Act 2003 - Volume 35 Issue 2 - Dave Laing

This paper explores the range of ways that music and football have been interlinked in the United Kingdom over the past century. The aspects covered include early novelty songs, music at stadia (marching bands, customisation of songs by fans, and PA music) and mediated music, in the form of records by club and national teams as well as professional...

‘Somewhere right now, in this country, a young person is scribbling on a scrap of paper or tapping on a keyboard, composing a song that will resonate far beyond the page. The industry may change, but that simple act of creativity remains, and will always remain, immortal and timeless’ (Feargal Sharkey, Chief Executive, UK Music, 2010) The quotation...

This article surveys legislative changes, proposals and case law affecting music copyright in the first decade of the 21st century. After restating the basic principles of copyright law, it analyzes the forthcoming increase in the duration of copyright in sound recordings in the European Economic Area. This involves a forecast of its impact on the...

Samuel Charters. 2009. A Language of Song: Journeys in the Musical World of the African Diaspora. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 368 pp. ISBN 978-0-8223-4380-6. £15.99.

John Szwed. The Man who Recorded the World: A Biography of Alan Lomax. London: William Heinemann, 2010. 438 pp. ISBN 9780434012329. £20.00.

Gordon Thompson, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. xii + 340 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-533318-3 (hbk).

Using an approach pioneered by the literary scholar Franco Moretti, this article maps popular music performance sites in order to understand the links between performers and their audiences and between music and its geographical, social, economic and cultural environments. Three case studies are provided. The first compares three genre-scenes in th...

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This article is a case study of an influential British music publication of the 1970s. It traces the origins of the magazine in the nascent rock criticism of the era and discusses its ethos in terms of historical perspective, transatlantic links, and the dichotomy between pop and rock. The content of Let It Rock was broad, including soul, jazz, cou...

The starting point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is “knowing thyself” as a product of the historical process to date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory. Therefore it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory. antonio gramsci Introduction The chapter...

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) is a nongovernmental organization (NGO) whose aims are to promote the value of recorded music, safeguard the rights of record producers and to expand the commercial uses of recorded music. The need for recording companies to find a common negotiating position to present to the Bureau...

Nathan Wiseman-Trowse, Performing Class in British Popular Music. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 208 pp. £50.00. ISBN 978-0-230-21949-6 (hbk).

This article provides a sketch of the main features of the global macro-economy of music followed by comments on World Music and its relation to the macro-economy. The article contains key financial data of the worldwide music industry in 2006 and an estimate of the royalty flows between global regions. The corporate structures of the major interna...

In 1988, the Institute of Popular Music (IPM) at the University of Liverpool was opened. It was the first specialist centre for popular music studies in Britain and one of the first in the world. This issue of Popular Music History is both a celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the IPM’s foundation and an exploration of its own history and r...

Diane Pecknold, The Selling Sound: The Rise of the Country Music Industry. Durham NC and London: Duke University Press, 2007. x + 294 pp. ISBN 978-0-8223-4080-5 (pbk).

Between 1991 and 1994, researchers at the Institute of Popular Music at the University of Liverpool carried out a research project on popular music in twentieth-century Liverpool. This article describes the principal methodologies employed, notably oral history interviews, and introduces excerpts from the published results of the research. These de...

Decline, Renewal and the City in Popular Music Culture: Beyond the Beatles. By CohenSara. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. x +252 pp. ISBN 978-0-7546-3242-9 (hb) - Volume 27 Issue 3 - Dave Laing

Marybeth Hamilton. In Search of the Blues: Black Voices, White Visions. London: Vintage, 2007. 246 pp. £8.99. ISBN 978-0-712-66446-2 (pbk).

Elton John’s American debut in 1970 was heralded by critics as the opening of a new, post-Sixties, era in popular music. This paper explores the backdrop to that debut through an analysis of John’s extremely varied experience in the British music industry of the 1960s. His ‘nine lives’ in the business ranged from classical music training and a job...

George McKay, Circular Breathing: The Cultural Politics of Jazz in Britain. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. xiv + 357 pp. ISBN 0-8223-3575-5 (pbk).

31 Songs (re-titled Songbook in the United States) is ‘a little book of essays about songs I loved’ written in 2002 by Nick Hornby, author of the 1996 hit novel High Fidelity and latterly pop critic of the New Yorker . Hornby's assumption of the role of music critic echoed the wish of the protagonist of High Fidelity whose No. 1 in a list of ‘my fi...

One of the most striking aspects of the writing on jazz is a reluctance to relate the history of the music to the messy and occasionally sordid economic circumstances of its production. [deveaux 1997, 12] The purpose of this chapter is to contribute towards a systematic study of those ‘economic circumstances’ by suggesting two frameworks within whi...

The policing of popular music can take many forms. In this chapter we consider the censorship and oppression on a global scale of musicians, fans, and others involved with popular music during the last two decades of the twentieth century (1980-1999). We look at the geographical distribution of that censorship, the causes of censorship and oppressi...

The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music Volume 1 provides an overview of media, industry, and technology and its relationship to popular music. In 500 entries by 130 contributors from around the world, the volume explores the topic in two parts: Part I: Social and Cultural Dimensions, covers the social phenomena of relevance to the practice of...

Academic work on popular music has had a difficult and intermittent relationship with work on gender and sexuality. Bursts of intense debate have been followed by years of scholarly silence, and questions that were raised in the early days of rock writing remain unresolved today. Is rock a male form? And if so, is this achieved through the gender o...

London is one of the world's foremost music cities. Using a statistical approach developed in earlier studies of music in the United Kingdom (NMC, 1996; NMC, 1999), this chapter presents the results of a survey commissioned by London Arts from researchers at the University of Westminster. The chapter draws together available data oh the commercial...

Although the European Union has had a policy for the audio?visual industry for some years, it is only since the mid?1990s that music and the music industry have figured directly in policy development in the cultural and employment sectors. This present status of music within the evolving strategies of the European Commission and European Union is d...

In 1993 several of the British national newspapers published obituaries of a Liverpool schoolteacher, Alan Durband. He had been a key figure in the establishment of the Everyman Theatre in the city and he was the former head of English teaching at the Liverpool Institute, the school which is shortly to be reopened as the Liverpool Institute for Per...

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While the rock'n'roll era, dance bands, country and the blues have been the subject of detailed and analytical histories, the 1890s, those formative years of music-recording, still await adequate and rigorous scrutiny. The standard (and only) history of the recording process remains Roland Gelatt's The Fabulous Phonograph , whose first edition appe...

Rocking Around the Clock: Music Television, Post-modernism and Consumer Culture. By Ann KaplanE.. New York & London: Methuen, 1987. 196 pp. - Volume 7 Issue 3 - Dave Laing

No Direction Home: the Life and Music of Bob Dylan. By SheltonRobert. New York. Morrow; London; New English Library, 1986. 573 pp. All Across The Telegraph: a Bob Dylan Handbook. Edited by GrayMichael and BauldieJohn. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1987. 290 pp. - Volume 7 Issue 1 - Dave Laing

Noise: the Political Economy of Music. By AttaliJacques. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985. 180 pp. - Volume 6 Issue 1 - Dave Laing

Artistic and commercial reasons have combined to support the commonplace that popular music was primarily a recorded music. For both progressive rock bands and teenybop groups the studio was the creative source, while records themselves yielded greater financial rewards than live performances. The latter were places in which to reproduce the record...

Woody Guthrie: a Life. By KleinJoe. New York: Knopf, 1980; London: Faber & Faber 1981. 475 pp. - Volume 2 - Dave Laing

Lillian Roxon's Rock Encyclopedia. Compiled by NahaEd. Completely updated and revised. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978; London: Angus & Robertson, 1980. 565 pp. The Rolling Stone Record Guide. Edited by MarshDave with SwensonJohn. New York: Random House, 1979; London: Virgin Books, 1980. 631 pp. Rock Family Trees. By FramePete. London: Omnibus Pre...