Paul Long

Mapping the Soundscapes of Popular Music Heritage

In the summer of 2010, the Midland Arts Centre (mac) in south Birmingham reopened its doors after a £15 million refurbishment. Its main gallery featured ‘Plug In’, an exhibition curated by artist Simon Poulter celebrating various aspects of the city’s identity and cultural heritage. The heterogeneous installations included a sign from the HP Sauce factory (relocated to the Netherlands), a Morris Minor motorcar and two contributions originating in the work of the Birmingham Popular Music Archive (BPMA). Visitors could watch Made in Birmingham: Reggae Punk Bhangra (Aston, 2010), a documentary film about the city’s music scene, and view an associated ‘Music Map of Birmingham’. The latter was built from the kinds of names and places featured in the film as well as many others it inevitably left out, some long forgotten or which had barely registered with audiences the first time around. The fact that the exhibit was visited by an estimated 35,000 people and the ongoing interest in the BPMA’s project attest to the fulfilment of one of its aims which is, literally, to put the music of the city on the cultural map.1

Representing Race and Place: Black Midlanders on Television in the 1960s and 1970s

Abstract This article explores the history of black midlanders in media representations. Through a focus on Birmingham and television in particular it explores issues involved in approaching history in this manner. Key historical moments in television coverage are analysed in light of these concerns: how have black people been spoken about and how have their experiences (and responses to them) been recorded and dramatised? The analysis covers news reports held in the Media Archives Centre England archive and television production at the BBC, including the documentary work of Philip Donnellan and dramas such as Rainbow City, Gangsters and Empire Road. What is revealed here is evidence of a struggle over representations and their production. Ultimately, this is a struggle by black people themselves for adequate recognition, to be heard and ultimately to take up their place in a shared space of representation and history.

Voicing passion: The emotional economy of songwriting

This article examines articulations of the role of passion in accounts of the life and work of the songwriter. It draws upon a range of interviews with successful artists captured in the Sodajerker On Songwriting podcast. It is suggested that these interviews capture the ‘voicing’ of the conventions of creativity in popular music, exploring a context in which passionate motivation, expression and understanding of the (potentially) affective responses to songs are paramount to the labour of the songwriter. The article explores how the core of this labour deals in emotion, attempting to articulate feelings in recognisable, tradable form. This is a process that is both instrumentally rationalised but often felt to be a deeply authentic process, understood (and believed) to spring from the individual’s emotional experience, so conferring identity in a generic field. In light of current debates about the nature of creative work and emotional labour, the accounts drawn upon here can be seen to epitomise many of the qualities of what constitutes ‘good work’ through a mode of self-actualisation.

The last post: British press representations of veterans of the Great War

Harry Patch (1898–2009) was the last surviving soldier to have fought in the trenches of the Western Front, entering the media spotlight in 1998 when he was approached to contribute to the BBC documentary Veterans. Media coverage of Patch and the cultivation of his totemic status were particularly prodigious in anticipating and marking his death, producing a range of reflections on its historical, social and cultural significance. Focusing on the British popular press, this article examines media coverage of the last decade of Patch’s life. It considers the way in which the Great War is memorialised in the space of public history of the media in terms of the personalisation and sentimentalisation of Patch, exploring how he serves as a synecdoche for the millions of others who fought, how he embodies ideas of generational and social change, and how the iconography of the Great War’s contemporaneous representation works in the space of its memorialisation.

‘What We’re Trying to Do is Make Popular Politics’: The Birmingham Film and Video Workshop

This article explores the origins and work of the Birmingham Film and Video Workshop (BFVW). Addressing absences in accounts of UK screen practice, the article places the BFVW in the UK’s socio-political context of the 1970s and 80s, as part of the workshop movement and its relationship with the establishment of Channel Four Television. It asks: what were the workshops and how are they to be understood in this landscape? What kinds of work did they produce and how is it to be assessed? What was the particular nature of the BFVW in this wider context? What was the significance of its work, if indeed it was significant at all? What happened to such workshops as organisations and indeed to the work that they produced? The article explores a variety of BFVW films in terms of their aesthetic qualities and contexts of production. It draws upon archival materials as well as a series of interviews with key workshop personnel, suggesting that the re-inscription of the work of BFVW to the wider account of the workshop movement is important for understanding the structuring of this field and the history of independent production in film and television.

A labour of love: the affective archives of popular music culture

Abstract This paper outlines the prodigious field of public history preservation practice prompted by popular music culture, exploring the relationship of affect, history and the archive. Framing this exploration with a concept of cultural justice, it considers the still uncertain place of popular music as a subject of heritage and preservation, assessing the parameters of what counts as an archive and issues of democratization. It offers a discussion of the archival and affective turns in the humanities as a means of framing the politics of practice focused on popular music culture. The paper offers empirical evidence of the relational qualities of the popular music archive considered in affective terms. Discussion draws first on evidence from the vernacular practices of communities in what Baker and Collins describe as ‘do-it-yourself’ archives and secondly from ‘authorized’ collections in established archival institutions (Baker and Collins, “Sustaining Popular Music’s Material Culture,” 3). The paper explores the motivations of popular music archivists and how they articulate the affective dimensions of their work, and how their work qualifies personal and collective commitments and expressions of value and indeed, relations with users. In conclusion, affect is identified as pertinent to wider issues in the relations of archive, archivist and user and the possibilities of historical practice.

Sound, Gown and Town: Students in the Economy and Culture of UK Popular Music

As Paul Chatterton notes: ‘although it is clear that universities have a major cultural, as well as teaching and research, role in the community, few attempts have been made to specify these in detail’ (Paul Chatterton, ‘The Cultural Role of Universities in the Community: Revisiting the University–Community Debate’, Environment and Planning 32 (2000), 169). One area in which universities, and students in particular, have had a major role is in the field of popular music. Since the 1970s, the music industries have had a productive relationship with the National Union of Students (NUS) and individual students’ unions (SUs) and across the UK higher education sector. Music companies and promoters have been able to take advantage of an established culture and infrastructure of NUS co-ordination, subsidised venues and audiences deemed to be receptive to a variety of musical forms. In fact, SUs have constituted a coherent touring circuit for professional (and semi-professional) bands. However, in scholarly and biographical literature about students and the music world, and indeed in music press reviews, the university or SU (the distinction is not always clearly demarcated) usually appears as little more than a taken-for-granted mise en scene. Rarely, if at all, is attention given to how such sites became important, why popular music has been performed in such places and their particular character. Drawing upon official and unofficial archives, this chapter seeks to explore the role that students and union sites have played in popular music culture in the UK. It asks: How has activity in the higher education sector played a part in national and local scenes? What has been the nature of relationships with promoters, non-student audiences and the wider popular music culture and economy? Indeed, how has the vibrancy of the engagement with music cultures among students played a part in ‘branding’ both institution and town, underpinning the appeal of universities for applicants as much as academic credentials?

Conceptualizing Creativity and Strategy in the Work of Professional Songwriters

Abstract Drawing upon interviews conducted as part of the Sodajerker on Songwriting podcast this paper explores professional songwriting as musical labor. It explores how songwriters conceptualize creativity and what strategies they employ for the delivery of original songs. It argues that individuals evince a faith in their own autonomy in the face of the demands of form and industry, expressing intuitive concepts of inspiration and practical insights into the nature of their work as work. The paper suggests that achieving and maintaining success is affirmed in a conjunction of value that is both economic and aesthetic, personal and public.

Class, Place and History in the Imaginative Landscapes of Peaky Blinders

This chapter explores the BBC historical drama series Peaky Blinders in terms of its representation of dynamic working-class protagonists and industrial Birmingham in the inter-war period. This milieu is one that is largely absent from dramatic representation and rarely licensed for imaginative exploration in quality British television. This representation is founded in the ambition and mission of the series’ creator and author Stephen Knight, whose reflexive and critical portrait is both attracted and repulsed by this milieu in turn. Nonetheless, Peaky Blinders affords its characters psychological complexity and humanity as they cope with the aftermath of the Great War and the limitations and opportunities of their environment.

‘I will not leave, my freedom is more precious than my blood’. From affect to precarity: crowd-sourced citizen archives as memories of the Syrian war

Abstract Based on the authors’ mapping of citizen-generated footage from Daraa, the city where the Syria uprising started in March 2011, this article looks at the relation between crowd-sourced archives and processes of history making in times of war. It describes the ‘migrant journey’ of the Daraa archive, from its origins as an eyewitness documentation of the early days of the uprising, to its current status as a digital archive of the Syrian war. It also assesses the effects of digital technologies for rethinking the ways in which our societies bear witness and remember. By so doing, this article attempts to address the pitfalls attending the representation and narrativisation of an ongoing conflict, especially in the light of rising concerns on the precariousness and disappearance of the digital archives. Finally, by engaging with scholarship from archival studies, this article attempts to address the intellectual rift between humanities and archival studies scholars, and is conceived as a call for more collaboration between the two disciplines for a more constructive research on archival representations of conflict.