Beatlemania

Beatlemania
Author: André Millard
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2012-06-04
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1421405245

Refreshing and insightful, Beatlemania offers a deeper understanding the days of the Fab Four and the band's long-term effects on the business and culture of pop music.

The Twenty-First-Century Legacy of the Beatles

The Twenty-First-Century Legacy of the Beatles
Author: Michael Brocken
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2016-03-03
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1317012909

It has taken Liverpool almost half a century to come to terms with the musical, cultural and now economic legacy of the Beatles and popular music. At times the group was negatively associated with sex and drugs images surrounding rock music: deemed unacceptable by the city fathers, and unworthy of their support. Liverpudlian musicians believe that the musical legacy of the Beatles can be a burden, especially when the British music industry continues to brand the latest (white) male group to emerge from Liverpool as ’the next Beatles’. Furthermore, Liverpudlians of perhaps differing ethnicities find images of ’four white boys with guitars and drums’ not only problematic in a ’musical roots’ sense, but for them culturally devoid of meaning and musically generic. The musical and cultural legacy of the Beatles remains complex. In a post-industrial setting in which both popular and traditional heritage tourism have emerged as providers of regular employment on Merseyside, major players in what might be described as a Beatles music tourism industry have constructed new interpretations of the past and placed these in such an order as to re-confirm, re-create and re-work the city as a symbolic place that both authentically and contextually represents the Beatles.

Why Don't We Do it in the Road?

Why Don't We Do it in the Road?
Author: John Astley
Publisher: INFORMATION ARCHITECTS
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2006
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0955183472

In Why Don?t We Do It In The Road? the author looks back to the 1960s and the global phenomenon surrounding four young men from Liverpool . . .The names and the songs are well known, but the ?why?? is more difficult to assess - even with hindsight - against the glare of the music industry?s powerful myth-making apparatus. . .John Astley deploys his forensic skills as a sociologist todevelop an original take on the kaleidoscopic landscape that gave birth to The Beatles phenomenon . . .The reader is invited to take a peep back into the recent past - at the post-War years in England. . .the trembling class structure of an exhausted society. . .and the advent of global communicationsin the 1960s as the music industry and British culture is unmade and remade . . .Put another way, ?Why Don?t We DoIt In The Road?? is question that has gone answered for four decades - until now. John Astley is a writer and lecturer - and is a frequent contributor to journals, conferences, and radio talks. As a sociologist of culture, he is also the author of three volumes of collected essays: Liberation & Domestication, Culture & Creativity, and Professionalism & Practice. John Astley is currently working on Herbivores and Carnivores, a timely investigation into cultural values in contemporary society.

The Beatles' Second Album

The Beatles' Second Album
Author: Dave Marsh
Publisher: Rodale Books
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2007-10-28
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1609617169

The Beatles' Second Album runs only 22 minutes, with just 11 songs--many of which the group didn't write. Despite all that, the album personifies the Beatles: the world's greatest rock'n'roll band, according to well-known rock'n'roll critic and author Dave Marsh. With its overload of rock'n'roll, R&B, and early soul influence, including "Roll Over Beethoven," and "Long Tall Sally", The Beatles' Second Album - the book and the album - offers a great vantage point from which to see the group's enormous impact on pop music and culture. Marsh breaks new ground by focusing on the Beatles' US recordings and how they evolved from British releases at a time when the two nations' approaches to rock'n'roll production were vastly different.

Gordon Stretton, Black British Transoceanic Jazz Pioneer

Gordon Stretton, Black British Transoceanic Jazz Pioneer
Author: Michael Brocken
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2018-09-15
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1498574475

This extensively researched text concerning the life and career of Liverpool-born Black jazz musician Gordon Stretton not only contributes to the important debate concerning the transoceanic pathways of jazz during the 20th century, but also suggests to the jazz fan and scholar alike that such pathways, reaching as they also did across the Atlantic from Europe, are actually part of a largely ignored therefore partially-hidden history of 20th century jazz performance, industry and influence. The work also exists to contribute to a more complete picture of the significance of diaspora studies across the spectrum of popular music performance, and to award to those Liverpool musicians who were not contributors to the city’s musical visage post-rock ‘n’ roll, a place in popular music history. Gordon Stretton was a jazz pioneer in several senses: he emerged from a poverty-stricken, racially marginalized upbringing in Liverpool to develop a popular music career emblematic of Black diasporan experience. He was a child dancer and singer in the Lancashire Lads (the troupe which was also part of a young Charlie Chaplin’s development), a well-respected solo touring artist in the UK as ‘The Natural Artistic Coon’, a chorister and musical director with the Jamaican Choral Union and, having encountered syncopated music, a jazz percussionist, multi-instrumentalist and vocalist (not to mention a ground-breaking bandleader). All of these musical experiences took place through time on his own terms as he learnt his craft ‘on the hoof’ via many different encounters with musical genres from Liverpool to London, Paris, Brussels, Rio, and Buenos Aires. Gordon Stretton was truly a transoceanic jazz pioneer.

Decline, Renewal and the City in Popular Music Culture: Beyond the Beatles

Decline, Renewal and the City in Popular Music Culture: Beyond the Beatles
Author: Sara Cohen
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2017-09-29
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1351218417

How is popular music culture connected with the life, image, and identity of a city? How, for example, did the Beatles emerge in Liverpool, how did they come to be categorized as part of Liverpool culture and identity and used to develop and promote the city, and how have connections between the Beatles and Liverpool been forged and contested? This book explores the relationship between popular music and the city using Liverpool as a case study. Firstly, it examines the impact of social and economic change within that city on its popular music culture, focusing on de-industrialization and economic restructuring during the 1980s and 1990s. Secondly, and in turn, it considers the specificity of popular music culture and the many diverse ways in which it influences city life and informs the way that the city is thought about, valued and experienced. Cohen highlights popular music's unique role and significance in the making of cities, and illustrates how de-industrialization encouraged efforts to connect popular music to the city, to categorize, claim and promote it as local culture, and harness and mobilize it as a local resource. In doing so she adopts an approach that recognizes music as a social and symbolic practice encompassing a diversity of roles and characteristics: music as a culture or way of life distinguished by social and ideological conventions; music as sound; speech and discourse about music; and music as a commodity and industry.

Other Voices: Hidden Histories of Liverpool's Popular Music Scenes, 1930s-1970s

Other Voices: Hidden Histories of Liverpool's Popular Music Scenes, 1930s-1970s
Author: Michael Brocken
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 454
Release: 2016-05-23
Genre: Music
ISBN: 131708487X

At times it appears that a whole industry exists to perpetuate the myth of origin of the Beatles. There certainly exists a popular music (or perhaps 'rock') origin myth concerning this group and the city of Liverpool and this draws in devotees, as if on a pilgrimage, to Liverpool itself. Once 'within' the city, local businesses exist primarily to escort these pilgrims around several almost iconic spaces and places associated with the group. At times it all almost seems 'spiritual'. One might argue however that, like any function myth, the music history of the Liverpool in which the Beatles grew and then departed is not fully represented. Beatles historians and businessmen-alike have seized upon myriad musical experiences and reworked them into a discourse that homogenizes not only the diverse collective articulations that initially put them into place, but also the receptive practices of those travellers willing to listen to a somewhat linear, exclusive narrative. Other Voices therefore exists as a history of the disparate and now partially hidden musical strands that contributed to Liverpool's musical countenance. It is also a critique of Beatles-related institutionalized popular music mythology. Via a critical historical investigation of several thus far partially hidden popular music activities in pre- and post-Second World War Liverpool, Michael Brocken reveals different yet intrinsic musical and socio-cultural processes from within the city of Liverpool. By addressing such 'scenes' as those involving dance bands, traditional jazz, folk music, country and western, and rhythm and blues, together with a consideration of partially hidden key places and individuals, and Liverpool's first 'real' record label, an assemblage of 'other voices' bears witness to an 'other', seldom discussed, Liverpool. By doing so, Brocken - born and raised in Liverpool - asks questions about not only the historicity of the Beatles-Liverpool narrative, but also about the absence o

A Taste of Honey

A Taste of Honey
Author: Melanie Williams
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 106
Release: 2023-04-20
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1839021586

A Taste of Honey (1961) is a landmark in British cinema history. In this book, Melanie Williams explores the many, extraordinary ways in which it was trailblazing. It is the only film of the British New Wave canon to have been written by a woman – Shelagh Delaney, adapting her own groundbreaking stage play. At the behest of director Tony Richardson and his company, Woodfall, it was one of the first films to be made entirely on location, and was shot in an innovative, rough, poetic style by cinematographer Walter Lassally. It was also the launchpad for a new type of young female star in Rita Tushingham. Tushingham plays the young heroine, Jo, who finds she is pregnant after her love affair with Jimmy (Paul Danquah), a Black sailor. When Jimmy's ship sails away, Jo is comforted and supported by her gay friend Geoff (Murray Melvin), while her unreliable mother, Helen (Dora Bryan), has her own life to lead. Candid in its treatment of matters of gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality and motherhood, and highly distinctive in its evocation of place and landscape, A Taste of Honey marked the advent of new possibilities for the telling of working-class stories in British cinema. As such, its rich but complex legacy endures to this day.

Love Across the Atlantic

Love Across the Atlantic
Author: Barbara Jane Brickman
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2020-02-14
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1474452094

From romantic novelist Elinor Glyn in the 1920s to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle today, this collection examines some of the BG, contemporary manifestations and enduring appeal of US-UK romance across popular culture.