I am currently working on a book about popular music in the British home between 1945-90.
That period begins with the new, mass-media take-up of popular culture that was central to the country’s material and cultural postwar rebuilding; it ends at the introduction of digital broadcasting, the invention of the MP3, and on the eve of what is often described as the internet’s radical reordering of domestic musical life. During the intervening years, British homes were transformed in design and construction. Modern modes of living were accompanied by rapid material growth in audio and music retail, record production and dissemination, and music consumption of many kinds. Across divides of class, geography and ethnicity, popular music laid increasing claim to domestic space, and to the emotional and imaginative lives of those dwelling therein; by the end of the 1980s, pop had achieved a cultural and spatial ubiquity far removed from its place at the end of WWII.
By situating musical history in a domestic environment, the study aims to provide an entirely new historical account of British pop between 1945-90: it de-emphasises pop’s mythologised creators, canonical styles, famous recordings and habitual youth-culture focus, to explore instead the ways that home audiences – in all their generational and cultural variety – heard, enjoyed and reflected upon a broad range of musical forms. This history of a changing ‘musical home’ makes use of archival industry data and contemporary press discourses, and extant historical work on broadcasting and music sales. It investigates the changing uses of media technology in pop listening using source types so-far underexplored in pop histories, including broadcaster and music industry audience research, private diaries, and fan writing.
The project is supported by a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship.