My colleague Dr Paul Long and I have been working on a project to analyse the way popular music history is represented on television. The latest stage of that project has been work on what is probably the first documentary history of pop music on British television.  That’s Tony Palmer’s All You Need Is Love.The chapter is first up in a newly published book The Music Documentary: Acid Rock to Electropop edited by Ben Halligan, Kirsty Fairclough-Isaacs and Rob Edgar.  You can find out more at the Routledge publisher page.

‘All You Need Is Love’ is a 17-episode documentary on the history of popular music. Expensive to make and expansive in scope, the series was originally broadcast in 1977 in a prime time Saturday night slot on UK commercial TV. It was written, directed and edited by journalist and programme maker Tony Palmer.

Palmer formed his filmic sensibility with the BBC’s ‘Monitor’ series as a documentarist concerned with high cultural forms. He achieved renown and notoriety as the ‘Observer’ newspaper’s pop music critic, suggesting that the form should be taken seriously, and for the controversial and impressionistic documentary on rock music ‘All My Loving’ (1968).

While his early film was an experimental filmic essay in comprehending contemporary music, ‘All You Need is Love’ developed and crystalised Palmer’s ideas about pop music – its origins, status, direction and value.  As Cordell Marks suggested in a preview article in ‘TV Times’: ‘Palmer will be to popular music what Lord (Kenneth) Clark was to Civilisation’. Such claims reveal the contemporary tendentiousness of treating popular music seriously at all, let alone dedicating to it the kinds of resources represented by this series.

In many ways Palmer established a type of approach that many subsequent popular music documentaries emulated (and indeed, his work is endlessly appropriated across televisual documentary). In its scope, use of archive material and original footage, as well as Palmer’s distinctive position on popular music, ‘All You Need is Love’ can be understood as an important moment in music documentary and a serious contribution to the historiography of pop. Nonetheless, although the series has been made available on DVD, and the accompanying book is back in print, this work, and indeed Palmer’s wider project, is little studied or even acknowledged in documentary or popular music studies.

Our chapter argues that ‘All You Needs is Love’ is a seminal documentary in applying techniques of television history to popular music, in interpreting a series of discourses about popular music’s cultural importance and modes of production, and in establishing pop as a suitable topic worthy of serious documentary investigation. We ask questions about the origins and implications of the programme content and form, both for television and popular music, apply questions about historiography to make assessments of the construction of the past in the series, and relate the editorial line of the programmes to the way popular music studies has changed over the last thirty years.  In particular we draw on arguments we have made elsewhere to examine the narrative structure, role of the diegetic and meta-narrator, and the relationship between existing stories about popular music and the visual and aural material out of which the series is constructed.  Fundamentally, we seek to demonstrate how seeing television documentaries as mediations of mediations of the past enables us to think beyond the usual approaches to understanding this document of pop’s past.

The second edition of my book Studying Popular Music Culture is out now.

At the publisher’s site

or at Amazon sellers

Here’s what the very generous Nathan Wiseman-Trowse had to say about the new edition:

Tim Wall’s Studying Popular Music Culture is that rare thing, an academic study of music that seeks to tie together the strands of the musical text, the industry that produces it, and the audience that gives it meaning. Wall acts as a wary guide to an industry that is currently in total flux, showing the reader how conventional histories of popular music are shaped by social, industrial and technical factors that ultimately leak over into the ways in which we listen to and interpret music. The new edition provides a timely account of the history of the recorded music industry as it responds to new technologies and industrial approaches, with an ever-keen eye on how industrial practice relates to the ways in which audiences consume and use popular music in a variety of ways. Wall’s lucid style provides a coherent summary of a cultural form that is never easy to grapple with at the best of times. Studying Popular Music Culture is a vital read for anyone interested in the changing nature of popular music production and consumption, whether as student, an industry insider or just a fan of popular music.

Here’s the reviews of the first edition at Amazon:

I bought this book at request of my (soon to be) course leader at University where I will be studying Popular Music. I found the book very detailed and unlike a lot of these types of books not at all boring. Well written and divided into different sections focusing on many aspects of the Music Industry, with every subject spoken about in depth. Would definitely recommend to anyone wanting to study anything music related.

If you like the book once you read it, I’d appreciate an Amazon review if you can spare the time.

Here’s what’s in the book:

There’s  a really interesting event on South African jazz coming up at the University of York in the UK on Saturday 20 April 2013

The programme is as follows:

09:00-09:50 registration / coffee

09:50-10:00 welcome

10:00-10:45 presentation and discussion 1: Brett Pyper ‘Jazz Stokvels’

10:45-11.30 presentation and discussion 2: Matthew Temple ‘Hidden Heritages’

[11:30-12:00 coffee]

12:00-13:00 Emmanuel Abdul-Rahim in conversation: ‘On working with Mbizo Johnny Dyani’

[13:00-14:00 lunch]

14:00-15:30 film / response and discussion 3: Aryan Kaganof ‘The Legacy’ / Jonathan Eato respondent

[15:30-16:00 coffee]

16:00-17:00 ‘Unheard Music, Unseen Images’: recordings and photographs from the Ian Bruce Huntley SA jazz archive

17:00-18:00 Roundtable / closing discussion: Emmanuel Abdul-Rahim, Darius Brubeck, Brett Pyper, Matthew Temple

They say themes will include:

Artistic heritage in post-authoritarian, post-censorship societies

The artist in exile

Vernacular intellectuals

Informal / underground knowledge transfer structures

Artistic modes of resistance

Navigation Links

Registration | Programme | Abstracts | Presenters | Subscribe to email list

To register (free) email jonathan.eato@york.ac.uk by 15 April 2013.

Jazz – Rex Harris [Penguin, Pelican Books, 1956]
There are four and half pages devoted to jazz in Britain.

The Decca Book of Jazz – Peter Gammond [Frederick Muller Ltd., London 1958]
There are two chapters on jazz in Britain and one on jazz in continental Europe.

Jazz in Britain – David Boulton  [W H Allen, 1958; Jazz Book Club 1959]
The first extensive study of the development of jazz in Britain.

The Jazz Scene – Francis Newton  [A Penguin special, 1961] 

Francis Newton was the pen name for British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm. Includes an interesting study of the British Jazz Fan, 1958.

Music Outside: Contemporary Jazz in Britain – Ian Carr [Latimer New Dimensions, 1973; Northway Publications 2008]

Important polemic about the state of British jazz in the 1970s

Jazz Now – Roger Cotterrell [Quartet Books in association with the Jazz Centre Society]

A History of Jazz in Britain: 1919-1950 – Jim Godbolt [Quartet Books, 1984]

A History of Jazz in Britain: 1950-1970  – Jim Godbolt [Quartet Books, 1989]

Innovations In British Jazz Volume One 1960-1980 – John Wickes [Sound World 1999]

Circular Breathing: The Cultural Politics of Jazz in Britain – George McKay [Duke University Press 2005]

The Evolution of Jazz in Britain 1880-1935 – Catherine Parsonage [Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series, 2005]

Inside British Jazz: Crossing Borders of Race, Nation and Class – Hilary Moore [Ashgate 2012]

Trad Dads, Dirty Boppers and Free Fusioneers: British Jazz, 1960-1975 – Duncan Heining [Equinox  2012]

Photograph of Duke on-route to England published in the Melody Maker 17th June 1933

This is a list of numbers played by Duke Ellington’s band in their 1933 broadcast. They are listed by order as set out in a contemporary Melody Maker review. While Jim Godbolt (2005; 105) when citing the review says there were 14 numbers, it is more likely there were nearly 20 including the seven song ‘Blackbirds of 1930’ section and a suggestion that there were other popular songs later in the broadcast. Ulanov (1946, 131) states the programme was 45 minutes long. The Radio Times says 14/6/33: Duke Ellington and his Orchestra and says the broadcast is on the BBC National Service 8.00-8.45pm. Godbolt says it was broadcast on the Regional Service (109).

East St. Louis Toodle-Oo (theme)

Lightnin’

Creole Love Call

Old Man Blues

Rose Room

Limehouse Blues

Best Wishes

Medley of tunes from Blackbirds of 1930:

I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby

I Must Have That Man

Dig-a-Dig-a-Doo

Doing the New Low Down

Porgy

Dixie

I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby (reprise)

then:

Sophisticated Lady

It Don’t Mean a Thing

I’ve Got The World on a String (in a selection of popular tunes)

Then:
Mood Indigo

11-14 April 2013, Media City UK/University of Salford

Steven Feld is an anthropologist, who in 2012 published his book length study of “five musical years in Ghana”. His book takes the idea of jazz cosmopolitanism as a way of investigating the way that individual musicians in Accra have utilised sounds and discourses from American jazz in their own music making and in their interaction with Feld as an American anthropologist.

I take his conclusions and disposition as a researcher, rather than his research method, as a way to open up our thinking about jazz in Europe.  Employing a variety of examples, including Jan Garbarek, Courtney Pine and Dudu Pukwana, and the European scenes in which they made their music, I use the ideas of cosmopolitanism, cultural essentialism and re-enculturation to reimagine some of the standard approaches to thinking about the place and role of jazz in, and of, Europe.

In particular, I address the idea that European jazz may have a distinctive sound or set of practices, and that individual cultures or nations within Europe may provide an accented, or maybe even alternative, approach to jazz, distinct from those that developed in the US. I will explicitly address the relationship of Europe to the USA, and investigate the notions of influence and transnational jazz culture.  Specifically, though, like Feld I ensure that this discussion is rooted in actual examples of music-making and cultural practice. Included in this rethinking of European jazz is the role of European jazz media in representing and mediating what it is to be a twenty-first century European jazz musician and jazz fan. My position, therefore, will be that of a media and cultural analyst, rather than an anthropologist.

Tim Wall’s Studying Popular Music Culture is that rare thing, an academic study of popular music that seeks to tie together the strands of the musical text, the industry that produces it, and the audience that gives it meaning.  Wall acts as a wary guide to an industry that is currently in total flux, showing the reader how conventional histories of popular music are shaped by social, industrial and technical factors that ultimately leak over into the ways in which we listen to and interpret music.  This new edition provides a timely account of the history of the recorded music industry and the challenges it faces as it enters the twenty first century.  Readers are provided with ways to understand the changing nature of the music industry as it responds to new technologies and industrial approaches, with an ever-keen eye on how industrial practice relates to the ways in which audiences consume and use popular music in a variety of ways.  Wall’s lucid style provides a coherent summary of a cultural form that is never easy to grapple with at the best of times.  Studying Popular Music Culture is a vital read for anyone interested in the changing nature of popular musical production and consumption, whether as student, an industry insider or just a fan of popular music.

An abstract for a proposed article I have submitted to write with Paul Long

This article explores the ways in which the BBC has scheduled popular music programming on BBC4. Launched in March 2002, BBC4 was the Corporation’s first foray into the digital distribution of television programming. For the station’s originators the channel was a site for high-quality and distinctive programming, especially in music, offering a serious approach to its subjects in tandem with a commitment to myriad listening and viewing pleasures. Peter Maniura, the BBC’s Head of Classical Music charged with formulating the channel’s music policy, has said that his intention was to ‘broaden the mix and give more depth and volume’ and to give airtime to popular music genres not usually covered on ‘mainstream’ channels. Janice Hadlow, BBC4’s original controller, has said that the channel aimed to challenge viewers: its goals in music programming ‘allow people to enjoy what they know and love already, but also about introducing an intelligent and discerning audience to new and challenging music’.

The channel offers music-themed nights, or extended seasons of music programming, often acting as a testing ground for new approaches to music broadcasting by the BBC. Friday night has become the point in the week in which popular music programming, and music theming, is concentrated. An evening’s schedule will usually be built around a new BBC documentary production supported by rebroadcasts of material taken from the BBC’s extensive television music archive.

We ask: how have BBC4 programmers managed music commissioning and scheduling across broadcast, online forums and social media platforms? And in what ways is the material presented in the Friday night slot understood in relation to a wider set of practices around popular music heritage exemplified by magazine such as Mojo or Uncut and Simon Reynolds much-discussed Retromania thesis? We suggest that the ongoing ‘curation’ of pop’s heritage (which perforce involves a contribution to defining that heritage) and archival retrieval by the BBC of its own recordings, highlights a history of the treatment of popular music and ways of treating its forms seriously as behooves the public service remit.

The nature of this programming is exemplified by the Britannia documentary series and one-off films which concern the history of musical genres and related cultural activities in the UK. Beginning with Jazz Britannia in 2005, subsequent contributions include similar treatments of folk (2006), soul (2007), dance music (2007), pop (2008), prog rock (2009), synth (2009), blues (2009), heavy metal (2010) and lately punk (2011) (see: Long & Wall, 2010; Wall & Long, 2011). With notably high production values, extensive archival research and interview schedules, such programmes utilise an impressive wealth of media sources, as well as many original contributions from performers and critics. Original documentaries are screened alongside repeats from the BBC TV vaults such as complete episodes from Jazz 625 (1964–65) or compilations of available performances from series such as Monitor (1958– 65), Colour Me Pop (1968–69) or The Old grey Whistle Test (1971–87).

Stomping Ground: How Northern Soul Built a Dance Community

There are a number of myths about the UK Northern Soul music culture which tend to disguise how soul fans have operated as a self-sustaining community over the last forty years. Drawing upon my own experience on the scene, and my published research, I’ll be highlighting three of these myths and examining how a networks of venues and DJs established a body of recorded music and forms of dance as the basis of the Northern Soul community. In doing so I want to ask some questions about the place of venues like Wigan Casino, the conventions of dancing at a Northern night and, perhaps most controversially, the role of class, gender and race on the Northern dance-floor.

I’ll be delivering a presentation on this theme at Symposium on Soul Music and Community in the Lord Mayor’s Parlour, Manchester Town Hall, Albert Square Manchester, M2 5DB

Details at: http://www.hssr.mmu.ac.uk/annual-research-programme/2011-12-community/northern-soul-community-memory-and-place/

There will be a new edition of the book I wrote with Paul Long out soon.  This is how you’ll recognise it.