We’ve got 32 panels, over 120 speakers and delegates, coming to MediaCityUK this week for the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (UK and Ireland) biennial conference. So excited—the event has been 15 months in the making, and now it’s almost here. (It’s being reported in the press—read the Manchester Evening News version of the conference, plus MEN readers’ comments, by clicking on the MEN screenshot below.) I can’t list the whole programme here, but I can offer a bit of a taster as to the kinds of topics being talked about in panels. And there are over 25 others! Most of them are about the conference theme, Imagining Communities Musically: Putting Popular Music in its Place. For instance:
- Panel 15. Englishness I. Chair: Dave Laing
- Richard Mills, St Mary’s University College: Englishness and placelessness in Nick Drake’s lyrics
- Davey Ray Moor, Bath Spa University: Carl Barat’s glimpses of Albion: A London Gothic
- Christian Lloyd and Shara Rambarran [joint presentation], Queen’s University (Canada) Bader International Study Centre: Tricky’s Mixed Race: internal culture shock, mixed medium, notional anthems
- Gurdeep Khabra, University of Liverpool: Stories about Soho Road: Bhangra music, place and identity.
- Panel 7. Festival as sonic-spatial community. Chair: George McKay
- Gina Arnold, Stanford University: Hardly Strictly Utopia: race, space and the American rock festival
- Alison Eales, University of Glasgow: Live music and urban regeneration: Glasgow and its Jazz Festival.
- Panel 20. Sounds and visions of Scotland. Chair: Michael Goddard
- Bob Anderson, University of Glasgow: Rain Town or Indie Town: social network theory and Glasgow’s local music scene
- Holly Tessler, University of the West of Scotland: Aye Tunes: Scotland’s Greatest Album and Scottish identity
- Evangelos Chrysagis, University of Edinburgh: ‘A sense of togetherness’: Nae Wave and the DIY music community in Glasgow.
Panel 3. Women, girls, mothers. Chair: Nikki Dibben- Sarah Boak, University of Southampton: Mother Revolution: Maternal bodies in the work of female singer-songwriters
- Paula Hearsum, University of Brighton: Women, music, death – examining the dominant discourses of musicians’ obituaries
- Nancy Bruseker, University of Liverpool: ‘From one of your old “gallery girls”’: Vesta Tilley’s fan mail and popular music audiences
- Sini Timonen, City University: The girl singer in 1960s London: the position of female vocalists within the pop music industry.
- Panel 26. Foreign styles, local realities: popular music in and beyond post-Soviet Russia II. Chair: Yngvar Steinholt
- David-Emil Wickström, Pop Academy Baden-Wuerttenberg: ‘Ia ne Gagarin’: imagining the Soviet Union in post-Soviet popular music from Germany
- Polly McMichael, University of Nottingham: Zemfira as Scandal-Girl: playing with genre in Russian popular music of the 1990s-2000s
- Kirstin Lohman, Warwick University: Narratives of Eastern Europe in the Dutch punk scene.
Panel 17. Jazz cultures as imaginary communities: a panel from the HERA EUFP7 Rhythm Changes: European Jazz and National Identities project. Chair: Loes Rusch- Nick Gebhardt, Lancaster University: Friends and Neighbours
- Tom Sykes, University of Salford: Making scenes: real and imagined communities in British jazz
- Tony Whyton, University of Salford: In Praise of Dreams: place and European jazz.