2
Authenticities from Record Hops to Raves (and the History of Disc Culture)

The Authentication of a Mass Medium

Authenticity is arguably the most important value ascribed to popular music. It is found in different kinds of music by diverse musicians, critics and fans, but it is rarely analysed and is persistently mystified. Music is perceived as authentic when it rings true or feels real, when it has credibility and comes across as genuine. In an age of endless representations and global mediation, the experience of musical authenticity is perceived as a cure both for alienation (because it offers feelings of community) and dissimulation (because it extends a sense of the really ‘real’). As such, it is valued as a balm for media fatigue and as an antidote to commercial hype. In sum, authenticity is to music what happy endings are to Hollywood cinema – the reassuring reward for suspending disbelief.

While authenticity is attributed to many different sounds, between the mid-fifties and mid-eighties, its main site was the live gig. In this period, ‘liveness’ dominated notions of authenticity. The essence or truth of music was located in its performance by musicians in front of an audience. Interestingly, the ascent of ‘liveness’ as a distinct musical value coincided with the decline of performance as both the dominant medium of music and the prototype for recording. Only when records began to be taken for music itself (rather than as ‘records’ in the strict sense of the word) did performed music really start to exploit the specificities of its ‘liveness’, emphasizing presence, visibility and spontaneity.

In fact, the demand for live gigs was arguably roused by the proliferation of recordings, which had the effect of intensifying the desire for the ‘original’ performer. Steve Connor contends that ‘increasingly high fidelity reproduction stimulates the itch for more, for closer reproductions, and the yearning to move closer to the original’ (Connor 1987: 130). Similarly, Andrew Goodwin argues that ‘aura’ has been transferred from the art object to its maker; it has taken up residence in the physical presence of the star (Goodwin 1990: 269). Walter Benjamin, the theorist who first explored this terrain in the 1930s, hoped that ‘the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’ would be liberated from this kind of worship. He believed that the awe reserved for unique objects would decline in a democratized world of mass-produced cultural goods. However, he knew this process would be difficult, for ‘cult value does not give way without resistance’ and was even suspicious that it would ‘retire into an ultimate retrenchment: the human countenance’ (Benjamin 1955/1970: 227–8).

What Benjamin did not and could not foresee was the formation of new authenticities specific to recorded entertainment, for these were dependent on historical changes in the circumstances of both the production and consumption of music. Initially, records transcribed, reproduced, copied, represented, derived from and sounded like performances. But, as the composition of popular music increasingly took place in the studio rather than, say, off stage, records came to carry sounds and musics that neither originated in nor referred to actual performances. In the 1960s, with the increased use of magnetic tape, producers began to edit their wares into ‘records of ideal, not real, events’ (Frith 1987a: 65). Moreover, in the 1970s and 1980s, new instruments such as synthesizers and samplers meant that sounds were recorded from the start. Accordingly, the record shifted from being a secondary or derivative form to a primary, original one.

In the process of becoming originals, records accrued their own authenticities. Recording technologies did not, therefore, corrode or demystify ‘aura’ as much as disperse and re-locate it. Degrees of aura came to be attributed to new, exclusive and rare records. In becoming the source of sounds, records underwent the mystification usually reserved for unique art objects. Under these conditions, it would seem that the mass-produced cultural commodity is not necessarily imitative or artificial, but plausibly archetypal and authentic. These values are related to but different from the ‘mystical veil’ or ‘magic’ described by Marx in his short essay, ‘The fetishism of commodities and the secret thereof’. Commodity fetishism would seem to account accurately for the obsessions of record collectors who call themselves ‘vinyl junkies’, but it does not explain the inversion of original and copy.

The proliferation of ‘cover’ bands from the 1950s to the mid-1970s probably best demonstrates this transposition of values. These live groups reproduced the tunes of the latest hit records and were evaluated on the basis of their proximity to the original record, hence their choice of names like ‘Disc Doubles’ and ‘Personality Platters’. By the eighties, these types of rock and pop cover bands were all but defunct, being superseded for the most part by records and to a lesser extent by tribute bands which specialized in the repertoire of specific dead or disbanded acts. (For example, the Australian Abba imitators, Bjorn Again, who played more university gigs in Britain than any other live act in the 1992–93 academic year, emulate not just records but the clothing and dance styles depicted on album covers and in film and video clips.)

Changes in music consumption were also essential to the development of the new authenticities of the disc. Records were not automatically absorbed into a static system called popular culture. Nor did they simply replace performance just because they resembled and reproduced music. The public acceptance of records for dancing was slow, selective and generational. For many years, records were considered a form of entertainment inferior to performance; they were not regarded as the ‘real’ thing or as capable of delivering an authentic experience of musical community. Records had to undergo a complex process of assimilation or integration, which involved transformations in the circulation, structure, meaning and value of both records and music cultures. This gradual enculturation of records is signalled by the changing names of the institution in which people danced to discs. The record hops, disc sessions and discotheques of the 1950s and 1960s specifically refer to the recorded nature of their entertainment. In the 1970s, transition is signalled with the shortened, familiar disco. In the 1980s, with clubs and raves, enculturation is complete and it is ‘live’ venues that must announce their difference.

The ultimate end of a technology’s enculturation is authentication. In other words, a musical form is authentic when it is rendered essential to subculture or integral to community. Equally, technologies are naturalized by enculturation. At first, new technologies seem foreign, artificial, inauthentic. Once absorbed into culture, they seem indigenous and organic. Simon Frith has been most productive in analysing the discourses of subcultural authenticity crucial to music culture (cf. Frith 1981c, 1986, 1988a). Frith argues that new music technologies tend to be opposed to nature and community. They are considered false and falsifying and, as such, threaten the authenticity or the ‘truth of music’ (Frith 1986: 265). Behind the discursive oppositions, however, lurks the fact that technological developments make new concepts of authenticity possible. In the early days of the microphone, for example, crooners were said to have a pseudo-public presence and to betray false emotions. Later, however, the extended intimacies of the microphone became a guarantor of new forms of authenticity; ‘it made stars knowable, by shifting conventions of personality, making singers sound sexy in new ways … moving the focus from the song to the singer’ (Frith 1986: 270). Similarly, when electric guitars were first introduced, they were said to alienate music from its folk roots. Later, however, when they were fully integrated into rock culture, the sound of the electric guitar became the seal of rock credibility. Records have taken an analogous, if more circuitous route, to become an authentic musical instrument of club and rave culture.

In the 1990s, records have been enculturated within the night life of British dance clubs to the extent that it makes sense to talk about disc cultures whose values are markedly different from those of live music cultures. What authenticates contemporary dance cultures is the buzz or energy which results from the interaction of records, DJ and crowd. ‘Liveness’ is displaced from the stage to the dancefloor, from the worship of the performer to a veneration of ‘atmosphere’ or ‘vibe’. The DJ and dancers share the spotlight as de facto performers; the crowd becomes a self-conscious cultural phenomenon – one which generates moods immune to reproduction, for which you have to be there. This is even more pronounced when it comes to raves, the latest incarnation of the discotheque, which are conceived as one-off rather than weekly events, some of which have attained the status of unique happenings on a scale that was once the lone preserve of the live rock festival.

Subcultural authenticities are often inflected by issues of nation, race and ethnicity. Gage Averill examines the significance of being ‘natif natal’ or native born and truly national to the perceived authenticity of Haitian music (cf. Averill 1989). While Paul Gilroy considers the trans-Atlantic circulation of discourses about racial roots and ‘authentic blackness’ to the meaning of post-war popular music (cf. Gilroy 1993). So, black British disc cultures often emphasize the strength of community ties outside the dance club, seeing the ‘vibe’ as an affirmation of a politicized black identity. Sexuality similarly informs and inflects disc cultural values. In gay clubs, which have long been spaces to escape straight surveillance, the celebratory expression of one’s ‘true’ sexuality often overrides other authenticities.

Between the production and consumption of records discussed here, two kinds of authenticity are at play. The first sort of authenticity involves issues of originality and aura; this value is held most strongly by DJs. The second kind of authenticity is about being natural to the community or organic to subculture; this is the more widespread ideal. These two kinds of authenticity can be related to two basic definitions of culture: the first draws upon definitions of culture as art, the second relates to culture in the anthropological sense of a ‘whole way of life’ (cf. Williams 1961 and 1976). With live music ideologies, the artistic and subcultural authenticities collide (and are often confused) at the point of authorship. Artistic authenticity is anchored by the performing author in so far as s/he is assumed to be the unique origin of the sound, while subcultural authenticity is grounded in the performer in so far as s/he represents the community. Within disc cultures, however, the two authenticities diverge. The record is an authentic source and the crowd makes it a ‘living’ culture. DJs bridge the gap in that they are professional collectors and players of ‘originals’ as well as mediators and orchestrators of the crowd, but not to the extent that they seem to embody authenticity (like live music performers).

Live and disc authenticities, though distinct, still have a lot in common. Both emphasize the cultural importance of being genuine and sincere and both seek to elevate their cultures above the realm of mass culture, media and commerce. Moreover, much popular music is entangled with both sets of values. Bands like the Rolling Stones are caught up in the logic of disc culture even if the dominant strains of their myth are about Mick Jagger as dramatic performer, Keith Richards as virtuoso guitarist and a legacy of gigging and live stadium shows. Similarly, even hardcore disc cultures, like house or techno, sometimes espouse residual variants of live ideology, celebrating star producer-DJs and singing divas. Some clubs and raves include ‘personal appearances’ (or ‘PAs’) by these dance ‘stars’, while others have made a purist selling point of the fact that they have ‘no PAs’. Live and recorded authenticities are therefore not mutually exclusive categories, but part of a continuum.

The development of disc cultures, the enculturation of records for dancing and the cultural ramifications of the supremacy of recording are the key issues addressed in this chapter. Most academic work on recording technology examines its effects on music production, in either its industrial or artistic guise. The main currents of debate consider whether it is democratizing or hierarchizing, rationalizing or disruptive of production processes, commodifying or challenging to legal definitions of property, inhibiting or enabling of new creativities and sites of authorship.^* While this chapter touches upon these issues, it concentrates on the less investigated relationship between recording technology and consumption.

Figure 2 Axes of authenticity

The following chapter is divided into five sections, each of which recounts the history of the enculturation and ultimate authentication of records from a different angle. The first section is a political economy (an analysis of the production of music consumption) which traces the economically-determined routes by which records entered the field of popular entertainments, tracking the rise of records and decline of performance in certain kinds of time and place. It also considers the obstacles put in the path of this ‘industrial revolution’ by the Musicians’ Union, with its exploitation of rights’ legislation and campaign to keep music live’.

The rest of the chapter considers the integration of records into music culture from more social and cultural perspectives. The second section examines how the social spaces of dancing changed to accommodate recorded music. It considers how the new social alliances and architectural designs contributed to the eventual subcultural authenticity of records. The third focuses on how record formats were modified in response to their increasing public use, detailing the formatting experiments of the 1960s, the development of twelve-inch singles in the 1970s and finally concentrating on the changing status of the DJ. The fourth section explores the specificities of recording and the kinds of music most at home with the medium. It considers how changes in the way popular music was recorded and disseminated contributed to transformations in the meaning and value of records and ponders why certain music genres came to be perceived as quintessentially and authentically recorded while others did not. The final section looks at changes to the shape and meaning of the live gig during the period in question. It identifies two seemingly contradictory tendencies. On the one hand, performances increasingly exploit those features which might distinguish them from records, retrieving spontaneity, making a theatrical happening, magnifying the presence and personality of the star. On the other hand, many performers adopted high technologies, pre-recording and even lip-synching to entertain the massive audiences they had accumulated through records, radio and other media.

Until recently, media scholars tended to overlook enculturation. Marshall McLuhan, for instance, does not identify the process per se because he sees media technologies as already cybernetic ‘extensions of man’. His analysis starts with the natural and human qualities attributed to technologies once they are fully enculturated, but doesn’t problematize them (cf. McLuhan 1964). Jean Baudrillard, to give another example, ignores the distinct statuses and effects of techniques of reproduction because he assumes that technologies which simulate are not in need of any form of assimilation. Although well-known in anthropology, the issue of enculturation is relatively new to Media Studies, having been put on the agenda by the collection, Consuming Technologies, which addresses the integration of media and information technologies into the home (cf. Silverstone and Hirsch 1992). In their opening essay, Silverstone, Hirsch and Morley identify four overlapping phases in the process of a technology’s integration into the home: appropriation (by ownership); objectification (within the decorative space of the home); incorporation (into the temporal structure of everyday lives); and conversion (into topics of conversation and cultural bonds) (cf. Silverstone et al. 1992). These categories can be used, by analogy, to clarify important dynamics in the enculturation of records into the public sphere of dancing. For example, I examine something akin to ‘incorporation’ into temporal structures (in discussing the development of new kinds of dance event) and ‘objectification’ in spatial structures (in relation to the interior design of discotheques). Moreover, their category of ‘conversion’ is an important dimension of what I include under the more encompassing historical but more specifically aesthetic category of ‘authentication’.

One needs to be wary of superimposing models generated by study of domestic contexts on to the public domain, particularly in light of the fact that one of the main hypotheses about recording technology is that it necessarily privatizes or domesticates music consumption. In his book The Recording Angel, for example, Evan Eisenberg reduces his otherwise compelling argument about the art of ‘phonography’ because, for him, ‘a record is heard in the home’ and its tendency is essentially private (Eisenberg 1987: 99). Shuhei Hosokawa’s discussion of the Walkman, for another example, slips into positioning the personal stereo as the culmination of recording’s relentless logic of individuation (cf. Hosokawa 1984). By ignoring broader contexts, these theorists fail to see the contradictory effects of music technology and the diverse significance of recorded music. Recorded music is as much a feature of public houses, shops, factories, lifts, restaurants and karaoke bars as it is an attribute of the private home.

Another hypothesis against which this chapter offers substantial evidence is that records engender cultural homogeneity. Recording technology informed Theodor Adorno’s conviction that popular music was characterized by a standardization that aimed at standard reactions (Adorno 1968/1988). While disciples of Adorno, like Jacques Attali, continue to contend that mass-reproduced music is ‘a powerful factor in consumer integration, interclass levelling, cultural homogenization. It becomes a factor in centralization, cultural normalization, and the disappearance of distinctive cultures’ (Attali 1985: 111). However, the discotheque is an institution which caters for neither individual nor mass consumption, but the collective consumption of the small group. Rather than homogenizing tastes, dance clubs nurture cultural segmentation.

Authenticity is regularly mentioned in studies of popular music but (other than the studies already cited) it tends to be discussed in terms of nebulous free-floating beliefs. Even when it is subject to thorough examination, it can still be indeterminate and unanchored. But these cryptic cultural values have material foundations; they relate to the economic, social, cultural and media conditions in which they were generated. The main aim of this chapter is, therefore, to ground the changing values of authenticity in transformed processes of music production and consumption.

Industrial Forces, Musician Resistance and ‘Live’ Ideology

Records were selectively enculturated into music culture: they moved from the private to the public sphere, from background accompaniment to specially featured entertainment, from minor occasions to momentous events, from modest locations to prominent places. Their movement is partly explained by an economic logic by which they replaced performance in the times and places with the youngest patrons and lowest budgets. Their progressive colonization of public spaces, however, was actively fought by the Musicians’ Union which was the first (and for a long time the only) body to see the practice as a serious cultural development. At the outset, the Union wanted to eradicate the practice; then it was satisfied with regulating it; later, it was appeased by receiving a percentage of the millions of pounds accrued in performance rights; finally, it resigned itself to the fact that recorded music was what many people wanted. Throughout this forty-year period, however, the Union reinforced its legislative efforts with ‘propaganda’ about the superiority and authenticity of live music. Where live music used to animate social occasions and cultural events of all kinds, recorded music now often performs the function. As a result, musician performances have declined in number, and appeal to a much smaller segment of the population than they once did.

When sound recording technology was introduced in the late 1870s, Thomas Edison proposed many uses for the new invention, few of which suggested its entertainment value. His recommendations revolved around the notion of a ‘talking machine’ which could facilitate dictation, record telephone messages, make books for the blind or create family albums for posterity (cf. Read and Welch 1976). Edison mentioned, but did not give much credence to, the phonograph’s potential as a ‘music box’. Within thirty years, however, music would be the staple noise of recording. Dance crazes, in particular, stimulated the early record business and repeatedly revived it in times of recession. In the 1910s, for example, dance instructors like Vernon and Irene Castle were important advisers to record company Artist and Repertoire departments (known as ‘A&R’, the division which decides who to sign and what material to record). They supervised records catering to the mania for tangos, one-steps, waltzes and walking dances. Even on the eve of the First World War in 1914, Columbia’s and Victor’s dance cylinders and discs were selling well (Gelatt 1977: 189).

From its inception, then, one of the main activities of the record industry was the provision of music for dancing, but it was mainly devised for home consumption, for practising dance steps and throwing parties in the private sphere. Throughout the 1920s, sound quality improved, particularly as a result of the introduction of electrical recording. This, combined with the increasing variety of musical material, singers and orchestras offered on record, made the medium more attractive. In the United States, the public performance of records on coin-operated phonographs or ‘juke-boxes’ kept the industry afloat when domestic sales dried up during the Depression. To ‘juke’ or ‘jook’ is an Afro-American vernacular expression meaning ‘to dance’ (cf. Hazzard-Gordon 1990). That the coin-operated phonograph took this name illustrates the importance of dancing to American out-of-home record-play at this time. In the UK, however, where the Depression took a different form, the juke-box did not significantly penetrate the public sphere until the fifties and sixties, and recordings did not tend to be an attracting feature of out-of-home entertainment.

During the twenties, radio quickly became a dominant source of music, most of which was broadcast live. The most popular programmes featured big dance bands who played for an audience of ballroom dancers at the same time as playing for those at home (cf. Frith 1987a). Record companies saw radio as a problem of competition and so did not send their recordings to stations for promotional purposes. When the first BBC radio programme devoted to records began in July 1927, however, its impact on sales was so obvious that record companies began to actively pursue air-play to the extent of buying plays on commercial continental stations like Radio Luxembourg. By the 1930s, argues Frith, radio was central to the new processes of record-selling and star-making which came with the shift in the commodity status of music:

The form of that commodity was irrevocably altered from live to recorded performance, from sheet music to disc, from public appearance to public broadcast – and its control passed from one set of institutions (music publishers, music hall and concert promoters, artists and agents) to another (record companies, the BBC, stars and managers). (Frith 1987a: 288)

While it is undeniable that recording took over from publishing as the leading arbiter of musical taste and style, some qualification is required of a historical shift ‘from public appearance to public broadcast’. Radio unseated the primacy of the family piano rather than challenging the dance hall; it rearranged domestic consumption (in a way the gramophone had not done) rather than instigating a massive withdrawal into the home.

During the thirties, recorded music was peripheral to out-of-home entertainment with one crucial exception – the cinema. Before the ‘talkies’, a large portion of Britain’s professional musicians were employed to accompany silent films. But within eighteen months of the box-office success of The Jazz Singer (1927, the same year as the BBC’s first record show), most of these musicians were out of a job and performance had received its first great blow. The development was crucial for the record industry as movies would become a vehicle for the international promotion of records. In the fifties, for example, the cinema would bring rock’n’roll attitudes and music to Britain with the film Blackboard Jungle and its closing track ‘Rock around the Clock’ by Bill Haley and the Comets. By the late fifties, the mutual marketing of movies and discs would be so entrenched that the album charts would be full of film soundtracks. As 45 singles were the format bought by youth in the fifties, the soundtrack albums were not predominantly rock’n’roll. The biggest sellers – South Pacific (1948), Love Me or Leave Me (1955), Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1962) and The Sound of Music (1960) – still tended towards ‘family entertainment’. In the sixties, a fair portion of both Elvis Presley’s and the Beatles’ albums were marketed as ‘original soundtracks’ e.g. Elvis’s GI Blues (1960) and Blue Hawaii (1961), the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and Help (1965). By the end of the sixties, the best-selling soundtracks would also be youth-oriented owing to the juvenilization of film audiences (cf. Doherty 1988). and the rising popularity of the album format amongst youth. The success of Simon and Garfunkel’s sound track for The Graduate in 1968 might be seen as the turning-point here.

Aside from cinemas, recorded music could be heard in pubs, restaurants and coffee bars. As early as the 1930s, the record industry began to take a financial interest in the public performance of its product. The Copyright Act of 1911 was regarded as protecting manufacturers against the unauthorized copying, as opposed to playing, of their sounds; it established a reproduction, but not a performance, right. Nevertheless, in the early thirties, record companies started to affix labels stating that the record should not be publicly performed and in 1934 they sued Cawardine’s Tea Rooms in Bristol for copyright infringement, winning the rights to the sound contained in their recordings, and set up Phonographic Performance Limited (PPL) to license the broadcast and public performance of their records.

Until the Second World War, records tended to provide background accompaniment to leisure activities; they were rarely the main entertainment at large public events. Owing in part to further improvements in technology, but primarily to the devastated condition of the British economy, the public performance of records increased dramatically during and after the War. The Musicians’ Union (MU) was particularly concerned about the use of records for dancing as the bulk of its membership worked in dance bands. In 1949, the cover of its in-house journal, Musicians’ Union Report, bore the watchwords ‘Recorded Music or You!’ and inside the Secretary General warned:

Probably the greatest threat from recorded music to the employment opportunities of our members exists in the field of casual dance engagements. There is abundant evidence that in recent years more and more dance promoters have availed themselves of the services of the public address engineer. In almost every town the man who runs the radio shop, or specializes in the provision of public address equipment, will undertake to supply recorded music for dances or other social events at a small proportion of the fee a good band would charge. (Musicians’ Union Report September-October 1949)

At about this time, the Musicians’ Union came to the first of many agreements with Phonographic Performance Limited (PPL) to attempt to combat the public use of records. As musicians were hired to perform by dancehall operators and to record by record companies, the Union was able to impede the use of records by the former through the exploitation of rights’s agreements with the latter. Since its formation, PPL had been authorizing the use of its records simply in exchange for a licence fee. From 1946 on, however, it began licensing establishments on the condition that ‘records not be used in substitution of a band or orchestra or in circumstances where it would be reasonable to claim that a band or orchestra should be employed.’ (Musicians’ Union Conference Report 1949).^*

Licensing restrictions were the driving force behind one of the first examples of the production of records specifically for public dancing. In 1950–51, Danceland Records produced ballroom numbers in standard arrangements on 78s. The objective of their records was not to provide continuous music nor fill the dancefloor (which would be the case with later formats) but simply to circumvent existing copyright law. They advertised their records for use in ballrooms, hotels, theatres and skating rinks and urged proprietors of these establishments to join the fight against PPL licensing restrictions. (Musicians’ Union Report 1951). As their recording sessions were held in Mecca ballrooms, the MU suspected that the dancehall chain financed the project.

In 1956, a new Copyright Act clarified the properties of the recording. It re-enacted the rights given to the record companies, defining the copyright in sound recordings as distinct from the copyright in musical works,^† and reiterated the three acts which required a PPL licence: making copies of records, playing them in public and broadcasting them. The Musicians’ Union was unhappy with the act for several reasons. First, the record companies maintained exclusive copyright and only volunteered royalties to the MU. Second, although it gave PPL the right to set up musician employment restrictions, it also established a tribunal to which users of copyright material (like broadcasters and dancehall owners) could protest. Third, the new Act permitted the free use of records ‘at any premises where persons reside or sleep’ as long as no special price was charged for admission and at non-profit clubs and societies whose main objectives were charitable, religious or educational (Musicians’ Union Report October 1956).

Plate 3 One of the first instances of records made specifically for the public dancefloor. In 1950 ‘Danceland Records’, allegedly payrolled by Mecca Ballrooms, advertised the sovereignty and savings that their releases afforded dancehall operators.
(Reproduced by kind permission of the Musicians’ Union)

Many dance clubs came to exploit these loopholes. For instance, the Whisky-a-Gogo in Wardour Street (which, in the 1980s, abbreviated its name to the WAG) claimed exemption from the licence fee on the grounds that the club was the headquarters of an international students’ association. The club’s solicitors drew up the charter of the so-called ‘Students’ United Social Association’ which included the following tongue-in-cheek objectives: ‘to promote opportunities for recreation, social intercourse and refreshment for foreign and English students … to advance … good international relations between young persons … to assist the promotion of social contacts for foreign students with English-speaking persons …’ (Musicians’ Union Report 1963).

Other small clubs dodged PPL licences or their conditions of use in a variety of ways. For example, the Saddle Room, once described as the ‘most fashionable discotheque in London’, full of people from the rag trade and ‘most noticeably, a great many fashion models’ was licensed by PPL on the condition that it hire a trio of musicians, but musicians never actually performed at the club (Melly 1970: 63). But, these individual cases were generally too difficult and expensive to prosecute, so the MU focused its attention on dancehall chains like Mecca and Top Rank where employment and licence fees could be gained en masse.

During the fifties, the Musicians’ Union started calling for a propaganda campaign against records which would attack their moral and aesthetic inferiority, draw on new notions of live music and strengthen its position with PPL. The term ‘live’ entered the lexicon of music appreciation only in the fifties. As more and more of the music heard was recorded, however, records become synonymous with music itself. It was only music’s marginalized other – performance – which had to speak its difference with a qualifying adjective.

At first, the word ‘live’ was short for ‘living’ and modified ‘musicians’ as in the following passage: ‘during and since the war, recorded music has been used more and more instead of “live” instrumentalists’ (Musicians’ Union Report 1949). Later it referred to music itself and quickly accumulated connotations which took it beyond the denotative meaning of performance. First, ‘live music’ affirmed that performance was not obsolete or exhausted, but full of energy and potential. Recorded music, by contrast, was dead, a decapitated ‘music without musicians’ (Musicians’ Union Report 1956). Second, the term also asserted that performance was the ‘real live thing’. Liveness became the truth of music, the seeds of genuine culture. Records, by contrast, were false prophets of pseudo-culture.

Through a series of condensations, then, the expression ‘live music’ gave positive valuation to and became generic for performed music. It soaked up the aesthetic and ethical connotations of life-versus-death, human-versus-mechanical, creative-versus-imitative. Furthermore, Union discussions about live music were overlaid with a Cold War rhetoric typical of the time. Records were a ‘grave threat’, a ‘serious danger’ and an ‘ever-present menace’ to the livelihood of the musician. Recording technology was a bomb – a set of inventions which could bring about professional death: ‘The musician may well become extinct and music may cease to be written’ (Musicians’ Union Report 1961). The term ‘live’ suggested that performance was fragile in its vitality and in need of protection.

The ideology of ‘liveness’ was one of the Union’s principal strategies ‘to combat the menace’ of recorded music. The Union initiated its ‘live’ music campaign in the fifties, adopted the slogan ‘Keep Music Live’ in 1963 and appointed a full-time official to oversee the project in 1965. Invoking a difficult combination of aesthetic, environmental and trade union concerns, the campaign was meant ‘to convince the community of the essential human value of live performance’ and of ‘the social good [generated when] the public has more contact with the people who make music’ (The Musician August 1971; Music Week 7 January 1978).

It is tempting to draw parallels between the views of the Musicians’ Union and Jean Baudrillard’s treatises on hyperreality and the death of culture. For both, culture is dying on the altar of techniques of reproduction. For Baudrillard, images are the ‘murderers of their own model’ (Baudrillard 1983a: 10). For live music advocates, recording is slowly killing its original, performance: ‘technology can destroy music itself’ (The Musician 1963). Just as Baudrillard describes the ‘precession of simulacra’ as the creation of images that no longer reflect the real but engender it, so musicians complained about the ability of recording to make more sounds and styles than were physically possible for a band. Baudrillard and the Musicians’ Union held similar notions of real culture but, faced with its death, the French theorist chose to write its obituary, while the British Union lobbied for protective legislation and disseminated propaganda.

The Union’s promotion of live music was tangibly hampered by the musical taste (and anti-mass culture discourses) that predominated among its members. For a long time, many members refused to pander to ‘gimmick-ridden rock’n’roll rubbish’ and couldn’t understand why teenagers didn’t appreciate ‘good jazz’ (Musicians’ Union Report 1959). The exigencies of Union taste even allowed for musicians in ‘beat groups’ to receive lower rates of pay, as their agreements with Mecca and Rank referred only to ‘musicians employed by dance band leaders’ until well into the 1960s (Musicians’ Union Report January 1965). The American Federation of Musicians (AFM), which conducted a similar ‘Live Music’ campaign, seemed to be less caught up in a canon of good music. AFM local branches, for example, offered workshops to keep musicians up-to-date with latest dance music fads (like the Frug) and experimented with event formats (like ‘Live-o-theques’) (Billboard 24 April 1965). The British Union, however, did not just champion performance over recording, it tended to promote certain kinds of music over others. Their discourses and contractual agreements actually reinforced the ‘natural’ association of certain music genres, like rock’n’roll and later soul, with records.^*

The ideology of live music was eventually adopted by rock culture (cf. Frith 1981a), becoming most strident in reaction to the attention disco music brought to discotheques in the mid-seventies, when tensions erupted into what was effectively a taste war. Discos were attacked for epitomizing the death of music culture. They were said to be artificial environments offering superficial and manufactured experiences: ‘a slick moving conveyor belt of the best product from the world’s rock factories, relayed by the finest amplification, with a deejay and lights to inject further doses of adrenalin’ (Melody Maker 30 August 1975). While the American ‘disco sucks’ discourse had evident homophobic and racist motivation (cf. Marsh 1985; Smucker 1980), British anti-disco sentiments are more directly derived from classist convictions about mindless masses and generational conflict about the poor taste of the young. This has to do with the disparate audiences with which the same music was affiliated in the two countries. In Britain, discotheques and disco music had a huge straight white working-class following and were not, as they were in the USA, strongly identified with gay, black and Hispanic minorities.

It is difficult to evaluate the effects of the ‘Keep Music Live’ campaign because, until well into the 1970s, musicians were preferred to records by most people anyway. In 1962, Kevin Donovan opened a discotheque called The Place in Hanley near Stoke-on-Trent. Although it had a capacity of five hundred, it received between ten and fifty patrons a night until Donovan started booking live bands. As the owner explains:

The good people of Stoke-on-Trent had decided there was no point in paying to hear records which were played on the wireless for nothing … We were taught our first major lesson in promotion – give the public what THEY want. If you want to advance your own ideas, these must be solidly hooked to an established and accepted aspect in order to attract any audience … The format was decided, we would become a Discotheque which also provided Live music. (Donovan 1981: 14)

In general, records infiltrated the public sphere from the least profitable to the most lucrative hours of the week. In the 1940s, it became standard for records to be played between the main band’s sets (replacing the second support band) at all but the most affluent or ‘muso’ of dance gatherings. In the early 1950s, the public use of records was facilitated by the introduction of vinyl 33 and 45 rpm records which were lighter, more portable, less breakable and had superior sound quality to 78s. This did not cause, but probably aided the proliferation of lunchtime rock’n’roll record hops. In the 1960s, most disc sessions, whether in live venues or discotheques, took place early in the week. For example, in 1963, The Scene, a well-known Mod discotheque, had exclusively recorded entertainment (‘Guy Stevens’ R&B Record Night’ and ‘Off the Record with Sandra’) only on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday nights, while they featured live bands at the weekends (New Record Mirror 2 November 1963).

In the 1970s, records began to dominate the ‘prime time’ of out-of-home entertainment on Friday and Saturday nights. Moreover, in certain circumstances, live music effectively became the interval between record sets. For example, musicians on the Northern Soul disco circuit tell of being hired to play very early or very late in the evening (when the venue was empty) to fulfil PPL licence agreements. When they did play at the height of the evening, however, patrons used the performance as an opportunity to take a break from dancing (Alan Durant in conversation, 1989). By the mid-1980s, the temporal organization of performance and recorded entertainment had been reversed: live music was relegated to the beginning of the week when profit margins were not expected to be as high, while DJs and discs were the main attraction at the weekends.

Just as dancing to discs progressed through the structure of weekly leisure time, so records were selectively assimilated by diverse premises at different rates. Records first gained a foothold in schools, community centres, youth clubs, town halls and other locations with low budgets. From non-profit premises, records moved to commercial ones – starting out small in basements, as extensions of coffee bars and as additional rooms to established venues. Only in the 1970s and 1980s, did the leisure chains start converting their ballrooms into large-scale discotheques.

By substantially cutting costs, records improved the profit margins and turnover of dance establishments internationally. Through the 1960s and 1970s, this was regular ‘news’ in relevant trade magazines: for example, when Gabriel’s Lounge in Detroit installed a discotheque, the club was able to ‘sell drinks at only a nickel above other neighbourhood tavern prices, but fifteen and twenty cents below prices charged by clubs with live entertainment’ (Billboard 20 March 1965). In fact, one juke-box manufacturer ran a hard-sell advertising campaign stating that they ‘pre-programmed profits into their records’ (Seeburg ads in Billboard 1965). In the United States, this was not much of an exaggeration. In 1965, Billboard reported that juke-box collections amounted to $500 million, half the total of television billings but substantially more than the $275 million motion picture receipts and the $237 million in radio billings (Billboard 15 May 1965). However, PPL licensing restrictions delayed investment in technology in Britain, hence, fewer juke-boxes and house sound-systems were installed and ‘mobile discotheques’ were heavily relied on until the late 1970s. But the expense of live music was not only one of musician labour, it was also one of the investment in the technologies of ‘liveness’, of instruments, amplification, MIDI and sound engineer controls, and in the crews of roadies and technicians needed to move and operate it. From this point of view, discotheques, even lavish ones, are a rational capital investment.

The big boom in investment in permanent discotheque facilities followed the top forty chart achievements of disco – a music made specifically for discotheques which signalled the extensive and durable presence of the institution. In March 1978, London’s main listing magazine, Time Out, began publishing a weekly listing of discotheques, ‘evaluating the music, the ambience, the prices and people’ (Time Out 24–30 March 1978). Much of this activity took place in the wake of the phenomenal sales of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack album, which was the biggest selling album of all time (until 1983 when it was superseded by Michael Jackson’s Thriller). It is telling that the film premiered in Cannes, not at the film festival in May but at MIDEM, the annual international record industry convention, in January 1978. This was a music-led media package. After the non-specialist media exposure the genre received on the coat-tails of the film, discotheques were hailed as a ‘revolution’ rather than a ‘fad’ in entertainment for the first time. As Britain’s main trade paper, Music Week, wrote in 1978:

the disco revolution in America has not been equalled since rock exploded in the fifties – and it will happen here too … the rock takeover, the disco takeover … We’re in the midst of a British club boom. More discos have opened their doors in the past month, it seems, than during the rest of the year. Many are following an All-American format. (Music Week 16 December 1978)

Leisure chains (like Rank, Mecca and First Leisure) and breweries (like Whitbread) adopted rolling programmes of refitting and refurbishing (cf. Disco International 1976–84). When disco music went out of fashion, pubs and dancehalls continued to be converted and discotheques purpose-built. As the first discotheque trade magazine, which began publication in 1976, wrote: ‘It’s comforting to predict that as America’s disco dinosaur becomes extinct, the social bedrock of the British disco is as firm as ever’ (Disco International December 1979). Throughout the 1980s, the size and number of disc-dance venues continued to increase.

Developing alongside the permanent sites with their own alternative ancestries were extended versions of the mobile discotheque. With them, records became the source of music for increasingly big events, to the extent that they eventually entertained arena-size crowds of ten and fifteen thousand people at ‘raves’ in unconventional locations. ‘Raves’ grew out of the semi-legal warehouse parties organized by young entrepreneurs in reaction to the expansion of the leisure industry and perceived ‘commercialization’ of night-life in the 1980s. The warehouse events, in their turn, drew their inspiration from the Afro-Caribbean ‘sound-systems’ which had been a feature of black entertainment since the 1970s. All three incarnations of the discotheque took advantage of its flexibility and mobility, exploring new kinds of environment which contributed to novel ‘atmospheres’.

The development and spread of permanent and mobile discotheques is part of a general re-location and re-positioning of live music. Before the Second World War, the majority of Musicians’ Union members were employed to play at dances of one sort or another. Today, few British musicians make a living from dance engagements. Live dancehalls dwindled in number and deteriorated in condition; some were restored for the use of devoted ballroom dancers; many were transformed into discotheques, converted into bingo halls or less commonly into cinema multiplexes and concert halls. The economics of music is such that live music is only profitable under certain conditions – and dance venues are no longer one of them.

Despite the resilience of live ideology, the professional performance of popular music has receded. The slow transition has gone relatively unnoticed. Periodically, the threatened closure of premier venues has provoked concern about a general decline of live music. In the seventies, for example, the Rainbow Club was on the brink of closure for several years and became a symbol of the threat discos posed to live music in London (cf. Melody Maker and New Musical Express 1973–5). In the 1990s, the possible closure of the Town and Country Club spurred similar outcries: ‘Live music in London is in crisis: audiences are down, venues are changing hands at an alarming rate and many promoters are being forced to rely on club DJs instead of bands … the decline of live music is a national phenomenon … there is a whole generation out there which isn’t being encouraged to go to gigs’ (Time Out 3–10 April 1991).

That live music has been marginalized is perhaps best demonstrated by the fact that in many British towns, the principal live venues have been owned, operated or subsidized by local governments and student unions. In the 1990s, venues in York, Sheffield, Cambridge, Norwich and London opened and closed their doors at the expense of local taxpayers. The largest share of middle-sized gigs, however, are hosted by university student unions who support around eight hundred venues around Britain. When the national government threatened to pass legislation preventing student unions from funding ‘non-essential’ campus activities, the importance of this subsidy became clear; if events had to be self-supporting, roughly seventy-five per cent of their gigs would have to be cut because ticket prices would be forced up beyond the reach of most students (Music Week 19 February 1994). Needless to say, college students now make up the bulk of the audience for live popular music and the live circuit is heavily dominated by a few subgenres, like alternative rock and indie music (cf. Central Statistical Office, General Household Survey 1986; EMAP Metro, Youth Surveys 1988). Another subsidizer of this scene is the record industry who give ‘tour support’ to emerging acts because they see gigs as a means of building fan bases, establishing markets and promoting records.

One live circuit which can be lucrative (but often incurs huge losses) is the arena and stadium concerts of the established pop and rock act. This sector would not exist if it were not for the massive audiences generated by records and other media. Here, tours are again sponsored by record companies, but also by advertisers of soft and alcoholic drinks, youth-oriented clothes and the like. While promoters of this sector (and there are not many in this league) make money from ticket prices, the bulk of revenue for the band often comes from the sale of merchandise such as T-shirts, posters and tour booklets. Although merchandising had been around since the 1960s, it was not until the 1980s that it became integral to the economics of touring (and part and parcel of developing an artist) to the extent that acts now often sign merchandising agreements at the same time as they sign recording contracts. The landmark legal action through which artists gained the copyright to their image was against a company producing unofficial Adam and the Ants merchandise in the early 1980s. Some indie bands like James or the Inspiral Carpets (famous for their ‘Cool as Fuck’ T-shirts) allegedly became wealthy by ‘self merchandising’ (Applause May 1991).

All this is not to argue that live music is dead, but that it no longer appeals to the broad base of the population that it once did and is no longer economical in many of the circumstances it once was. Much live music is made by unpaid amateurs and semi-professionals. Performance is an enjoyable hobby for many pub musicians, buskers, church choirs and brass bands (cf. Finnegan 1989). However, some bands in this category, who aspire to a recording contract but need to be heard in the appropriate venue first, may find themselves paying the venue for the privilege of performing. These ‘pay for play’ situations usually take the shape of ‘ticket deals’ where the band buys fifty tickets then sells them to friends.

In 1988, the Monopolies and Mergers Commission recommended that PPL completely withdraw its musician employment requirements. The Commission agreed with dance operators who argued that the live music requirements were ‘not only expensive but pointless’ for two reasons. First, they argued that the dance sound conveyed by the records ‘cannot be reproduced by instrumentalists playing direct to an audience’. Second, they maintained that ‘audiences prefer recorded sound’ (Monopolies and Mergers 1988: 41). As a result, live music (or rather the requirement to hire musicians) was not found to be in the public interest. The ruling against the Musicians’ Union is typical of the fate of much union-related legislation under the Thatcher government. However, in few countries other than Britain, did musicians enjoy such protective arrangements in the first place. Later, Musicians’ Union representatives would admit that live music ‘has ceased to be “hip”. Clubs with name DJs and the latest remixes are what appeals to people today’ (Mark Melton, IASPM conference, 19–21 April 1990).

For over forty years, the Musicians’ Union and the dancehall/discotheque operators negotiated their conflicting interests through the mediation of the record company collective body, PPL. Given their disparate financial stakes in ‘phonographic performance’, the relatively congenial relationship between the Musicians’ Union and the record companies requires some explanation. The benefits to the MU are more apparent. Because all copyrights were those of the record company, the Union’s rights’ revenue was entirely dependent on its donation by PPL. Between 1947 and 1989, PPL gave 12.5 per cent of its net royalty revenue to the MU in respect of ‘the services of unidentified session musicians’. In 1987, that percentage amounted to £1.3 million. The reasons why PPL agreed to restrictions on the use of its product are less obvious but perhaps more numerous. First, the Union helped PPL maintain its control on repertoire in so far as it forbade its members to record with non-PPL record companies. Although PPL administered the rights of ninety per cent of all commercial sound recordings in the late 1980s, its monopoly was much less secure in the 1950s and 1960s (cf. Musicians’ Union Report 1961). Second, Union members monitored record performances and copyright infringement at a local level – something PPL, with a staff of less than sixty, had never been equipped to do. It was Union members who wrote letters to local newspapers, knocked on venue doors, censured club managers and effectively enforced copyright legislation on the ground. Third, the Musicians’ Union helped legitimate the record companies’ claims to copyright as a reward and incentive for creative production. As a 1989 PPL press release explained: ‘The British recording industry is dependent upon the services of musicians for the continued uninterrupted production of excellent sound recordings. This requires a healthy broad based musical profession covering the whole spectrum of performance.’ Finally, despite the fact that the record industry does not profit directly from live performance, but rather spends substantial sums on tour support, record company executives have tended to believe that the most artistically and commercially successful music comes from live ‘working’ acts (cf. Negus 1992: 52–4). The ability of a band to perform live is seen as insurance for a strong image and long career. Since disco, the global successes of non-live dance music have led to a proliferation of in-house and satellite dance labels and to ‘club promotions’ departments (whose aim is to nurture fan bases by plugging records to key DJs). Nevertheless, the ideal of the traditional performing rock group still prevails in many record companies who see the live version of authenticity as a key selling point.

Since the 1950s, records have supplanted musicians as the source of sounds for most social dancing and contributed to the re-location and re-definition of live music in general. This section has explored the technological, economic and legal determinants of the shifting public presences of recording and performance. Musician resistance to the enculturation of records was only effective in so far as it could be seen to coincide with the ‘public interest’. When the Union eventually lost the ideological battle, it was only a matter of time before it lost the legislative one. Changes in the ideological status of recorded entertainment were dependent on several key factors which are the subject of three of the next four sections. First, records increased their allure as a result of being affiliated with the new types of occasion, new social spaces and ‘new’ social groups – all of which contributed to the increasing subcultural authenticity of records. Second, records adapted to their public use, changed their format to suit discotheques and to satisfy the exigencies of a new profession, the club disc jockey. And, third, as the studio rather than the stage became the key site for the origination of music, so recordings in certain genres began to acquire aura.

‘Real’ Events and Altered Spaces

The authentication of discs for dancing was dependent on the development of new kinds of event and environment, which recast recorded entertainment as something uniquely its own, rather than a poor substitute for a ‘real’ musical event. These new time-frames and spatial orders exploited the strengths and compensated for the weaknesses of the recorded medium. By using new labels, rubrics, interior designs and distracting spectacles, disc dances were rendered distinctive. They were effectively transformed from an occurrence into an occasion, from a migrant practice into a unique place, from a diverting novelty into an entertainment institution.

Before record hops, dancing to discs was not a cultural event in itself. The use of records was not highlighted in flyers, listings or advertisements. The Musicians’ Union protested that dances using records were advertised in such a way as to create the impression that a live band would be playing. More peculiarly, Union members often reported that audiences didn’t notice the absence of performers. In 1953, one member contended that one young dance crowd had no idea they were dancing to records: ‘Amplification was so good as to be indistinguishable from an actual band heard outside the hall; and inside, soft lights, and a quick-change of records made the absence of a band unnoticeable. [There were] about 300 teenagers jiving like mad entirely oblivious of no band being present’ (Musicians’ Union Report 1954). Similarly, another MU member claimed that he had attended a musical play in which records had been so perfectly synchronized with voice and action that the audience thought an orchestra was playing. When he told people sitting on either side of him, they allegedly refused to believe him. He concluded his report with the lesson: ‘Members will therefore appreciate that the public, unless they are properly informed, will not know whether the music they are hearing is recorded or an actual live performance’ (Musicians’ Union Report 1956).

Although these reports are undoubtedly exaggerated in the direction of stereotypes about mass culture and false consciousness, it does appear that many people didn’t note the absence of musicians during this period. When asked today whether they danced to records at their local dance halls and youth clubs before rock’n’roll, people tend to remember if they were dancing to a band but not if they weren’t. This may be evidence of the ability of records to ‘simulate’ in Baudrillard’s sense of the word; they do not so much imitate as ‘mask the absence’ of performance (Baudrillard 1983a: 11). However, it is also testimony to the more mundane fact that, in the reports, the music was subordinate to, first, a social event and, second, a theatrical spectacle. Given these conditions of consumption, the audience didn’t give the music the attention musicians expect and appreciate. In Benjamin’s terms, these audiences were ‘distracted’: they absorbed the music but the music did not absorb them (Benjamin 1970: 239).

Rock’n’roll record hops, however, focused favourable attention on the entertainment format. In the US, the record ‘hop’ was endorsed by the new and still glamorous medium of television with the after-school show, American Bandstand. In Britain, the American import with a distinct name brought dancing to discs into vogue for the first time. ‘Hops’ gave the activity a distinct identity, transforming it into a noteworthy event rather than simply an intermission or occurrence. Significantly, record hops were identified with youth and youth alone. Like the spate of Hollywood ‘teenpics’, they capitalized on the emergence of youth as a consumer category and cultural identity. Conveniently, youth were the group with the least prejudice about the inferiority of recorded entertainment and the one with the most interest in finding a cultural space they could call their own. More than any other cultural phenomenon of the fifties, record hops came to symbolize the new youth culture. Along with labels like ‘teenager’, they contributed to a heightened consciousness of generation and, with their large-scale collective gathering, fuelled the first fantasies of a movement of youth. Records had become integral to a public culture; they were the symbolic axis around which whirled the new community of youth.

Later incarnations of disc dances did not target only youth, but smaller demographic segments and shades of taste. In 1966 in New Society, Reyner Banham argued that the cultural formations that grew up around records were characterized by what he playfully called ‘vinyl deviationa’. One of the main social functions of records – their distribution of culture – had been superseded by radio. As a result, the gramophone became ‘a system for distributing deviant sound to the disaffected cultural minorities whose peculiar tastes are not satisfied by the continuous wallpaper provided by radio [like the] BBC’ (New Society 1 December 1966). Of course, dance clubs are not only significant for minority taste cultures, but also for class, ethnic and sexual ones (cf. chapter 3).

The enculturation of records for dancing was first fostered by the development of new kinds of event and, only second, promoted by new kinds of environment. The initial 1950s disc hops did little to transform the dancehalls and youth clubs in which they took place. The following description of a record session at the Lyceum Ballroom in the Strand, for example, contrasts the traditional architecture with the new cultural form:

The Lyceum was originally a theatre, and Mecca Dance Halls Ltd have left most of its Edwardian-baroque opulence untouched. Above, all is crimson and gold, cherubs and swags of fruit. On the band stand, a sharp young man in horn rimmed spectacles fades the records in and out on the two turntables of the enormous record player. On the floor over a thousand teenagers jive … the atmosphere is solemn and dedicated … All the dancers without exception wear the fashionable cut-off expression. (Melly 1970/1989: 68–9)

In the early 1960s, the ‘discotheque’ rendered dancing to discs fashionable in the way the record hop had done a few years before. This time, however, the institution was conceived as a French import and extended its influence to its architectural surroundings. Changes in environment were crucial to the definition of the new institution; they were meant to complement the culture of contemporary youth. La Discothèque in Wardour Street, for instance, was very dimly lit, gloomy by some accounts, with a number of double beds in and around the dancefloor. Invoking the new permissive sexual mores, the outlandish interior was an attraction in itself. The Place in Hanley near Stoke-on-Trent provides another example. It was lit by red light and decorated entirely in black with the exception of a few rooms: the entrance hall was sprayed gold, the toilets sported imitation leopard-skin wallpaper and a small sitting-room was painted white, lit by blue light and called ‘the fridge’ (cf. Donovan 1981).

The spaces of 1960s’ discotheques defined themselves against the architecture of the dancehalls whose interiors stayed the same for years and whose models of elegance were royal (hence the ‘Palais’ and ‘Empires’) or relics of nineteenth-century bids for respectability (which referenced the classical world of ‘Lyceums’ and ‘Hippodromes’). Either way, the ideologies of ballrooms did not speak to the youth of the day. Discotheques were emphatically different and self-consciously unconventional. They were lounges, rooms or simply spots; they were places with presence rather than palaces, hence names like the Saddle Room, the Ad-Lib, the Place and the Scene. The suffix ‘a-Gogo’ was also used internationally to make their existence as young urbane dancing establishments absolutely clear: London and Los Angeles had Whisky-a-Gogos, named after the Parisian club. Chicago not only had a Whisky-a-Gogo, but a Bistro-a-Gogo, Gigi-a-Gogo and a Buccaneer-a-Gogo (Billboard 6 March 1965).

But transformations in name and interior design did not stop here. The institution continually renovated and effectively rejuvenated itself in order to appeal to an ever-shifting market of youth. Late-sixties’ discotheques would embrace psychedelic and strobe lighting, slide projectors and hanging beads. Seventies ‘discos’ would become a maze of shiny futuristic surfaces, chrome party palaces of mirrors and glitter balls. Eighties ‘clubs’ abandoned mirrors: walls in black or grey were particular favourites early in the decade, while painterly postmodern or tribal styles made their appearance in the second half of the decade. Late eighties ‘raves’ took dance events outside what had become ‘traditional’ venues to unorthodox locations in industrial districts and remote rural areas. Each new version of the institution was meant to be an advance on the old – an adventurous departure into a realm which seemed to have fewer rules and regulations.

The fresh names and renovated interiors were not simply a means of rejuvenation: the discotheque’s constant search for liberation from tradition extends to the legacy of British class cultures. The early-sixties discotheque not only rejected the aristocratic fantasies of the ballroom but also effaced the hierarchical distinction between the elite nightclub and the common dancehall. The discotheque, like youth culture generally, was positioned as classless. In 1965, George Melly described discotheques as ‘those wombs of swinging London’ which were ‘virtually classless’ where ‘success in a given field is the criterion and, in the case of girls, physical beauty’ (Melly 1970/1989: 104). A few years later, Tom Wolfe took a more critical view, suggesting that these youngsters seemed to be classless because they had dropped out of the conventional job system: ‘It is the style of life that makes them unique, not money, power, position, talent, intelligence … The clothes have come to symbolize their independence from the idea of a life based on a succession of jobs’ (Wolfe 1968b: 104).

Each change in institutional identity positioned the new disc dance as significantly different from what went before. Generally, the ‘revolution’ in leisure was seen as both democratic and avant-garde. ‘Discotheques’, ‘discos’ and ‘clubs’ were all meant to be both exclusive and egalitarian, classless but superior to the mass-market institution that preceded them. Raves, in their turn, were enveloped in discourses of utopian egalitarianism: they were events without door policies where everybody was welcome and people from all walks of life became one under the hypnotic beat. But the discourse could hardly be tested, for only those ‘in the know’ could hear of and locate the party. Moreover black and gay youth tended to see rave culture as a straight, white affair.

It is a classic paradox that an institution so adept at segregation, at the nightly accommodation of different crowds, should be repeatedly steeped in an ideology of social mixing. The discotheque/disco/club/rave regularly re-invented itself to maintain an eternal youth and to obfuscate dated relations to class cultures. As Barbara Bradby argues, this kind of utopianism ignores the subordinate position that women occupy at most levels of rave culture (cf. Bradby 1993). The dance acts, music producers, DJs, club organizers and bouncers who structure the events are predominately male and require that women prove themselves twice over if they want to do more than sing, check coats or tend the bar. Moreover, although raves are supposed to be ‘sexless’ affairs – that is, clothing is unisex and participants are not there to get laid – it does not follow that they are necessarily sexually progressive.

The regular redecoration of the discotheque also addressed the main deficiency of recorded entertainment. Eye-catching interiors were meant to compensate for the loss of the spectacle of performing musicians. In the 1960s, the biggest global juke-box manufacturer, Seeburg, publicly lamented the machine’s ‘negative image’ (Billboard 27 February 1965). The key to improving its status, they argued, was their new high volume, minimum distortion, stereo juke-box called ‘DISCOTHEQUE’, which they hoped would be accepted ‘as a form of entertainment in much the same way as [the public] accepts films, radio or television’ (Billboard 15 May 1965). Crucially, the machine was accompanied by an ‘INSTANT NIGHT CLUB’ package of wall panels, modular dancefloor, napkins, coasters and other decorations ‘needed to transform a location into a discotheque’ (Ad in Billboard 23 January 1965). Equally significantly, the wall panels portrayed life-size white jazz musicians in the midst of a spirited jam session. Intended for the wall behind the juke-box, these panels offered a literal solution to the phonograph’s problem of having no visual focus or, as Dave Laing writes, ‘a voice without a face’ (cf. Laing 1990).

Although this sort of literalism was relatively rare, one trajectory in the changing shape of discotheques has been the proliferation of visuals. Lighting, in particular, has become an elaborate accompaniment to the music, emphasizing its rhythms, illustrating its chords. Sometimes, the roving coloured beams and flashing strobes decorate the dancers, making a better spectacle of the crowd. At other times, swishing lasers and figurative patterns of light are an optical phenomenon in their own right. Computer-generated fractals and other abstract designs of coloured light can act as visual equivalents of the instrumental sounds of house and techno music, while film loops, slide projectors and music videos punctuate the space with figurative entertainment. The discotheque bears witness to the symbolic possibilities of electric light which, since the nineteenth century, has been used to signal the consequence and difference of night-time social gatherings (cf. Marvin 1988).

In contrast to the record sessions held in old-style dancehalls, discotheques attempted to offer complete sensory experiences – ones often intensified by the use of alcohol and/or drugs, which have been mainstays of youthful dance experience since disc sessions took on their own premises. Only with the discotheque of the 1960s did the institution develop into a total environment where ‘dream and reality are interchangeable and indistinguishable’ (Melly 1970: 9). In what must be the first study of discotheques, Lucille Hollander Blum argues that their appeal results from the way they offer ritual catharsis. Discotheque dancers, she asserts, experience a ‘delirious sense of freedom’, enter a ‘state of complete thoughtlessness’ and escape from ‘present day reality’ (cf. Blum 1966). Since then, discotheques have evolved further into multimedia installations whose worlds are contiguous with the recorded fantasies of music video and the virtual realities of computer games, but are still a site of tangible human interaction. ‘Club worlds’ are markedly divorced from the work world outside. Door restrictions sharply divide inside from outside, while long corridors, inner doors and stairways create transitional labyrinths. Raves add the pilgrimage, the quest for the location, to extend the ritualistic passage. Like Alice’s rabbit hole, both convey the participant from the mundane world to Wonderland.

Disc Jockeys and Social Sounds

Discotheques have carved out distinctive times and places for recorded music. With their different senses of place and occasion, they have, as their name suggests, effectively accommodated discs. But records have also adapted to the social and cultural requirements of the evolving dance establishment, modifying their formats and formalizing the manner in which they are played. Disc jockeys have had a decisive role in conducting the energies and rearranging the authenticities of the dancefloor.

Essential to the altered space of discotheques is the enhanced acoustic atmosphere which results from high volume, continuous music. The initial popularity of juke-box-fitted coffee bars and purpose-built discotheques over the record sessions in dancehalls related not only to architectural style but also to improved sound-systems. According to one music weekly of the early sixties, La Discothèque in Streatham was ‘more than a dance hall’ because of the ‘quality and the volume’ of the records they played (New Record Mirror 19 January 1963). In the 1950s, record playback technology was not able to fill a large ballroom with high fidelity sound. Even in the early 1960s, few discotheques could provide all-around sound, highs or lows, or thumping bass.

In the mid-1960s, many juke-box manufacturers, including the three largest, Seeburg, Wurlitzer and Rowe, started to manufacture extended-play records for their dance-oriented juke-boxes – a decade before record companies extended the length of the single with the twelve-inch format. Seeburg argued that the discotheque would prevail as a form of entertainment only if it offered ‘uninterrupted music’. As a result, they issued dance music in the format of the ‘Little LP’, a recording with three titles per side, with music in the lead-in and lead-out grooves, amounting to seven and a half minutes of continuous music (Billboard 6 February 1965 and 1 May 1965). So, the practice of dancing to discs began to affect the design of the record itself.

Record companies were slow to react. At around this time, Billboard introduced a discotheque chart because they said that the discotheque was having ‘a major effect on the entire music and entertainment industry. A look at Billboard’s Hot 100 shows discotheque industry material all over the chart’ (Billboard 27 February 1965). But it was not until a decade later, with disco music, that the industry really opened its eyes to the ‘concept of transforming a routine nightclub into a catalyst for breaking records’ (Wardlow in Joe 1980: 8–9). In his extensive analysis of the introduction of the twelve-inch single in America, Will Straw argues that record company interest in dance clubs coincided with shrinking radio play-lists; promotions departments were looking for alternative means of plugging their music (cf. Straw 1990).

In the 1970s, extended twelve-inch singles became a standard product amongst American, then British, record companies. The idea came from American DJs who had been mixing seven-inch copies of the same record for prolonged play. Some began recording their mixes, editing them on reel-to-reel tapes, then playing them in clubs. When these recordings were transferred to vinyl, the extended remix was born. Record labels became involved when they realized that discotheques were sufficiently widespread to make catering to them with special vinyl product a promotional necessity.^*

The new record format was better suited for playing at high volume over club sound-systems and its extended versions had instrumental breaks where the song was stripped down to the drums and bass with very little vocal in order to facilitate seamless mixing of one track into another. (Interestingly, dance bands of the 1920s and 1930s constructed dance numbers in a way not unlike twelve-inches, with extended instrumental introductions and finales and short segments of lyrics in which the vocal acted as if it were merely another instrument. Simon Frith in conversation.) These extended dance ‘tracks’ (rather than ‘songs’) helped sustain the momentum of the dancefloor and contributed to the other-worldly atmosphere of the discotheque. The constant pulse of the bass blocks thoughts, affects emotions and enters the body. Like a drug, rhythms can lull one into another state. With rave culture, this potentiality was ritualized as the ‘trance dance’ by dancers actively seeking an altered state of consciousness through movement to the music.

Pre-eminently, twelve-inch records were made specifically for DJs. The recorded entertainment at the heart of disc cultures is not automated. DJs incorporate degrees of human touch, intervention and improvisation. They play a key role in the enculturation of records for dancing, sometimes as an artist but always as a representative and respondent to the crowd. By orchestrating the event and anchoring the music in a particular place, the DJ became a guarantor of subcultural authenticity. As Daniel Hadley writes, although DJs lack absolute control over the proceedings, they are ‘still responsible for the creation of a musical space, a space which is formed according to the expectations of the crowd and the specific kinds of DJ practices in place’ (Hadley 1993: 64).

The changes in the DJ’s occupational status reflect the progressive enculturation of recorded entertainment. The DJ’s job has changed dramatically since the Second World War, moving from unskilled worker through craftsman to artist, but also through a less linear process involving degrees of anonymity and celebrity, collection and connoisseurship, performance and recording (cf. Kealy 1979/1990; Langlois 1992). In the forties, the person who played records for public dancing was not seen to possess much technical skill, let alone artistry. Although the Musicians’ Union referred to the services of the ‘public address engineer’, it also suggested that the job was simply a question of unskilled supply. In a passage quoted earlier, for example, it was reported that, ‘In almost every town the man who runs the radio shop, or specializes in the provision of public address equipment, will undertake to supply recorded music for dances or other social events at a small proportion of the fee a good band would charge’ (Musicians’ Union Conference Report 1949). Even in the 1950s, playing records for dancing was considered so unskilled that most thought it best to do it oneself. One didn’t hire mobile DJs but their records. The advertisements read: ‘Party records for a record party. Hire an evening’s recorded music’ (New Musical Express December 1957). General opinion in the record industry was that the DJ was not endowed with any particularly special skills. As its main trade paper observed: ‘The position of the disc jockey is not an easy one. He becomes a public figure by presenting someone else’s talent’ (Record Retailer and Music Industry News 10 March 1960). A decade later, however, DJs came to be acknowledged by the record industry as experts about dance music and its markets. DJs entered a number of new jobs, invading A&R, promotions and marketing departments, sometimes even becoming managing directors of their own labels. DJs were also brought into the studio as remixers, producers and even artists in their own right. In fact, by the mid-nineties, it was a rarity to find a dance musician who had not spent at least some time working as a DJ.

Supplying the records was certainly the first and most vital function of the DJ. Consistently through the years, DJs have been heavy record buyers, product hunters, zealous collectors. For example, Jocks (later relaunched as DJ magazine) ran a weekly column ‘How to be a DJ’ which included a section on ‘Buying Records’. They argued that the most important investment of a mobile DJ, other than his/her turntables and amplifiers, is a constantly updated record collection. Shopping ‘once a fortnight is the absolute minimum … records can become huge surprisingly quickly and nothing is worse than going to a gig where half your audience wants you to play something new and you’ve never heard of it’ (Jocks October 1990).

Certain DJs have built a reputation upon having the most comprehensive collections of particular genres. An ad for a Northern Soul night at Blackpool Mecca in 1974 identifies the night’s DJs, Ian Levine and Colin Curtis, and proclaims their main selling point: ‘We have records that no one else has’ (Black Music January 1974). At this time, the status of DJs was partly the status of an exclusive owner with discerning taste. As one journalist commented, ‘the disc jockeys are becoming more and more of a cultural elite in their efforts to outdo each other in finding exclusive records’ (Black Music June 1974).

Beyond the supply of records, the uses, skills and talents of DJs have long been viewed with some suspicion. The origins of the curious term, ‘disc jockey’, are disputed. Nevertheless, whatever its etymology, the expression suggests that some sportsmanlike dexterity was required to perform the job. The new professional had to ‘ride’ a record much as a racing jockey might handle his horse at the track. But ‘to jockey’ also means to gain advantage by skilful manoeuvering, trickery or artifice. The implication might have been that disc jockeys deceived their listeners into thinking that what they heard was a live performance. Well into the 1970s, the DJ had a dubious reputation. S/he was often considered to be ‘a parasite, the less successful being a mere spinner of discs, while the ranking DJ is a synthetic rock star with no musical ability’ (Melody Maker 15 November 1975).

For several decades, the expectations of the DJ’s job varied greatly. For example, in the mid-1960s, the American Whisky-a-Gogo chain employed women who acted as both DJs and gogo dancers. Called ‘dance-DJs’, they changed records and did ‘dance routines in glass cages above the crowd’ (Billboard 1 May 1965). However, this arrangement was anomalous. The master of ceremonies, presenter or ‘personality DJ’ was a more common role. Most ‘personality DJs’ with a national profile came from radio. They filled the gaps between records with informative chatter and presided over disc hops, touring the country promoting the product of a sponsoring record company. They also might broadcast a regular weekly show from a particular club. Radios Caroline, London and Luxembourg broadcast disc shows from venues like the Marquee and the 100 Club throughout the 1960s.

Amongst youthful crowds, DJs were developing into leaders and local celebrities. In New Society in 1968, Angela Carter wrote about a disc jockey in an unnamed provincial city as the ‘prince of cloud-cuckoo land’. She described how, wearing extravagant white suits, he presided over the controls of a monumental record-player and she paraphrased his philosophy: ‘A disc jockey is in a position of power. He can mould taste. Maybe he could do more. You’ve got all these kids looking up to you and you’re in a position of authority’ (Carter 1968). In this way, DJs started to be perceived as taste-makers or ‘moulders of musical opinion in a very similar – and far more direct – way to the music journalist’ (Melody Maker 15 November 1975).

By the mid-seventies, it was generally understood that the best DJs built up a rapport with their crowd to the degree that the crowd would follow the DJ from one club to another. The ‘Tom Cat’ mobile discotheque, for example, claimed a ‘fan club’ of two thousand members. They would hire the venues, promote the show by printing then distributing a thousand handbills in the street, put up posters, advertise in the press and take the money on the door (as it was the only way to earn more than ten pounds a night). The lead DJ explained their strategy: ‘We’re just like a pop group. We have our own signature tune and a back up jock who plays slow records for ten minutes before I come on’ (Melody Maker 30 August 1975).

However, it was as mixers, rather than personalities, that DJs entered the hallowed world of musicianship. As ‘turntable musicians’, they would perform elaborate mixes which required much rehearsal (with names like the running mix, the chop mix, transforming, etc.). DJs created new music in the process of mixing. Records became the raw material of DJ performance just as, with sampling, they had become the raw material of composition. As Tony Langlois argues in his study of British house music DJs, ‘house records are not recordings of performances, but are actively performed by the DJ himself, allowing spontaneity, surprise and creativity’ (Langlois 1992: 236). This is one reason why tapes of DJ mixes can be bought at raves, outdoor markets and under the table in dance record shops or downloaded from rave bulletin boards and internet sites. In other words, dance fans desire documents of DJ performance.

As the vinyl single had been the raw material of DJ performance since rock’n’roll, it is not surprising that there was moment in the late 1980s when disc jockeys reacted negatively to the rise of the CD in a manner not unlike the way musicians of the 1970s responded to the proliferation of mobile discos. Both involved threats to livelihood and creativity. Just as the dance musicians’ repertoire became outmoded so the DJ’s vast record collection threatened to become obsolete. And just as the years of practice in mastering an instrument by the musician no longer promised employment, so DJs who had spent hours perfecting their touch, feeling the groove, sighting the track, were faced with a technology whose operations they could not see or touch. As one journalist wrote: ‘In the age of digital reproduction … the DJ may be the last musician … records represent the last technology you can grasp – now with CDs it’s all digital’ (Jocks September 1990). The analogy between musicianship and DJ-ing extended to the properties attributed to vinyl. According to mixing DJs the sound of vinyl was ‘real’, ‘warm’, ‘imperfect’ but full of integrity, while CDs were ‘cold’, ‘clinical’, ‘inhuman’ and ‘unreal’. Their language resembled the way live music was polarized from recorded music only a few years before. By the early 1990s, however, many clubs were fitted with CD mixers, and DJs were adjusting to the new format, seeing the possibilities of its ‘purer’ sound.

Plate 4 In the late eighties DJs worried about the death of vinyl as a threat to the value of their record collections, mixing skills and livelihood. By the mid-nineties most DJs had come to use CDs, although the twelve-inch record was still their preferred medium.

Though DJs may be musicians, they are rarely performers in the pop sense of the word. In purpose-built clubs, mixing booths tend to be tucked away and DJs unseen. As cultural figures, DJs are known by name rather than face. Although in the mid-nineties in a minority of London clubs, the ‘cult of the DJ’ led to the practice of facing the DJ booth whilst dancing, this has not been a widespread activity. The enduring spectacle afforded by discotheques has been the dancing crowd. In the absence of visually commanding performers, the gaze of the audience has turned back on itself. Watching and being seen are key pleasures of discotheques. Angela McRobbie extends an analogy between the gazes involved in the cinema and those of the discotheque: both offer ‘a darkened space where the [individual] can retain a degree of anonymity and absorption … but where the cinema offers a one-way fantasy which is directed solely through the gaze of the spectator at the screen, the fantasy of dancing is more social, more reciprocated’ (McRobbie 1984: 146).

What authenticates club cultures is not so much a unique DJ performance, as the ‘buzz’, ‘vibe’, ‘mood’ or ‘atmosphere’ created in the interaction of DJ and crowd in space. It is as orchestrators of this ‘living’ communal experience that DJs are most important to music culture. DJs respond to the crowd through their choice and sequence of records, seek to direct their energies and build up the tension until the event ‘climaxes’. DJs are supposed to have their finger on the pulse of the event in order to give the dancing crowd ‘what [they] need rather than what [they] want’ (Graeme Park quoted in New Musical Express 27 February 1988). In this way, DJs are artists in the construction of musical experience. As Jon Pareles argues:

Disc jockeys, improvising with records or electronic gadgets and usually backed by immense sound systems, produce variations on hit records by taking them apart, adding new drum tracks, superimposing tunes or bass-lines – all with a careful attention to the sensuality of sound and the efficacy of rhythm. Not only does the music have the freshness of improvisation – and a function, to keep people dancing – but it has a richness rarely heard in live pop music. In clubs, there’s no tension between music, technology and audience. (New York Times 22 July 1990)

Records are the pivot around which dance cultures have come to revolve. Contrary to the old rock ideologies, the ‘live’ does not have an exclusive claim on collective music culture, nor is it the original to which disc culture is a dull and distant echo. Disc culture is a distinct high-tech folk culture and twelve-inch dance records in the hands of a mixing DJ are, quite literally, social sounds.

The Authenticities of Dance Genres

The perceived authenticity of particular records and music genres is a complex issue entangled in several factors which are the subject of this section. First and most obviously, given the discussions of the past two sections, authenticity is dependent on the degree to which records are assimilated and legitimized by a subculture. Authentication is the ultimate end of enculturation. Second, the distance between a record’s production and its consumption is relevant to the cultural value bestowed upon it. When original performers are remote in time or place, as is the case with foreign imports and revived rarities, records can acquire prestige and authority. Third, the environment in which a record is produced contributes to its authenticity. Records are more likely to be perceived as the primary medium of musics whose main site of production is the studio. And, finally, the ideological vagaries of music genres like their communication of bodily ‘soul’ or their revelation of technology play a main role in whether records come across as genuine. In other words, authenticity is ultimately an effect of the discourses which surround popular music.

In the 1930s, the British jazz appreciation societies called ‘rhythm clubs’ held ‘recitals … given by records loaned by members’ (Godbolt 1984: 138). These gatherings mark a shift in cultural values whereby records became the pivot around which a collective culture developed and revolved. One of the first jazz fans to analyse the rhythm club movement from an academic perspective described its mania for the recorded form:

To understand the function of this sort of organization in the life of the European jazz fan, his utter dependence on phonographic records will have to be remembered. Cut off from the living music by time as well as space he submits to a particular shift in values. The record becomes more important than the music; minor musicians who have left recorded examples of their own work behind them become more important than those major musicians who for one reason or another have never got around to a recording studio; and the man who has met the musicians and knows his way through a maze of records becomes more important than the musician himself. (Ernest Borneman 1947 quoted in Godbolt 1984: 142)

The resolute focus on records in jazz connoisseur circles was an anomaly in the thirties which would become the norm much later with the advent of teenage dance cultures. Despite the unlikely pedigree, the genealogy is preserved in the etymology of the word ‘discotheque’ which literally translated from the French means ‘record library’ and gained currency in relation to Parisian jazz clubs.

Although jazz fans collected and fetishized records, they valued discs as ‘records’ in the strict sense of the word, as transcriptions, accounts, replicas, reproductions of a unique jazz performance. Jazz records were enculturated, they had prestige and authority, but they were still a secondary medium for reasons that related both to their process of production (they were relatively straightforward documents of particular performances) and also to the discourses in which they were enveloped (as performance was considered unquestionably superior to recording, even though recording was superior to notation) (cf. Newton 1959).

It was not until rock’n’roll that records started to serve as the original. With rock’n’roll, spinning discs were no longer a poor imitation of performing musicians; they were music itself. As one ‘jiver’ remembers it: records brought ‘the real sound and real tempo of the mainly American [music that was] taking the charts by storm, rather than the house band’s well-meaning but tidied up cover versions’ (Nourse with Hudson 1990: 43). In fact, rock’n’roll was so tightly identified with records in Britain that PPL, which was willing to regulate the use of records for any other kind of music during this period, thought it ‘unreasonable that musicians should be employed at so called “rock’n’roll” dances’ (Musicians’ Union Conference Report 1961).

This was mainly due to changes in media environment and studio production. For example, in America as well as Britain, the development of rock’n’roll depended on records. The cross-fertilization of Hillbilly music and Rhythm & Blues that engendered rock’n’roll was primarily brought about by records on radio. As Kloosterman and Quispel write, the black and white music scenes had few ‘live’ contacts because the southern states were strictly segregated. When television took over from radio as a national mass medium in the 1950s, radio went local and its audience segmented. One of its new target markets was the black population whose recently increased affluence meant that they were now attractive to a handful of advertisers. Black music, therefore, made it on to airwaves which crossed neighbourhood boundaries and diffused black music among the white youngsters who chose to tune in (cf. Kloosterman and Quispel 1990).

Elvis Presley, who had little contact with the local black population, gained his knowledge of R&B music from Memphis’s black radio station (cf. Quain 1992, Wark 1989). Moreover, his sound and image were fashioned from an array of recorded influences, including radio, records, comic books, movies and television. Elvis’s early records abandoned the attempt to mimic a live performance in the studio; their novel use of echo created a specifically studio sound (Middleton 1990: 89). Elvis’s professional live act followed his first hit on local radio; it was developed to promote his records. This series of inversions of the ‘natural’ route from performance to recording was an exception at the time (for example, Bill Haley and Little Richard were seasoned touring performers before they entered the studio). However, depending on the genre, the precedence of recording over performance would gradually become the rule.

It is worth considering the role played by distinct times and sites of production and consumption. Records were preferred to performance in circumstances where the qualities specific to records were exploited. So, the ability of records to travel in space and time led to disc cultures revolving around imports, new releases or lost and almost forgotten old records. By these means, records acquired credibilities independent of performance. And, the onus of authenticity was shifted from a regard for the unique to an interest in the degrees of exclusivity found in the new, rare and antique. However, a ‘unique recording’ or ‘only copy’ has occasionally figured in disc cultures. One key to the success of reggae sound-systems, argues Les Back, is having original music in the strict sense of the word: ‘Dub plates, or recorded rhythms, are original acetates and they are usually the only copies … The records are made by artists especially for the sound-system’ (Back 1988: 145–6).

Since the 1950s, one way in which disc sessions have attracted audiences is by playing the ‘latest releases’. In a modern world of proliferating communications media where the speed by which information travels and fashions change seems to get progressively faster (just as the music seems to quicken, from the 120 beats per minute standard of disco to 200 bpm with techno and jungle music), discotheques are able to deliver the freshest sounds. With dance music, performance has a difficult time keeping up: musicians must decide to expand their repertoire, rehearse the songs, by which time the sound may have lost its currency. As a result, cover or copy bands are now few and far between. Live acts either play their own material or versions which are truly ‘their own’. Today, British dance sounds are distinguished by a quick turnover of records, styles and subgenres to the extent that vanguard audiences often dance to tracks on ‘import’ or limited edition ‘white label’ before their commercial release. (Pre-release to clubs is, in fact, a standard promotion strategy.) Amongst pop music cultures, novelty and rarity displace uniqueness. This may be an instance of what Benjamin called the ‘phoney spell of a commodity’ but, in this way, records nevertheless enjoy a kind of attenuated aura (Benjamin 1955/1970: 233).

The time-binding power of records fosters interest not only in the novel, but in the archival. Records expedite cultural revival; they allow for ‘dancing to music recorded and forgotten in another world and another time’ (Black Music June 1974). In London in the early 1990s, one could attend record hops where the boys jived and the girls did ‘the Madison’ or visit funk (also called ‘rare groove’) clubs where the crowd would ‘get down’ in 1970s style. Meanwhile ‘Classic Disco’ nights had become a feature of almost every British provincial town, particularly in gay clubs.

Perhaps the first fully-fledged archival dance culture to draw attention to the distinct potentials of discs over and above performed music was the ‘Northern Soul’ scene of the early 1970s. Populated by white working-class youth from Northern England who danced to obscure, in fact unpopular and long forgotten, Afro-American soul records from the 1960s, the scene was considered by many to be ‘the strangest and most unlikely manifestation of the entire black music experience’ (Black Music November 1975).

The logic of Northern Soul’s appeal was not nostalgia but rarity. Taking the Mod taste in soul music (around 1966) off on a tangent, Northern Soul DJs played increasingly rare records from the period. Not only were these records unavailable to dancers but also few of them knew the names of the artists or record labels to which they danced. Nevertheless, the dancers avowed that they went to the Northern Soul discos to hear sounds they couldn’t hear anywhere else (Black Music June 1974).

Northern Soul records effectively displayed many of the characteristics of the work of art before the age of mechanical reproduction. They functioned as the axis of an elaborate ritual and displayed ‘cult value’. Certainly, their scene bordered on the religious. As one commentator wrote at the time, Northern Soul ‘has evolved its own temples (Wigan Casino, Blackpool Mecca), high priests (the disc jockeys), false prophets (the bootleggers) and congregation (thousands of working class kids pulled from the heavy industry belt of the North and Midlands)’ (Black Music January 1975).

The ease with which records travel in space and time has enabled the continual crossover and growing globalization that characterize post-war popular music. While not quite ‘a music hall without walls’, recording technology does trespass on the borders of neighbourhood and nation (McLuhan 1964: 248). Significantly, it also traverses time: records are more readily available and longer-lasting than live music; they efficiently distribute and preserve sound. It was in exploiting the time and space-binding characteristics of recording that disc cultures acquired distinction.

The ideologies of music genres also played a crucial role in the authentication of recorded music and discotheques. Contemporary pop music has seldom been anathema to discotheques and has rarely tried to deny its recorded form. Rock, however, has pivoted ideologically around the ideal of the live music event despite the fact that it is known by most listeners primarily in its recorded form and has often been played in discotheques. This idea took root with late-sixties rock. In the mid-sixties, Billboard’s list of top discotheque records not only included the Beatles’ ‘Eight Days a Week’ and the Beach Boys’ ‘Do You Wanna Dance?’, but also Bob Dylan’s ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ (Billboard 1 April 1965). Only a few years later, Dylan would not be considered optimum discotheque music.

The meta-genre, ‘dance music’, does not have an exclusive claim on dancing. For instance, rock audiences do not sit in quiet, contemplative appreciation. Headbanging, fist-raising, air-guitar solos and other movements which mimic the performers are all ‘dancing’ in the broad sense of the word. Many live rock gigs involve degrees of toe-tapping, finger-snapping, rhythmic clapping, pogoing, slamming and moshing. Even though the audience tends to face forward, eyes fixed on the stage, these crowds are physically responsive; they do dance and their musics do inspire it.

The repertoire of body movements associated with rock music often fails to be categorized as ‘dancing’. This may be because the gaze of the dancers is focused elsewhere, but it may also relate to issues of cultural hierarchy. In the late 1960s, when rock’n’roll became rock, the music abandoned its overt function for dancing. (This is not to say that people didn’t dance to rock, but that dancing wasn’t considered the optimal response.) If rock was to be taken seriously as an art form, then listening, not dancing, would be the requisite mode of appreciation. Dancing is still frequently stigmatized as being uncritical and mindless to the extent that it can debase the music with which it is associated. (That dance-influenced ‘ambient’ music distinguishes itself as a cerebral listening, or more accurately ‘head’, music would seem to reinforce this point. It is part and parcel of the genre’s bid to be taken seriously by non-clubbers.)

What contemporary British youth call ‘dance music’ is more precisely designated as discotheque or club music. Rather than having an exclusive claim on dancing, the many genres and subgenres coined obsessively under the rubric share this institutional home. Genres often announce it in their names: disco music was so called because of discotheques, while ‘house’ and ‘garage’ were named after key clubs – the Warehouse in Chicago and Paradise Garage in New York. Discotheques have historically played a wide range of music. Afro-American and Afro-Caribbean genres have been particularly affiliated with the institution: R&B and soul in the 1960s; funk, disco and reggae in the 1970s; hiphop, house and garage in the 1980s; ragga, dancehall and jungle in the 1990s. Nevertheless, one should not reify the relationship and forget about white traditions in ‘dance music’. Rock’n’roll, electro pop, varieties of gay and Euro-disco, new wave and the New Romantics, Hi-NRG, British acid house and techno, to name just a few, have had predominantly white performers, audiences and sounds.

The ideological categories of ‘black’ and ‘white’ define the main axes of authenticity within dance music. Categories of gender and sexuality are employed with reference to pop, but varieties of dance pop such as Madonna or the Pet Shop Boys actually fall outside the definitions of dance music which circulate in the predominantly straight and white club and rave cultures investigated here. Although issues of gender and sexuality can be read into the music and are clearly important discursive categories in gay club cultures (cf. Dyer 1992; Hughes 1994), they are not a conspicuous feature of the discourses of straight club cultures, for the main reason that the feminine tends to signal the inauthentic, and the authentic is rendered in genderless or generically masculine (rather than macho) terms (cf. chapter 3).

‘Black’ dance music is said to maintain a rhetoric of body and soul despite its use of sampling and other computer technologies. Whereas ‘white’ or ‘European’ dance music is about a futurist celebration and revelation of technology to the extent that it minimizes the human among its sonic signifiers. Of course, these categories often have little to do with the actual colour of the people making the records; rather they are two discourses about the value of dance music. Both have their authenticities. For white youth, ‘black’ musical authenticity is rooted in the body, whereas Euro-dance authenticity, like white ethnicity, is disembodied, invisible and high-tech. In other words, to be organic to a discotheque, music must ring true to its recorded form.

Both ‘black’ and ‘white’ dance traditions have been at the forefront of studio experimentation since the sixties. Free from the constraints of imminent performance, makers of dance music have explored the aesthetics of new musical instruments such as synthesizers, drum and bass-line machines and samplers. Unlike rhetorically ‘live’ genres, the truth of dance music is often found in the revelation of technology. Genres like house, hiphop and techno have conspicuously featured technologies hidden by other genres. They sampled and blatantly manipulated vocals at a time when most pop producers were using samplers to mimic the high production values usually furnished by numerous studio musicians and to correct the lead singer’s odd bad note. They used new equipment, not to imitate ‘natural’ sounds, but to explore and create new sounds.

The ‘black’ tradition, however, maintains a key interest in vocals and, in certain subgenres, ‘funky’ instrumentation. For white youth, black authenticity tends to be anchored in the body of the performer/artist/star – in the grain of the voice, the thumping and grinding bass, the perceived honesty of the performance. In other words, authenticity is rooted in the romance of body and soul and relates to essential, verifiable origins. Whether it be soulful house or rap, musical authenticity resides in a rich, full, emotive and embodied sound.

The ‘white’ dance tradition exchanges fidelity to the body for the romance of technology. Described as electronic, progressive, industrial and techno, these musics tend towards the instrumental and explore new computer sound possibilities. When they use vocals, they tend to be sampled and heavily manipulated into something which sounds futuristic or ‘inhuman’. Moreover, their technophilia is demonstrated in their choice of name: for example, LFO, T99, or 808 State (named after the Roland 808 drum machine). Often, certain technologies will come to define a genre. For instance, the signature sound of acid house was a novel bleep produced by a Roland TB303 bass-line machine. Although the DJs in Chicago who first used this sound, like DJ Pierre (also known as Phuture, producer of ‘Acid Tracks’) were black (and gay, for that matter), the sound came to be associated with a predominantly white club culture in Britain. By 1989, few black clubbers seemed to perceive acid house as black music, although white clubbers seemed to hear the music as ‘black’ for almost another year. Interestingly, in America, house and acid house were perceived first and foremost as gay and could be heard only in gay clubs until they were re-exported back to the United States as ‘English acid house’. Despite the continual cross-fertilization and hybridization of ‘black’ and ‘white’ dance musics, the two are kept remarkably separate in discourse. Genres which mix colours aesthetically are always emerging – hip-house, ethnotechno and jungle – but they often float to one pole or the other depending on their association with different audiences.

Both ‘white’ and ‘black’ dance music are primarily producers’ rather than performers’ media. But a producer is a hypothetical, remote origin. So, in the ‘black’ music tradition, individual singers or rappers will often stand in as authentic sources, whereas in the ‘white’ tradition dance groups embrace the ‘facelessness’ often seen as a problem with dance music. Sometimes this denial of image seems to allude to art discourses which celebrate the autonomy of music and the purity of engaging a single sense with sound. But when the act uses a corporate, logo-style name like DNA, SL2 or the KLF, it becomes clear that they are playing with strategies of branding rather than the personas of the artiste. To some extent, their credibility is measured by their author’s invisibility. Album covers and videos (when they have them) are likely to sport computer-generated animation or heavily manipulated and abstracted photographs. Their lack of figurative human image corresponds with their aural abstraction, for as Robert Christgau has written, techno reduces ‘vocals to samples and melodies to ostinatos, the average techno hit doesn’t leave the average listener … much to grab onto’ (Village Voice 16 February 1993). Moreover, not only do techno acts adopt brands, they also continually change them, eschewing the brand as soon as it is established. In so doing, they avoid ‘selling out’ and preserve their niche audience.

Another way in which ‘black’ and ‘white’ versions of authenticity differ is in their provenance. Although both bear witness to trans-Atlantic influences, ‘black’ dance musics are more likely to be rooted in local urban scenes and neighbour-’hoods’. Even gestures to the black diaspora point to local subcultures and city places – New York, Chicago, Detroit, Washington. These specific places anchor and authenticate music, render it tangible and real. ‘White’ dance musics, by contrast, are more likely to claim to be global, nationless or vaguely pan-European.

The trajectory of the genre ‘techno’ – which began as a ‘black’ music and ended as ‘white’ – is revealing of these cultural logics. ‘Techno’ was launched in the UK by the Virgin Records compilation, Techno: The Dance Sound of Detroit, in June 1988. In the months leading to the release, the company’s A&R and marketing departments held discussions with DJs and other consultants to decide what to call the music of the three black Detroit-based DJs whose tracks were featured on the album. The term ‘house’ was then strongly identified with Chicago and was in dangerously ubiquitous use in the UK. They decided on the name ‘techno’ because it gave the music a distinct musical identity and made it appear as something substantively new (Stuart Cosgrove: interview, 25 August 1992). Crucially, the press release validated the music by emphasizing its roots in subcultural Detroit: ‘Techno is the new music of the motor city, a highly synthesized form of modern dance music made in basement studios by Detroit’s new underground producers.’ In the subsequent articles in music and style magazines, the city was subject to as much copy as the DJ-artists. Despite the fact that the music was not on the playlist of a single Detroit radio station, nor a regular track in any but a few mostly gay black clubs, the British press hailed ‘techno’ as the sound of that city. Although the genre was not met with contestation^* and a few singles from the album (notably Inner City’s ‘Big Fun’) were hits, the genre as a category didn’t quite take off. Because it was only a little faster and more melodic than ‘Chicago’ house, techno was not needed as an explanatory rubric or mark of club identity at this time.

Ironically, the term ‘techno’ was later appropriated to describe a slightly different descendant of Chicago house. When ‘acid house’ became unserviceable because of tabloid defamation and general overexposure (cf. chapter 4), the clubs, record companies and media went through a series of nominal shifts (about twenty different adjectives came to modify the word ‘house’, sometimes in pastiches like ‘deep techno house’) until they finally settled on ‘techno’. The term had at least two advantages: it was free from the overt drug references of acid house and it sounded like what it described – a high-tech predominantly instrumental music. Record companies may coin a genre but they cannot control its circulation. By the time Virgin came to release Inner City’s third album Praise in 1992, they had to shuffle the band’s position, redefining their genre niche rather awkwardly as ‘soulful techno’ – reasserting the ‘blackness’ of the sound with reference to ‘soul’.^†

Importantly, the shift from the first to the second kind of techno, from a ‘black’ to a ‘white’ sound, is accompanied by a shift in the discourses about their places of origin. Later techno was said to be a musical Esperanto. It was not considered to be the sound of any particular city or any definite social group but rather as a celebration of rootlessness. As one producer said, ‘Electronic music is a kind of world music. It may be a couple of generations yet, but I think that the global village is coming’ (Ralf Hutter quoted in Savage 1993: 21).

The authenticities of dance music are complex and contradictory. They waver between an ancestral world of real bodies and city places and the new high-tech order of faceless machines and global dislocation. The categories ‘black’ and ‘white’ are often used as shorthand for these different sets of cultural values. In practice, however, it is very difficult to map this terrain in these terms because dance music is characterized by a constant borrowing and hybridization.

Since the 1950s, studios have been editing their wares into ‘records of ideal, not real, events’ (Frith 1987a: 65). Discotheques are an ideal environment for ideal musical events. They are an appropriate site of consumption of musics for which the studio is the main site of production, for the development of genres of music which are quintessentially recorded and the growth of the values which assert their cultural worth. Whether they draw from older live or newer disc-oriented value systems, discotheque musics have evolved their own auras and authenticities.

The Response of the ‘Live’ Gig

Record sessions and discotheques gained popularity as sites of youthful leisure because they were set up for socializing to an easily altered soundtrack, they targeted youth and cohered with their subcultural ideologies. Additionally, within the aesthetic frameworks of many music genres, records, rather than performances, were increasingly being perceived as offering the best sound. These factors, combined with the economic conditions described in the first part of this chapter, curtailed engagements for live music. Confronted with, at worst, being swept out with the tide or, at best, positioned as a simulation of recording, performers reacted in two principal, seemingly contradictory ways: they faced the threat of recording by embracing new technologies and they positioned themselves as the opposite of the mechanical and predictable disc, reinventing performance as ‘live music’. In other words, technology alone could not save the gig. Performance had to find its essence, its superior values, its raison d’etre. Its response to recorded entertainment was not unlike the reaction of painting to photography a century earlier.^* Painting became impressionist and expressionist, rhetorically more spontaneous and personal. It experimented with colour, light and shade, investigated perception and portrayed layers of inner selves. So music performance would transform itself, by developing spectacle, amplifying personalities and heightening the semblance of spontaneity.

Since the 1960s, records have increasingly dictated the nature of performance for reasons related to changes in both consumption and production. First, people came to know a group’s music through its records and their aural expectations shifted accordingly. As early as the mid-fifties, there were complaints about the quality of live music. Letters from fans complained not only of high prices, but of bad sound: ‘While promoters continue to bring bands to [Manchester], my friends and I will just buy a record with the money and be more satisfied,’ wrote one music weekly reader (Melody Maker 29 December 1956). The record moved from being ‘a primarily mnemonic form (preserving songs known through performance) into a formative or prescriptive one’ (Durant 1984: 111). Moreover, live performances were ‘checked’ against memories of recordings to the extent that when the band fail to approximate their recordings, the ‘audience’s collective memory takes over and it “hears” what it cannot hear, in the sketch provided by the band’ (Middleton 1990: 88).

Second, records have become paradigms for performance because new production techniques, particularly those derived from the use of magnetic tape, have allowed for multi-track recording as well as corrective and creative editing. These changes in production were preconditions for the development of the concept album and the genre, album rock, both of which operated under the assumption that rock records could be musical events in themselves. It is no coincidence that the album, rather than the single, was the format to be elevated and, given the centrality of the single to dance culture, it is worth outlining why. First, the duration of the album was similar to a band’s set and allowed for the exploration and development of sounds, themes, even movements. Second, since the fifties, the LP had been the configuration of classical music. Presumably, rock and other genres could ennoble themselves by association. Third, album consumers had the appropriate demographics: the bulk of them were white, male and adult (rather than teenage or pre-teen). Whatever the sociological catalysts behind the formation of ‘album rock’, its accompanying aesthetic of experimental recording presented further challenges to music performance.

The problems that this inverted relationship of recording and performance posed for artistically ambitious bands of the mid-sixties is perhaps best illustrated by the Beatles, particularly the shape of their American tours and their decision in 1966 to abandon performing. The Beatles were the first band to hold concerts in huge arenas and stadiums normally reserved for sporting events and possibly the last band to get away without dramatically changing their style of performance to accommodate this new environment. At New York’s Shea Stadium in 1965, for instance, they played a pub-style set on a small platform perched on the pitcher’s mound in the middle of the field. There were no elaborate sets or lights, just the four band members poorly amplified and looking like ants even to those screaming in the front row. Drowned out and effectively overpowered by their fans, it’s not surprising that they stopped gigging the following year. In fact, the Beatles said that their main reason for retiring from ‘live’ music was that it impeded their musical creativity. As George Harrison told their authorized biographer in 1968: ‘We were held back in our development by having to go on stage all the time and do it, with the same old guitars, drums and bass’ (Davies 1968/1992: 344). Faced with conflicting aesthetic demands, the Beatles decided to align themselves with the new aesthetics of recording.

Other bands, however, negotiated the tensions between performance and recording by bringing the technologies of the studio to the stage. The Grateful Dead, for example, one of the most successful live acts in the history of rock, invested heavily in new sound technologies from their inception in the sixties. As Tom Wolfe recounts:

The Dead [had] equipment such as no rock’n’roll band ever had before … all manner of tuners, amplifiers, receivers, loudspeakers, microphones, cartridges, tapes, theater horns, booms, lights, turntables, instruments, mixers, muters, servile mesochronics, whatever was on the market. The sound went down so many microphones and hooked through so many mixers and variable lags and blew up in so many amplifiers and rolled around in so many speakers and fed back down so many microphones, it came on like a chemical refinery. (Wolfe 1968a: 223–4)

The Dead pioneered the development of music performances as mixed-media events. Motivated by a desire to simulate an LSD drug experience ‘without the LSD’, their gigs used black light, strobes, slide and film projections as well as a machine that projected light through plates of glass containing oil, water and food colouring which later became the visual hallmark of the psychedelic movement.

This mode of spectacular technological display is a main way by which live music meets the expectations and proportions of stadium crowds. In the 1970s, the tradition was advanced particularly by progressive rock groups, like Pink Floyd, whose elaborate sets, giant inflatables and pyrotechnics were stage experiments meant to live up to, or at least properly accompany, their studio experiments in sound. By the 1980s, the stadium concerts of all kinds of pop and rock acts had become so complex that they were planned down to the smallest detail with storyboards by concert designers (such as Fisher Park and Robert LePage) who like film directors had their own recognized oeuvres and signature-styles. Needless to say, the financial investments of touring have sky-rocketed in accordance with this form of spiralling visual excess.

Today, the record is not the only medium against which performances are measured. Audiences have come to expect a spectacle akin to or better than the one they have experienced by watching music videos. The ‘Baudrillard effect’, as Frith jokingly calls it, is when ‘a concert feels real only to the extent that it matches its TV reproduction’ (Frith 1988b: 124–5). So, Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation tour captured not just the flavour of her videos but sometimes re-enacted them in what seemed like a step-for-step duplication of their choreography. Moreover, the concert dance routines were then projected on to an enormous video screen to the side of the stage, so that the audience could then receive the routine through the same medium as it had originally.

Large-screen high-definition video has become a standard feature of many stadium gigs. Sometimes these screens depict segments of the artist’s music video; at other times they display newly chosen imagery. Mostly, however, they offer ‘live’ close-ups of the performers, so the audience can enjoy intimacies of the kind they are accustomed to seeing on television. But, at the show, they see the performer sweat, grin and grimace in real time, something they can verify by comparing the positions of the cameramen on stage with the video image above or to its side. On his Secret World tour, Peter Gabriel ironically played up to the desires of fans to get close to the star – and be familiar with the famous – by strapping a tiny pivoting video camera to his head which allowed his audience to watch his pupils dilate and to peer into his mouth.

One of the main objectives of concert technologies, then, is not only to enlarge the spectacle, but also to intensify the presence of its personalities. Beatles’ fans may have been satisfied by being in the physical presence of the stars – basking in the aura of the band – but subsequent acts needed to dramatize their appearance to maintain an audience for repeated stadium shows. The ways and means of magnifying aura are manifold. The glam images of David Bowie and Roxy Music in the 1970s, for example, meant that although these musics sounded good in discotheques, their fans still wanted to be in the presence of these characters. With flamboyant dress and make-up, these artists gave striking features to what could have been faceless records. With the help of light, smoke and sets, lead singers are often portrayed as the conductors of the show, sometimes they are even positioned as an orchestrating deity. On his Dangerous tour, for example, Michael Jackson waved his arms as if to gesture ‘let there be light’ and there was. He opened the show by emerging ‘mysteriously’ from clouds of smoke and ended the spectacle without an encore by seeming to ascend to heaven in an astronaut suit.

No matter how dazzling the technological revelation of the artists, the band are still expected to personify the music. At smaller gigs, in particular, they should appear to be the inspired source of the sound. The audience expects to appreciate aura. For example, when Madness played a few reunion gigs in late 1992, they were panned. As one reviewer explained:

Rarely have I seen such a bored bunch of people at a gig. Not the crowd … But [the band who] look as bored as a plank full of drill holes. It was like being at a show by the Australian Madness – Mad Again or somesuch; as if a crew of clones had donned the clothes, got the hits down pat, and dragged themselves out onto the stage. (Melody Maker 2 January 1993)

Here the missing ingredient is not so much presence as that other principle of ‘live’ music, spontaneity, which is crucial to performances in so far as it elevates them into unique events. Sometimes, the enactment of spontaneity is as limited as the well-rehearsed deviation from the record track in the form of the guitar or drum solo. At other times, the deviation is more dramatic, involving special guest stars (‘my good friend, Eric Clapton, on the guitar’) or what has become a perennial crowd-pleaser, smashing one’s instruments on stage. More than anything else, it is perhaps this act of destruction which signals that, since the late sixties, music performance has moved into territories well beyond its usual preserve. The Who, the first well-known band to wreck their instruments during a gig, borrowed ideas from artworld ‘happenings’ which fetishized the impermanence of performance. Later, punk groups, then grunge bands, would turn guitar-smashing into a semi-regular rite.

Spontaneity is one way to make an event seem unique, but musical improvisation in the strict sense of the word is a specialist taste. Regular gig and concert-goers are likely to enjoy behavioural, as much as musical, spontaneity. If one analyses gig reviews published in the music weeklies which keep live music in high regard, musicianship is rarely mentioned. Many of the most celebrated rock musicians are not known as expert players of their musical instruments. Although their particular styles may come to admired, it is as much for their revelation of distinctive personality as for any absolute measure of their musical mastery. Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison have legendary status as live performers, not only because they were innovative musicians who died young, but because their abuse of drugs and alcohol made them appear out of control on stage. Their dramatic, reckless, involuntary, even unconscious, behaviour was something special for an audience to witness. With punk, good performance actually came to be defined against good musicianship. Punk bands found the essence of performance in all the ‘mistakes’ that would have been edited out of recorded versions, like flat singing full of wrong notes and brazen displays of musical incompetence.

While there are few allusions to musicianship in gig reviews, references to records abound. Singles and albums and their place in the charts are repeatedly referred to by critics as if they were signposts to the meaning and structure of a performance. No matter how much musicians attempt to distinguish their performances from their recordings, it would seem that the latter reign supreme. So much so that, during the 1980s, a high proportion of shows began using recorded music and sound effects to bring the performed music closer to the clarity and richness of its ‘original’ recording. According to Rolling Stone, ‘anywhere from 75% to 100% of touring rock acts use technology to reproduce sounds achieved in the studio and 25% or more of what the audience hears in an arena show is pre-recorded’ (Rolling Stone 6 September 1990). Only a minority of fans seemed to notice or care that much of the music was recorded: synthesizers replaced horn sections and stringed instruments; drum machines were used instead of drummers and other percussionists; digital samples supplemented on-stage session musicians. Amazingly, none of this extensive use of recorded music seemed to threaten the ‘liveness’ of these large-scale performances, at least not until it was suggested that the star might be lip-synching.

The meaning and value of ‘liveness’ in most pop and rock genres cannot be attenuated to the degree that it includes recorded lead vocals. (Back-up vocals do not pose the same problem.) Live lead vocals act as a guarantee of star presence and sincerity and, as such, are part of the perceived essence of pop music performance. For this reason, a ‘PA’ (or ‘public appearance’) by Sister Sledge at the Odyssey discotheque in Bristol received a improbably favourable review in that outpost of indie rock values, New Musical Express (NME), at least in part because, despite the fact that all instrumentation was supplied on backing tapes, they had a ‘live’ vocal presence which was the convincing origin of the sound: ‘The atmosphere in this cavernous glitzerama niterie borders on volcanic, but Sister Sledge … soak up this scary mass hysteria with seasoned assurance … such is the euphoria three feisty divas and a karaoke machine can inspire for half an hour … great disco, like fine wine, clearly matures with age’ (NME 30 January 1993).^*

While many concerts are covertly part-record/part-performance, PAs or ‘track dates’ are an explicit hybrid of the two forms. On one level, then, their difference from gigs is a matter of degree, involving the ratio of high tech to old tech, recorded to ‘live’ music. On another level, the aesthetic ramifications of the two kinds of show could not be farther apart. For example, the following dance fanzine writer prefers PAs in part because of their less ‘macho’ gender connotations:

Gigs are out – PAs are in. A gig was originally a musician’s term for a live show or concert… Very often it’s a complete mess with feedback, bum notes, inaudible vocals, broken guitar strings, vomit and punch ups. A ‘PA’ or ‘Public Appearance’ on the other hand is designed to bring a little order to the proceedings. The band (or more often solo artists) perform their songs to a backing tape or CD. Some will ‘mime’ totally with not one note actually being sung or played. Others will prefer to sing and play part of the music live whilst using CDs to enhance the backing …

So where does this leave the ‘Sweat & Blood’ attitude of the good ol’ rock’n’rollers? In reality they’re in a different league, where classic poses, endless guitar solos and the ‘macho man’ image still rules. (Tab Bumper Techno Issue 1991)

Dance acts, however, have felt pressure to live up to ‘live’ aesthetics for several decades – if only because their record labels see touring as a main means of building the artist identity essential for big sales. In the 1990s with the popularity of raves, PAs have developed into more elaborate quasi-live affairs. Acts like Adamski, The Orb, 808 State and The Prodigy have toured clubs playing sets with computers, samplers and ‘improvised’ keyboard parts, vocalists and other guest instrumentalists (not to mention turntables). These artists create events that have been hailed as ‘live’ and have generated stars in ways previously not considered possible by these kinds of club dates.

The key to the success of these new kinds of performance was their delivery of recorded music different from that already available on released records. Much like the ‘live’ rock show, they found it necessary to deviate from the album to underline the status of the event as a happening. Many dance acts re-enact the procedures involved in making the music in the first place. The Orb, for example, explain: ‘What we’re trying to do is take the studio out in front of 2,000 people and mix it live … For previous [tour] excursions … we mixed all the tracks completely differently in the studio, then re-recorded them and ran samples and weird effects over the top live’ (Future Music June 1993).

The lines which previously demarcated the gig, the PA and the club have been blurred. One group that has actively tried to bring this about is the Shamen. They started out as an indie band, then they got involved with the rave scene and progressively began playing more dance-orientated music. They came up with a crossbreed show they called ‘Synergy’ where their own set was integrated into a night’s entertainment which included DJs, MCs, rappers, ‘live keyboards’ and creative visual and lighting effects. To the Shamen, the logic was simple: the traditional rock gig ‘is outmoded … They’re no fun to do and no fun to go to: you stand around listening to crappy tapes played through a [public address system], the band comes on and then you go home’ (Face April 1990). Their Synergy events, by contrast, were said to keep interest and momentum going all night long. According to participants, the party was seamless; people danced to DJ-spun discs, then continued to dance when ‘the band’ came on.

Since the fifties, the ascendancy of recording as the primary means of communicating music has led both to the divergence and convergence of ‘live’ and recorded aesthetic values. On the one hand, the ‘live’ was defined against the supposedly lifeless, banal predictability of the record. It pursued new forms of performance – accentuating its status as spectacle and happening and emphasizing both the proximity and transcendence of the star. On the other hand, recorded events from hops to raves have increasingly integrated the human touch, particularly in the figure of the DJ with his finger on the pulse of the crowd, as well as generating new forms of public appearance which enliven the presence of dance acts. Although once a value assigned exclusively to performance, since the mid-eighties, ‘live’ qualities have been increasingly attributed to recorded events. At the same time, music performances have become more and more reliant on recording and other mediating technologies which question the integrity of the ‘live’. Undoubtedly, the permutations of this history are not over. What is clear, however, is that accounts of the aesthetics of post-war popular music have not, for the most part, addressed this important axis of meaning.

Conclusion

Authenticity in popular music and its primary medium, recording, appears at first to be an idiosyncratic value. Upon sustained consideration, however, one can discern material foundations and ideological logics. The vagaries of the value can be related to concrete practices of production and consumption. With respect to production, I have tried to explore some of the ramifications of ‘original’ records, the changes in value that occur when the studio is the main site of music production and records precede and prescribe performance. First, records found artistic credibility by exploiting properties specific to them rather than qualities which imitated performance. Second, under certain circumstances, rare and exclusive recordings acquired aura.

This chapter, however, has concentrated on processes of consumption and has found that enculturation is key. The enculturation of records for dancing was not automatic but slow enough to be the subject of ‘gaps’ between several generations. It was (and still is) an uneven process dependent on diverse influences. Its history involves big businesses, trade unions and copyright law, the semantics of interior design, the social requirements of distinct crowds, the evolution of new professions, the production processes and travel patterns of particular genres, and discourses about the honesty and integrity of music.

Records were no mere substitute for performance, they were a different form altogether – one which fostered new types of event and social space. To accommodate such sounds harmoniously, dances had to change their appearance and structure. So the discotheque eventually became a site of consumption appropriate to music whose site of production is the studio.

Since rock’n’roll, records have become increasingly indispensable, integral and organic to music cultures. They have become the musical axis around which club and rave crowds gather and scenes revolve. But what exactly are the configurations of these crowds? What hierarchies define and divide clubbers? What social demographics and cultural values distinguish them? These are the issues investigated in the next chapter.

* This rich body of work includes: Cutler 1984, Durant 1991, Eisenberg 1987, Frith 1987a and 1987b and 1988b and 1992a, Gelatt 1977, Goodwin 1990 and 1992a, Grossberg 1992, Hayward 1991, Kealy 1979, Laing 1986 and 1990, Langlois 1992, Middleton 1990, Mowitt 1987, Negus 1992, Porcello 1991, Qualen 1986, Read and Welch 1976, Straw 1990, Struthers 1987, Theberge 1989 and 1991.

* Differences of intention and interpretation arose between the trade union and the record industry association almost immediately. The Union saw the agreement as part of an ambitious initiative whereby ‘the performance of every record [could] be controlled and ultimately used for entertainment in the home’ (Musicians’ Union Conference Report 1951). PPL, on the other hand, favoured less constraint because increased use of their copyright meant more income for their members. Typical of their compromises was their agreement about the practice of playing records between band sets. The MU wanted no recorded interval. PPL thought this unreasonable. They eventually agreed that future licences would limit recorded intermissions to a total of twenty minutes – a stipulation that would be difficult to enforce (Musicians’ Union Conference Report 1954).

† The copyright in sound recording is defined as the ‘aggregate of the sounds embodied in, and capable of being reproduced by the means of a record’ (Copyright Act 1956).

* In Britain, the music outside PPL copyright control was for many years that of foreign producers and included ‘large quantities of soul records which presented particular problems in some types of discotheque use’ (MU Conference Report 1971:46).

* Although twelve-inches were originally made for public performance only, within a few years, they became retail products. In Britain, the first two retailed twelve-inch disco singles were Undisputed Truth’s ‘You Plus Me’ (issued in a limited edition of three thousand) and Goodie Goodie’s ‘No 1 DJ’ in 1978. The first twelve-inch-only release to make it into the top ten was Abba’s 1981 single ‘Lay Your Love on Me’. This honour is usually assumed to be held by New Order’s ‘Blue Monday’, which was released on twelve-inch-only but, despite high sales and many weeks in the chart, it peaked at number nine. Although roughly forty-five per cent of singles sold in the early 1990s were twelve-inches, major record labels still see the format as primarily promotional. Profits on twelve-inches are such that they are usually only relevant to small companies with low overheads and low turnover.

* Newly coined genres are often challenged. For example, in the same period, Balearic Beat was hotly debated and criticized for being ‘conjured out of thin air’ and ‘merely a scam’ (Soul Underground August 1988, Melody Maker 20 August 1988).

† There are advantages to having your genre hijacked. For example, when American Time magazine introduced techno music to their readers, they said it was ‘born in Detroit during the mid-eighties’ and by implication positioned Inner City as the founders of rave (Time 17 August 1994).

* Of course, records are not like photos per se but ‘comparable to a photomontage’ (Laing 1990: 188).

* However, Wendy Fonarow, who has conducted extensive ethnographic research of the British indie scene, argues that another reason why the PA would receive a positive review in NME is because, in liking something inappropriate, the reviewer could assert his distinctively individual taste (Fonarow in conversation 1994).