Review Article

[PMH 11.2 (2016) 175-178] PMH (print) ISSN 1740-7133 https://doi.org/10.1558/pomh.37829 PMH (online) ISSN 1743-1646

Review article

George MacKay, ed. The Pop Festival: History, Music, Media, Culture. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. xx + 234 pp. ISBN 978-1-62356-959-4 (pbk).

Andy Bennett, Jodie Taylor and Ian Woodward (eds). The Festivalisation of Culture. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2014. xiii + 279 pp. ISBN 978-1-4094-3198-5 (hbk).

Ray Foulk with Caroline Foulk. The Last Great Event: When the World Came to the Isle of Wight. Surbiton, Surrey: Medina Publishing, 2015. xx + 364 pp. ISBN 978-1-909339-58-3 (pbk).

Derek Schofield.Towersey Festival: 50 Years in the Making. Matlock: Mrs Casey Music, 2014. iv + 172 pp. ISBN 978-0-9547502-1-3 (pbk).

Robert Edgar, Kirsty Fairclough-Isaacs, Benjamin Halligan and Nicola Spelman (eds). The Arena Concert: Music, Media and Mass Entertainment. London: Blooms- bury, 2015. xv + 331 pp. ISBN 978-1-6289-2555-5 (pbk).

Reviewed by: Dave Laing, University of Liverpool [email protected]

Abstract This review article discusses several books dealing with aspects of live music, notably festivals and arena concerts. It points out that, for the most part, two edited collections on festivals are purely celebratory and focus on audience experience rather than the character of perfor- mances. In contrast, two book-length studies of individual folk and rock festivals provide a more comprehensive account, including the extent of local opposition to the staging of the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival. Finally, the article finds much to commend in an edited volume on the arena concert.

Keywords: music festivals; arena concerts; audience participation; music technologies; ticketing; mediated performance

Over ten years ago, the Performing Right Society (PRS) published statistics that showed that the live music industry in Britain now had a greater financial capac- ity than that of the recorded music business. This caused great excitement among

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2018, Office 415, The Workstation, 15 Paternoster Row, Sheffield S1 2BX. 176 Popular Music History industry executives and commentators, since for many years previously it had been the conventional wisdom that recordings were the dominant element of the popular music business; so much so that it had become commonplace for the terms ‘record industry and music industry’ to be used interchangeably, a state of affairs that was sternly condemned by Williamson and Cloonan (2007). In tune with the PRS analysis, these authors bemoaned the consequent demotion of live music in particular. The rise to prominence of live music internationally is now being widely reflected within popular music studies, as shown by the publication of the first three books under review. It is also indicative of the principal emphasis of this ‘rediscovery’ of live music that two of these edited volumes are focused on festivals. In their different ways, George McKay and Andy Bennett were pioneers in the study of such events. Previously, McKay published a study of Glastonbury as site for festivals (McKay 2000) while Bennett edited a volume of essays on the 1969 Woodstock festival, an event whose character and ethos set the template for gen- erations of music festivals to come (Bennett 2004). These editors’ current books cast their net much wider. McKay’s 14 authors range over six decades from the 1950s to recent times, generically from jazz to soul to trance and techno and geographically from North America to Europe to Australia. Bennett and his co-editors have assembled a team of contributors whose topics sometimes overlap with those of the McKay volume—notably in discussions of various forms of mediation, and of British ‘New Age’ travellers— although the only author to appear in both volumes is the indefatigable Graham St John. Despite the wide range of subject matter these books are permeated by two common features: an atmosphere and an absence. Firstly, the tone of many arti- cles is almost wholly celebratory, with little acknowledgment of the darker side of festivals. The notable exception is Sean Nye and Ronald Hitzler’s chapter in The Pop Festival on the disastrous events in 2010 at the Love Parade, a German techno festival where ‘overcrowding at its main entrance resulted in a panic and stam- pede, which caused the deaths of twenty-one people and the injuring of hundreds more’ (p. 116). Secondly, music itself is all but absent from the accounts of festivals, which focus on the behaviour and experience of audiences. There is much discussion of ‘carnivalized’ politics, ‘sustainable practices’ and ‘festival bodies’, sweaty and otherwise. To find a more comprehensive ‘insider’s’ version of individual festivals, it is useful to turn to the books by the Foulks and by Derek Schofield. These authors are not academics, but have been participants in the rock and folk festivals they

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2018 Review article 177 describe. Ray Foulk was one of the organizers of the Isle of Wight festivals of 1969 and 1970. This book deals with the latter event, whose headline acts included Jimi Hendrix, The Who and The Doors. It is a blow-by-blow account of both the perfor- mances and the prior conflict between Fiery Creations (local promoters led by Ray Foulk and his brothers) and the forces of reaction on the Isle of Wight that sought to prevent the festival from taking place. In one memorable scene at a public meeting, Rikki Foulk was pushed off the stage by a Brigadier Phipps who told him, ‘My father fought in the war for people like you’ (p. 72). In a very different way, this book complements Michael Clarke’s prosaic but valuable account of similar conflicts surrounding the free festivals of the late 1960s and 1970s (Clarke 1982). Derek Schofield has been a stalwart of the Towersey folk festival, held in a small English village near Oxford since 1965. His history of the event follows an earlier volume on the Sidmouth Folk Festival (Schofield 2005). Both books trace the origins of these long-lived festivals from their origins in the thriving English folk revival of the mid-1960s. Along the way, the author provides much mate- rial for an understanding of the evolution of that revival itself. Unlike Sidmouth and its near contemporary, the Cambridge Folk Festival, Towersey originated in a broader and more parochial village event designed to raise funds to renovate the village memorial hall, dedicated to those local men who died in the First World War. Scofield skilfully traces the ultimately unsuccessful attempt by festival organizers to retain such a link as the event’s popularity attracted more and more folk fans and ‘star’ performers. The sector of live music with the greatest economic importance is the subject matter of The Arena Concert, a multi-edited volume with no fewer than 20 chapters, dealing systematically with key dimensions of the biggest indoor events in the music business. Apart from a rather unoriginal historical section focused in part on the Beatles’ 1965 Shea Stadium concert, the book contains fascinating first-hand accounts by an arena concert performer (Jon Stew- art) and of the evolution of the ‘event space’ by architecture professor Robert Kronenburg. One important aspect of the contemporary touring and festival scene unmen- tioned in any of these books is the rise of ‘ticketing’ as a specialist sub-sector which did not exist until about 1996 when Ticketmaster sold its first concert tick- ets online. Canadian journalists Dean Budnick and Josh Baron (2011) have begun the task with their investigation of the (so far) irresistible rise of the unloved Ticketmaster to a position of dominance over the multi-million-dollar arena concert scene. We await the first in-depth examination of this topic from within academia.

References Bennett, A., ed. 2004. Remembering Woodstock. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Budnick, D., and J. Baron. 2011. Ticket Masters: The Rise of the Concert Industry and How the Public Got Scalped. Toronto: ECW Press. Clarke, M. 1982. The Politics of Pop Festivals. London: Junction Books. McKay, G. 2000. Glastonbury: A Very English Festival. London: Gollancz. Schofield, D. 2005.The First Week in August: Fifty Years of the Sidmouth Festival. Matlock, Sid- mouth: International Festival Limited. Williamson, J., and M. Cloonan. 2007. ‘Rethinking the Music Industry’. Popular Music 26/2: 305–322. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261143007001262