Saywood, Laurence. 2024. Identifying the Vicwardian Continuum in British Popular Music: Working-Class Performance and Cultural Continuity, 1945-1979. Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London [Thesis]

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Abstract or Description

This thesis explores the overlooked influence of Victorian and Edwardian culture within postwar British popular music. The portmanteau ‘Vicwardian’ is employed to describe what became a collection of tropes associated with the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The thesis offers a counterpoint to academic and popular narratives that emphasise the era’s popular music as a radical departure – primarily influenced by American styles of music – from past socio-cultural tradition. Utilising a wide range of historical study and qualitative archival research, analysis is divided into three areas of investigation focused on local cultural hubs, commercial popular music, and television. These studies re frame familiar narratives surrounding the rise of rock music and reveal vibrant but critically marginalised practices that perpetuated the forms and meanings of much older urban working-class leisure. Commentators have on occasion drawn attention to an apparent sense of music hall nostalgia in the work of The Beatles, The Kinks and other 1960s rock musicians. But the thesis’ original contribution to knowledge lies in its establishment that an eclectic and enduring mix of performance culture, social environments and collective mentalities, rooted in both the real and imagined nineteenth and early twentieth-century past, not only intersected with and influenced 1960s rock culture, but constituted what I term a wider post-war ‘Vicwardian continuum’, visible in a plurality of popular music contexts. The study questions classic historiographical approaches to post-war British popular music and, in so doing, places itself alongside revisionist histories of the era which argue that the scale and pace of post-war change has routinely been overstated to the detriment of what were purposeful constructions of socio-cultural continuity.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Identification Number (DOI):	https://doi.org/10.25602/GOLD.00037461
Keywords:	popular music, working class, Victorian, Edwardian, the Beatles, the Kinks, music hall, working men's club, variety theatre, Max Bygraves, Mrs Mills, Billy Cotton
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	Music
Date:	31 July 2024
Item ID:	37461
Date Deposited:	15 Aug 2024 14:49
Last Modified:	15 Aug 2024 14:53
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/37461

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