This book critically examines two versions of the genre identified as pub rock as they evolved in the UK and Australia. Both developed in the communal spaces of pubs and both had their heyday in the mid‑ to‑late 1970s. Indeed, the two have so much in common that AC/DC, sometimes thought of as the quintessential Australian pub rock group, became hugely popular in the UK, while other Australian groups such as the Sports, outliers of pub rock, also had success there. At the same time UK pub r...

Released in 1986, Hunters and Collectors' album Human Frailty is one of the most important Australian albums of the last two decades of the twentieth century. It was pivotal in the group's career and marked the group's move into pub rock. It is unashamedly concerned with love and desire. The album challenged traditional understandings of Australian masculinity while playing music to predominantly male audiences. No other Australian group would have dared, or indeed been able, to g...

This book explores dancing from the 1960s to the 1980s; though this period covers only twenty years, the changes during it were seismic. Nevertheless continuities can be found, and those are what this book examines. In dancing, it answers how we moved from the self-control that formed the basis for ballroom dancing, to ecstatic rave dancing. In terms of music, it answers how we moved from the beat groups to electronic dance music. In terms of youth, it answers how we moved from youth cultu...

An Anthology of Australian Albums offers an overview of Australian popular music through the lens of significant, yet sometimes overlooked, Australian albums. Chapters explore the unique qualities of each album within a broader history of Australian popular music. Artists covered range from the older and non-mainstream yet influential, such as the Missing Links, Wendy Saddington and the Coloured Balls, to those who have achieved very recent success (Courtney Barnett, Dami Im and F...

This book examines the experience of race and ethnicity in Australia after the withering away of official multiculturalism. The first chapter looks at the formation of the Australian state, the role that multiculturalism has played, and the impact of neoliberal ideas. The second chapter takes nightclubbing in the city of Perth during the 1980s, the peak period for official multiculturalism, to exemplify how diversity and exclusion functioned in everyday life. The third chapter considers th...

Britpop and the English Music Tradition is the first study devoted exclusively to the Britpop phenomenon and its contexts. The genre of Britpop, with its assertion of Englishness, evolved at the same time that devolution was striking deep into the hegemonic claims of English culture to represent Britain. It is usually argued that Britpop, with its strident declarations of Englishness, was a response to the dominance of grunge. The contributors in this volume take a different point of view:...

Jon Stratton provides a pioneering work on Jews as a racialized group in the popular music of America, Britain and Australia during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Rather than taking a narrative, historical approach the book consists of a number of case studies, looking at the American, British and Australian music industries. Stratton's primary motivation is to uncover how the racialized positioning of Jews, which was sometimes similar but often different in each of the so...

Black Popular Music in Britain Since 1945 provides the first broad scholarly discussion of this music since 1990. The book critically examines key moments in the history of black British popular music from 1940s jazz to 1970s soul and reggae, 1990s Jungle and the sounds of Dubstep and Grime that have echoed through the 2000s. While the book offers a history it also discusses the ways black musics in Britain have intersected with the politics of race and class, multiculturalism, gender and ...

Like many Jews of our generation, Jon Stratton grew up in a family more concerned about assimilation than about preserving Jewish tradition. While he could easily 'pass' among non-Jews, he found himself increasingly torn between his fear of not belonging and a deeply-felt commitment to his family's past.Coming Out Jewish examines the unique challenge of constructing an identity amid the clash between ethnicity and conformity. For many Jews, the idea of full assimilation end...

When Music Migrates uses rich material to examine the ways that music has crossed racial faultlines that have developed in the post-Second World War era as a consequence of the movement of previously colonized peoples to the countries that colonized them. This development, which can be thought of in terms of diaspora, can also be thought of as postmodern in that it reverses the modern flow which took colonizers, and sometimes settlers, from European countries to other places in the world. ...

Australia likes to celebrate its musical heritage, but there are so many stories that haven't been told.'Andrew tells us things about the songs that we might not know and things about the songs that no one should ever know. He does it with intelligence and humour, not to mention an acid wit.' - Jimmy BarnesWhich band is Australia's premier act for drunk men to hug to? Which dance floor smash owes its existence to an elderly Canadian stand-up team? How does ...

In Working Class Heroes, David Simonelli explores the influence of rock and roll on British society in the 1960s and '70s. At a time when social distinctions were becoming harder to measure, rock musicians appeared to embody the mythical qualities of the idealized working class by perpetuating the image of rebellious, irreverent, and authentic musicians.