From the Beatles to Oasis, pop music is one of Britain’s biggest cultural success stories, so it’s strange that the joys of screaming fans and ear-splitting concerts are rarely seen in museums.
There are a number of reasons for this. For a start, the immediacy and raw emotion of pop music are difficult to capture in traditional museum displays. Also, pop memorabilia is difficult to get hold of, as fans and collectors rarely want to part with that precious signed album or treasured concert poster.
The failure of the £15m National Centre for Popular Music also casts a long shadow. This lottery-funded project opened in Sheffield in 1999 and closed just over a year later after abysmal visitor figures.
And yet a recent nationwide survey of popular music collections, displays and exhibitions has revealed that well over 100 exhibitions featuring popular music and related cultural activities have been mounted in the past 10 years around the UK.
The survey was carried out as part of Collecting and Curating Popular Music Histories, a project being conducted by the Institute of Popular Music at the University of Liverpool.
It is supported by the Arts & Humanities Research Council’s £5.5m Beyond Text programme, which funds projects looking at how people communicate through performance, sound, images and objects. The key partners are the British Music Experience, Victoria and Albert Museum and National Museums Liverpool.
“We have also been conducting in-depth interviews with curators, conservators and other museum professionals working in education and outreach roles with the aim of sharing practice with museum professionals interested in the subject, and to act as an advocate for the effective use of popular music in museums,” says Marion Leonard, senior lecturer in music at the University of Liverpool.
“It’s early days but we can already say that there is an increasing amount of activity in this area, with museums of different sizes and types putting on shows which engage with popular music in different ways.
“Some of these have focused on well-known artists or offered an overview of particular points in British music history, while others, notably in art galleries rather than museums, have focused on aspects of visual art related to popular music releases or movements,” adds Leonard.
Alongside this, popular music has featured in museums as a way to explore social and urban histories, focusing on aspects of popular music practice and achievement within specific localities rather than the broad themes that a national museum might tackle.
The British Music Experience (BME) at the O2 arena in London is the closest we have to a national museum of pop music. The BME opened in March 2009 and attracted 150,000 visitors in its first year with its state-of-the-art mix of interactive exhibitions and zoned areas where people can dance, sing, play instruments or learn more about the pop music industry. Information and activities are recorded on “smart tickets” that can be accessed later from home using the internet.
“People can see objects, but there’s so much more to enjoy – you can mix records, play instruments, learn dance moves, immerse yourself in giant hologram areas,” says BME curator Paul Lilley. “It’s the depth and level of our interpretation that sets us apart – and how we animate the collection.”
A range of commercial sponsors from the Co-operative to Gibson Guitars provide funds, but also content, though many of the pop memorabilia items are loaned from owners, which Lilley admits can be tricky.
“Relying on loans can mean a huge risk for curators and having to incur the expense of frequent display changes,” he says. “But the upside is that relationships are built. We’ve engaged 150 artists, which we wouldn’t have done if we already had a collection or we’d bought stuff at auction.”
Lilley believes that smaller museums are also able to use these connections. “The importance is in building an army of advocates – from artists and industry supporters to audiences themselves – who are interested in everything you do.
“You don’t want them to come once, you want them to come back, and then spread the word. We have the full support of the UK music industry – it’s unheard of to have all the major record labels and trade organisations, who are normally in competition, behind us.”
Pop merchandise
Beyond London, there are many exhilarating stories to tell about British pop music and identifiable audiences to appeal to. This is why it’s hard to see how the National Centre for Popular Music could have failed. The consensus is that it took a scattergun approach and, more significantly, failed to connect with the city of Sheffield and its musical heritage.
“You have to move beyond objects in cases,” says Paul Gallagher, curator of contemporary collecting at National Museums Liverpool (NML). NML opens its Wondrous Place gallery as part of the Museum of Liverpool this July.
A pop music exhibition, Liverpool Sound, is one element of this gallery, telling the story of the city’s cultural life. “You can’t avoid overlapping the different cultural elements: music, sport, writing, fashion. Popular music is a very visual experience; we use a lot of costume.
“It’s an opportunity to engage with music in different ways, and people can dip in and out. We have digital jukeboxes, a karaoke room where people can sing the Liverpool hits, and a pop quiz table interactive which plays video clips,” adds Gallagher.
The Beatles’ story, for example, is told through the fans. “The vast majority of this is from our own collections and is mainly merchandise, but this is a huge part of the story – how the Beatles phenomenon came about and how they were the first band to push merchandise on a global scale,” says Gallagher.
“It could be overwhelming, because Liverpool and pop music are inextricably linked, and because of the sheer amount of stories to tell, so it had to have a chronological element,” says Gallagher. “But we wanted to get across the speed with which it all happened, how the Beatles were a band that borrowed and kept moving.”
He says objects are central, but it’s the story that drives the display. “It has to get under the skin of the city. We use a lot of first-hand quotes, and from these come the excitement. It’s the story that’s enormous, not the exhibition, and most of all it has to work as a piece of entertainment.”
Despite the country’s rich musical heritage, Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales (NMW) did not actively collect contemporary music material until 20 years ago.
“We started to add aspects of Welsh industrial life in the 1980s at St Fagans, the museum of traditional Welsh rural folk life. Collecting music items followed logically from that,” says Owain Rhys, curator of contemporary life at NMW.
“It is difficult, because people didn’t want to part with their possessions, so we photographed and recorded material that we considered of significance to Wales. Unless people have duplicates of items, such as vinyl LPs, donating would defeat the object of collecting for them.”
In 2009 St Fagans created Pop Peth (Welsh for “everything”), a pop music exhibition curated by people from outside the museum. “It was a way of accessing material but also of handing responsibility to people who knew the objects and could tell the story from their point of view,” Rhys says.
Those invited were a collector who brought posters, badges and Welsh-language ephemera; the editors of a fanzine, who recreated a student bedroom; family-run Spillers Records, which provided signed photographs, promotional material and other pop memorabilia; and a dub reggae band who brought their synthesiser for people to play on.
“We benefited hugely from their enthusiasm and knowledge,” says Rhys. “And seeing them setting up their corner created a buzz in the museum as visitors’ memories were triggered.”
Building a pop music collection at NMW has been slow and painstaking, but relationships have come out of it. “Museums could work more closely with collectors, and show that they value their collections,” says Rhys. “For example, Gari, the collector for the Pop Peth exhibition, collected ticket stubs because no one else did, and for their cultural rather than iconic value.”
But small items such as ticket stubs can tell a big story, points out Rhys. “We hope that in the future collectors can look at us as a repository for their collections.”
Since the exhibition, St Fagans has asked up-and-coming bands to compose contemporary music inspired by items now in the collection, with the results posted on the NMW website.
“It creates new audiences and we are also creating history by capturing the present for the future,” says Rhys.
Deborah Mulhearn is a freelance journalist
The rarefied atmosphere of the Handel House Museum in London’s Mayfair was rocked for three months last year when it held an exhibition to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the death of American musician Jimi Hendrix, who lived in what today comprise the museum offices.
The 18th-century German composer Frideric Handel resided at 25 Brook Street from 1723 until his death in 1759. Hendrix moved into the top-floor flat of 23 Brook Street in 1968, and lived there for 18 months with his English girlfriend, Kathy Etchingham.
The exhibition, Hendrix in Britain (25 August-7 November 2010), was a huge success, with the museum’s usual 1,200 visitors per month swelling to 7,500.
“The exhibition was an opportunity for us to celebrate a very different musical culture,” says Sarah Bardwell, the director of the Handel House Museum.
Virtuosity
But there are parallels between Handel and Hendrix, Bardwell points out. “Both were immigrants during exciting decades in London’s development – Handel in the 1720s and Hendrix in the 1960s – and both used London to make their mark. And both were brilliant musicians, Hendrix on guitar, Handel on harpsichord.”
The exhibition was designed to fit in with the 18th-century environment of the house and was presented in a traditional, low-key way with photographs, graphic panels and listening posts. Any anxiety on the part of the museum staff was quickly dispelled by the rapport struck between the two sets of enthusiasts.
“It’s the passion for music that unites them,” says Bardwell. “It was lovely to see our guides listening rapt to stories about Hendrix’s last concert on the Isle of Wight from fans who were there. And Hendrix fans in jeans listened spellbound to the live baroque music we often have playing.”
“A real high”
Bardwell is now looking at ways to incorporate the Hendrix story permanently. “The amazing publicity we got has put us on the map. We won’t be changing our mission – we are a museum about Handel. But we now know there’s an interest and that the juxtaposition works. We got a real high from doing this exhibition and it’s completely changed the way we work and how we reach new audiences.
There are a number of reasons for this. For a start, the immediacy and raw emotion of pop music are difficult to capture in traditional museum displays. Also, pop memorabilia is difficult to get hold of, as fans and collectors rarely want to part with that precious signed album or treasured concert poster.
The failure of the £15m National Centre for Popular Music also casts a long shadow. This lottery-funded project opened in Sheffield in 1999 and closed just over a year later after abysmal visitor figures.
And yet a recent nationwide survey of popular music collections, displays and exhibitions has revealed that well over 100 exhibitions featuring popular music and related cultural activities have been mounted in the past 10 years around the UK.
The survey was carried out as part of Collecting and Curating Popular Music Histories, a project being conducted by the Institute of Popular Music at the University of Liverpool.
It is supported by the Arts & Humanities Research Council’s £5.5m Beyond Text programme, which funds projects looking at how people communicate through performance, sound, images and objects. The key partners are the British Music Experience, Victoria and Albert Museum and National Museums Liverpool.
“We have also been conducting in-depth interviews with curators, conservators and other museum professionals working in education and outreach roles with the aim of sharing practice with museum professionals interested in the subject, and to act as an advocate for the effective use of popular music in museums,” says Marion Leonard, senior lecturer in music at the University of Liverpool.
“It’s early days but we can already say that there is an increasing amount of activity in this area, with museums of different sizes and types putting on shows which engage with popular music in different ways.
“Some of these have focused on well-known artists or offered an overview of particular points in British music history, while others, notably in art galleries rather than museums, have focused on aspects of visual art related to popular music releases or movements,” adds Leonard.
Alongside this, popular music has featured in museums as a way to explore social and urban histories, focusing on aspects of popular music practice and achievement within specific localities rather than the broad themes that a national museum might tackle.
The British Music Experience (BME) at the O2 arena in London is the closest we have to a national museum of pop music. The BME opened in March 2009 and attracted 150,000 visitors in its first year with its state-of-the-art mix of interactive exhibitions and zoned areas where people can dance, sing, play instruments or learn more about the pop music industry. Information and activities are recorded on “smart tickets” that can be accessed later from home using the internet.
“People can see objects, but there’s so much more to enjoy – you can mix records, play instruments, learn dance moves, immerse yourself in giant hologram areas,” says BME curator Paul Lilley. “It’s the depth and level of our interpretation that sets us apart – and how we animate the collection.”
A range of commercial sponsors from the Co-operative to Gibson Guitars provide funds, but also content, though many of the pop memorabilia items are loaned from owners, which Lilley admits can be tricky.
“Relying on loans can mean a huge risk for curators and having to incur the expense of frequent display changes,” he says. “But the upside is that relationships are built. We’ve engaged 150 artists, which we wouldn’t have done if we already had a collection or we’d bought stuff at auction.”
Lilley believes that smaller museums are also able to use these connections. “The importance is in building an army of advocates – from artists and industry supporters to audiences themselves – who are interested in everything you do.
“You don’t want them to come once, you want them to come back, and then spread the word. We have the full support of the UK music industry – it’s unheard of to have all the major record labels and trade organisations, who are normally in competition, behind us.”
Pop merchandise
Beyond London, there are many exhilarating stories to tell about British pop music and identifiable audiences to appeal to. This is why it’s hard to see how the National Centre for Popular Music could have failed. The consensus is that it took a scattergun approach and, more significantly, failed to connect with the city of Sheffield and its musical heritage.
“You have to move beyond objects in cases,” says Paul Gallagher, curator of contemporary collecting at National Museums Liverpool (NML). NML opens its Wondrous Place gallery as part of the Museum of Liverpool this July.
A pop music exhibition, Liverpool Sound, is one element of this gallery, telling the story of the city’s cultural life. “You can’t avoid overlapping the different cultural elements: music, sport, writing, fashion. Popular music is a very visual experience; we use a lot of costume.
“It’s an opportunity to engage with music in different ways, and people can dip in and out. We have digital jukeboxes, a karaoke room where people can sing the Liverpool hits, and a pop quiz table interactive which plays video clips,” adds Gallagher.
The Beatles’ story, for example, is told through the fans. “The vast majority of this is from our own collections and is mainly merchandise, but this is a huge part of the story – how the Beatles phenomenon came about and how they were the first band to push merchandise on a global scale,” says Gallagher.
“It could be overwhelming, because Liverpool and pop music are inextricably linked, and because of the sheer amount of stories to tell, so it had to have a chronological element,” says Gallagher. “But we wanted to get across the speed with which it all happened, how the Beatles were a band that borrowed and kept moving.”
He says objects are central, but it’s the story that drives the display. “It has to get under the skin of the city. We use a lot of first-hand quotes, and from these come the excitement. It’s the story that’s enormous, not the exhibition, and most of all it has to work as a piece of entertainment.”
Despite the country’s rich musical heritage, Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales (NMW) did not actively collect contemporary music material until 20 years ago.
“We started to add aspects of Welsh industrial life in the 1980s at St Fagans, the museum of traditional Welsh rural folk life. Collecting music items followed logically from that,” says Owain Rhys, curator of contemporary life at NMW.
“It is difficult, because people didn’t want to part with their possessions, so we photographed and recorded material that we considered of significance to Wales. Unless people have duplicates of items, such as vinyl LPs, donating would defeat the object of collecting for them.”
In 2009 St Fagans created Pop Peth (Welsh for “everything”), a pop music exhibition curated by people from outside the museum. “It was a way of accessing material but also of handing responsibility to people who knew the objects and could tell the story from their point of view,” Rhys says.
Those invited were a collector who brought posters, badges and Welsh-language ephemera; the editors of a fanzine, who recreated a student bedroom; family-run Spillers Records, which provided signed photographs, promotional material and other pop memorabilia; and a dub reggae band who brought their synthesiser for people to play on.
“We benefited hugely from their enthusiasm and knowledge,” says Rhys. “And seeing them setting up their corner created a buzz in the museum as visitors’ memories were triggered.”
Building a pop music collection at NMW has been slow and painstaking, but relationships have come out of it. “Museums could work more closely with collectors, and show that they value their collections,” says Rhys. “For example, Gari, the collector for the Pop Peth exhibition, collected ticket stubs because no one else did, and for their cultural rather than iconic value.”
But small items such as ticket stubs can tell a big story, points out Rhys. “We hope that in the future collectors can look at us as a repository for their collections.”
Since the exhibition, St Fagans has asked up-and-coming bands to compose contemporary music inspired by items now in the collection, with the results posted on the NMW website.
“It creates new audiences and we are also creating history by capturing the present for the future,” says Rhys.
Deborah Mulhearn is a freelance journalist
Purple haze in Mayfair
The rarefied atmosphere of the Handel House Museum in London’s Mayfair was rocked for three months last year when it held an exhibition to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the death of American musician Jimi Hendrix, who lived in what today comprise the museum offices.
The 18th-century German composer Frideric Handel resided at 25 Brook Street from 1723 until his death in 1759. Hendrix moved into the top-floor flat of 23 Brook Street in 1968, and lived there for 18 months with his English girlfriend, Kathy Etchingham.
The exhibition, Hendrix in Britain (25 August-7 November 2010), was a huge success, with the museum’s usual 1,200 visitors per month swelling to 7,500.
“The exhibition was an opportunity for us to celebrate a very different musical culture,” says Sarah Bardwell, the director of the Handel House Museum.
Virtuosity
But there are parallels between Handel and Hendrix, Bardwell points out. “Both were immigrants during exciting decades in London’s development – Handel in the 1720s and Hendrix in the 1960s – and both used London to make their mark. And both were brilliant musicians, Hendrix on guitar, Handel on harpsichord.”
The exhibition was designed to fit in with the 18th-century environment of the house and was presented in a traditional, low-key way with photographs, graphic panels and listening posts. Any anxiety on the part of the museum staff was quickly dispelled by the rapport struck between the two sets of enthusiasts.
“It’s the passion for music that unites them,” says Bardwell. “It was lovely to see our guides listening rapt to stories about Hendrix’s last concert on the Isle of Wight from fans who were there. And Hendrix fans in jeans listened spellbound to the live baroque music we often have playing.”
“A real high”
Bardwell is now looking at ways to incorporate the Hendrix story permanently. “The amazing publicity we got has put us on the map. We won’t be changing our mission – we are a museum about Handel. But we now know there’s an interest and that the juxtaposition works. We got a real high from doing this exhibition and it’s completely changed the way we work and how we reach new audiences.