‘Going down the pub!’: The pub rock scene as a resource for the consumption of popular music

Abstract

In this article I want to consider the importance of the pub rock scene as a resource for the consumption of popular music. Considering its role as one of the primary sites for the production and consumption of live music, very little has been written about pub rock. Moreover, in those studies that have made reference to pub rock, emphasis has often been placed upon its role as a training ground for musicians and songwriters (see, for example, Laing 1985, p. 8), or as a stepping stone to full-time professional music-making rather than ‘a locally expressed and tangible manifestation of music in its own right’ (Finnegan 1989, p. 235). Indeed, if only a few published works exist on the production of pub rock then there are, to the best of my knowledge, no studies devoted to pub rock audiences. What I want to do here is to begin redressing this imbalance. I will focus upon two specific examples of pub rock audiences and thus hope to demonstrate that the production of pub rock is inextricably linked to the localised patterns of consumption that inform its reception, and that the significance which an audience attaches to a particular pub rock event is an essential, if not the essential, aspect of that event. The first audience study presented here is drawn from my experience of working as a part-time musician in a pub rock band. The second study, which pursues a slightly different line of enquiry to the first, is based upon fieldwork material that I am currently collecting as part of my doctoral studies at Durham University.