Soundtracks: Music, Tourism, Travel - "Stolen Memories": Nostalgia in Liverpool Music and the (re)emergence of Tactical Space

Abstract


This paper narrates a contemporary image (Penrose 1959/1995) of musical entrepreneurship in Liverpool city centre in the hope of challenging nostalgic reminiscence of previous ones. It takes the almost illegal, dirty, rat infested example of Don't Drop the Dumbells and counterposes the tactic (de Certeau 1984) against a similar unsanitized space of play (Hjorth 2005) and decision (Shackle 1979) known as Eric's Club active in Liverpool during the mid 70s and early 80s. Both 'alternative', 'underground' tactics drew their symbolic presence against local formalised spaces of musical business and touristic commerce that eventually absorbed them. They created space amidst a city often backwards and inwards looking, too conservative to step away from musical entrepreneurs of the past. Though also the spaces were dirty and riddled with health and safety defying issues punters felt some strange, rare inimitable value there unmoderated by the more dominant order. People didn't complain about their clothes getting dirty, instead they tend to insert the spaces into folkloric myth. Yet despite such strong connections neither found the resources nor tactical capacity to fend off more powerful entrepreneurs and departed prematurely. Fast forward to today and the latter is being commoditized by well-resourced 'suited' business people (who perhaps never even went 'back in the day') that hope to sell the repackaged memories to unsuspecting musical tourists. Looking back at the experience of active participation (Holstein & Gubrium 1995; Freire 1990) with Dumbells in 2010 and 2011 it does then become easy to take refuge in the past. One might dream of Dumbells being another Eric's, taking its place within this backwards looking culture, commoditizing the memory when unable to conjure new images. Yet to do so likely provides us musical tourists with only a paradoxical simulation, rather than the new beginnings (Shackle 1979) redescribing history (Ricouer 1990) and inventing new lines of flight from nostalgia centred around things that no longer exist. To add concluding note, the paper disrupts the normative narrative of musical business in one of the world's most musical cities by identifying two original sources of musical memory and their potential commoditization into formalised consumer experience.


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