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Deindustrialisation and
Popular Music
Popular Musics Matter: Social, Political and Cultural Interventions
Series Editors:
Eoin Devereux, Aileen Dillane and Martin J. Power
The Popular Musics Matter: Social, Political and Cultural Interventions series will publish internationally informed edited collections, monographs and textbooks that engage in the critical study of popular music performance (live and recorded), historical and contemporary popular music practitioners and artists, and participants and audiences for whom such musics embody aesthetic, cultural, and, particularly, socio-political values. The series sees music not only as a manifestation of global popular culture but also as a form that profoundly shapes and continually seeks to redefine our understandings of how society operates in a given location and era.
Titles in the Series
Soundtracking Germany: Popular Music and National Identity, Melanie Schiller
Heart and Soul: Critical Essays on Joy Division, edited by Eoin Devereux, Martin J. Power and Aileen Dillane
Deindustrialisation and Popular Music: Punk and ‘Post-Punk’ in Manchester, Düsseldorf, Torino and Tampere, Giacomo Bottà
Deindustrialisation and
Popular Music
Punk and ‘Post-Punk’ in Manchester, Düsseldorf, Torino and Tampere
Giacomo Bottà
London • New York
Published by Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.
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Copyright © 2020 by Giacomo Bottà
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: HB 978-1-78660-737-9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bottà, Giacomo, 1974- author.
Title: Deindustrialisation and popular music : punk and 'post-punk' in Manchester, Düsseldorf, Torino and Tampere / Giacomo Bottà.
Description: Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, 2020. | Series: Popular musics matter: social, political and cultural interventions | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: "The book offers a new and unique point of view on industrial cities and their popular music cultures based on interdisciplinary research and methods"-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019057100 (print) | LCCN 2019057101 (ebook) | ISBN 9781786607379 (cloth) | ISBN 9781786607386 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Popular music--Social aspects--Europe--History. | Punk rock music--Social aspects--Europe--History. | Post-punk music--Social aspects--Europe--History. | Deindustrialization--Europe.
Classification: LCC ML3917.E85 B67 2020 (print) | LCC ML3917.E85 (ebook) | DDC 781.66--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019057100
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019057101
Acknowledgements
The idea for writing this book came during my fellowship as a Von Humboldt Foundation experienced researcher at the Zentrum für Populäre Kultur und Musik of the University of Freiburg, in Germany. I hereby thank Michael Fischer and Nils Grosch for their support during my application and during my stay in Freiburg. I am grateful to Eoin Devereux, Martin J. Power, and Aileen Dillane for several great conferences in Limerick and for accepting this book in the series Popular Musics Matter: Social, Political and Cultural Interventions. Thanks also to all the editorial personnel at Rowman & Littlefield International.
Chapters or sections of this book have been presented as papers at international conferences. The International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) biennial conferences have been, over the years, the place to discuss my ideas in a friendly, safe, and supportive environment. I hereby thank all IASPM members I met over the years, in particular: Antti-Ville Kärjä, Geoff Stahl, Tony Mitchell, Rosa Reitsamer, Fabian Holt, Johan Fornäs, Franco Fabbri, Alenka Barber-
Kersovan, Gonnie Rietveld, Christoph Jacke, Chrizzi Heinen, and Martin Cloonan. Thanks to Paula Guerra and all the KISMIF family in Porto; to Matthew Worley and the Interdisciplinary Network for the Study of Subcultures, Popular Music and Social Change; to Iñigo Sanchez, who invited me to present some of the findings of this research in a keynote speech in Lisbon; and to Leonard Nevarez, whose Music Urbanism blog has provided me with inspiration, critical insights, and great music.
Many people helped me while I was spending time in industrial cities. I thank Helge Schreiber, in Oberhausen; Rudi Esch and Fernand Hörner, in Düsseldorf; Heikki Uimonen, Severi Helle, Juho Karisaari, Juho Kaitajärvi-Tiekso, and Lasse Ullvén, in Tampere; and Alberto Vanolo, in Torino. All the people I interviewed in the course of this research—too many to mention—have given precious accounts of their lives and their music making. I hereby thank them all: lo spirito continua.
The University of Helsinki has been my main affiliation over the last fifteen years. I thank Anu Korhonen, Anne Haila, and all my colleagues in urban studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences and in European area and cultural studies at the Faculty of Arts.
The Finnish Cultural Foundation funded my research and partially the writing of this book with a full two-year grant.
Love to Tanja, Joel, Anton, and Martta. Cyril Connolly allegedly stated that ‘there is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall’. I think this is untrue; it just takes a little more time to get things done.
This book is dedicated to G. P. Bottà, my papà, who couldn’t see it finished.
Introduction
Metal on Metal
In the late 1980s, I was an Italian pupil in a two-week school exchange program in Wuppertal, West Germany. Wuppertal is a typical industrial city, where German metallurgical concerns developed and grew across various historical eras until the late 1970s Strukturwandel (paradigm change, deindustrialisation). Since the 1970s, these concerns have systematically disappeared, leaving behind a huge amount of empty and vacant industrial-built environment.
One evening during my stay in Wuppertal, I was shyly attending, in my host’s home, a party in honour of a family friend artist who made abstract sculptures out of industrial