Item Details

The meaning of the music venue: Historicizing the Click Club

Issue: Vol 12 No. 1 (2019) Special Issue: Lost Musical Histories— Curating and Documenting Local Popular Music-Making in the UK

Journal: Popular Music History

Subject Areas: Popular Music

DOI: 10.1558/pomh.39558

Abstract:

This article focuses on a venue/music night in 1980s Birmingham called "The Click Club". The history of the club is documented via a critical account of a 2016 exhibition entitled “Is There Any One Out There”, which celebrated the venue and the many bands that performed there. Since the club’s demise, Birmingham is noted as celebrating some of its local icons such as Black Sabbath and The Electric Light Orchestra, with the city now regenerating itself to highlight and celebrate its musical identity. Memories of “The Click Club” are regarded as “lost” from more mainstream depictions of musical histories of the city. Via engaging with what they describe as an online “community of memory”, the article documents not only the origins and memories of the venue and formation of the aforementioned exhibition, but also the wider historical conceptualizations of the music venue as cultural product, through which meanings are made.

Author: Paul Long, Sarah Raine

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