Blackpool in Film and Popular Music

by Ewa Mazierska (Editor)

Overview

This collection examines Blackpool, Britain’s first and largest working-class seaside resort as a location for the production and consumption of British film and popular music, and the meaning of ‘Blackpool’ in films and songs. It examines representation of Blackpool in films such as Hindle Wakes, A Taste of Honey, Bhaji on the Beach, Away, Bob’s Weekend, The Harry Hill Movie and Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, linking it to the concepts of heterotopia, purgatory, fantasy, simulacra and the carnivalesque. It also presents music in Blackpool through the history of its venues and examines development of punk and grime music in this seaside town. The authors argue that Blackpool in filmic and musical texts often stands for British culture, but increasingly for culture which is remembered or imagined rather than present and real.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030499341
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	08/12/2020
Edition description:	1st ed. 2020
Pages:	155
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Ewa Mazierska is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Central Lancashire, UK. She has published over twenty monographs and edited collections on film and popular music. They include Heading North: The North of England in Film and Television (Palgrave, 2017) and Sounds Northern: Popular Music, Culture and Place in England’s North (2018).

Table of Contents

Chapter One: Introduction. Ewa Mazierska, University of Central Lancashire.- Chapter Two: Behind the Façade: the liminal, margins, and the social shifts of cultural production in Blackpool grime. Dr. Adam de Paor-Evans, University of Central Lancashire.- Chapter Three: Blackpool grime and Brexit – how Little T became the North’s biggest pop star. Dr. Kamila Rymajdo, freelance journalist and cultural commentator.- Chapter Four: Punk in Blackpool. Philip Smith, Record Collector and Universal Records correspondent.- Chapter Five: Blackpool ‘Rock’ 1967-c.1975 (working title). Dr. Pete Atkinson, University of Central Lancashire.- Chapter Six: Blackpool music venues 1960s to the present day. Colin Appleby, music promoter.- Chapter Seven: Travelling to and through Blackpool: Female Subjectivity and Social Realism in Hindle Wakes (1927), A Taste of Honey (1961), andBhaji on the Beach (1993). Dr. Cecilia Mello, University of Sao Paolo.- Chapter Eight: A Long Weekend In Purgatory: Blackpool in Away and Bob’s Weekend. Chad Bentley, University of Sheffield.- Chapter Nine: Blackpool Fantasy Film and the Contemporary Dilemmas for Blackpool. Professor Ewa Mazierska, University of Central Lancashire.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Blackpool in Film and Popular Music is not only a book about a much maligned and misunderstood town, it is about how popular culture reflects, enriches, and produces a sense of place for individuals, communities, regions and nations. Its scope is both highly specific and wide ranging, underling the importance of countering the generalisations that all too often define characterisations of Northern places, while producing arguments which are applicable to other spaces in England. In privileging a rich range of scholarly perspectives and diverse explorations of Blackpool, Mazierska models the kind of interdisciplinary approach that is essential if we are to better understand the complex processes of place making that are at play in what is increasingly an economically, culturally and politically divided country.” (David Forrest, The University of Sheffield)