Trading offstage photos: Take That fan culture and the collaborative preservation of popular music heritage

Discussions of the increasing pervasiveness of popular music heritage seem in sharp contrast to the notion that pop music, specifically, is an ephemeral phenomenon. In the first half of the 1990s, Take That fans took thousands of photos of the band offstage and traded them with each other by letter, forming a living social network of music enthusiasts. To what extent can we describe the photos and their social use as forms of self-produced music heritage? A number of researchers have begun to think through the issue of popular music heritage culture in terms of a more or less clearly defined distinction between official and ‘DIY’ forms. Using a study of Take That pop fandom, this chapter suggests that the distinction is sometimes not quite so clear. It begins by reviewing some recent contributions to the debate on about music heritage, considers the place of a specific example of Take That heritage culture: the 2011 photo exhibition in Manchester curated by Anja Lobert. We argue that emphasis on the concept of ‘DIY’ heritage may be danger of neglecting moments when fans can collude with ‘official’ institutional structures in order to legitimate their memories.

Citation

Duffett, M. (2015). Trading offstage photos: Take That fan culture and the collaborative preservation of popular music heritage. In S. Baker (Ed.), Preserving popular music heritage: Do-it-yourself, do-it-together (pp. 151-163). New York: Routledge.

Publisher

Routledge

URI

http://hdl.handle.net/10034/337190

Type

Book chapter

Language

en

Description

This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge in Preserving Popular Music Heritage: Do-it-Yourself, Do-it-Together in 27/05/2015. https://www.routledge.com/products/9781138781436

ISBN

9781138781436

Additional Links

https://www.routledge.com/Preserving-Popular-Music-Heritage-Do-it-Yourself-Do-it-Together/Baker/p/book/9781138781436