Dr Abigail Gardner (University of Gloucester) Ageing and Contemporary Female Musicians

The talk discusses key ideas from Ageing and Contemporary Female Musicians (Routledge, 2019). The book focuses on age and ageing across three connected areas of female creative practice in contemporary popular music; the recent wave of women’s rock memoirs, the continuing performance of women in their middle and late middle ages and of young female musicians. Its main theme is that age’s diverse impact on gender and sexuality informs the memories, articulations and performances of female experience across popular music. The book argues that ‘age stages’ (youth and old age in particular) are embodied, voiced, performed and represented in multifarious ways that both support and subvert expected trajectories of femininity in relation to ageing. See the Eventbrite link for the full abstract.

Dr Abigail Gardner is Reader in Music and Media at the University of Gloucestershire. She has written on music, gender and ageing and is currently researching in the area of music, place, temporality and transference. Key publications include Ageing and Contemporary Female Musicians (2019), Aging and Popular Music in Europe (2019, with Ros Jennings), PJ Harvey and Music Video Performance (2015) and Rock On: Women, Ageing and Popular Music (2012, with Ros Jennings). She is currently the PI on an Erasmus + European project called ‘Mapping the Music of Migration’ and produces community film and lo-fi media.

Karlyn King (University of Birmingham) What contributes to the perception of vinyl records as a more authentic choice of music consumption?

This talk will explore my present current primary research on the topic – “What contributes to the perception of vinyl as an authentic choice of music consumption?”. I will explore definitions of the term in relation to music formats, notions of verisimilitude in the research findings from record store owners, staff, artists and fans across genres such as dance, indie, pop and rock as well as the importance of significant vectors of analysis such as gender and Record Store Day. The branding of events such as Record Store Day will be examined alongside the target demographic who build self identity around such notions of ‘the real’. The environment of the record store will be considered as a key factor in establishing authenticity, whether deliberate or otherwise.

Glasgow-born Karlyn King is a Popular Music academic, lecturer and researcher who teaches all over the UK. She leads on modules such as Artist Development and PR,Sound and Culture and Popular Music Debates with a special interest in rock n roll history. She is currently working on a PhD at University of Birmingham exploring the enduring format of vinyl. Karlyn is a regular panel speaker and conference presenter on all things vinyl.

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