Research
Research
I have specialised in interdisciplinary research on popular music, broadly defined, but with a particular interest in the anthropology of music. While this research has encompassed a wide range of themes and issues, there has been a focus on questions concerning place, migration, heritage, identity, age and ageing.
I have led a series of research projects supported by various funding bodies, including the UK Economic and Social Research Council, the Leverhulme Trust, the Humanities in the European Research Area JRP, the Australia Research Council, the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. These projects have involved collaboration with researchers based in the UK and beyond, and with a wide range of non-academic groups and organisations, including museums and galleries, governing bodies and heritage managers, film and media companies, music businesses and associations, and community arts organisations. Working with colleagues across several University of Liverpool departments, I am currently leading a project that investigates music heritage, migration and identity through collaboration with Chilean, Yemeni and Ukrainian communities in the Liverpool City Region, and another project investigating music, memory and everyday life.
My first monograph, Rock Culture in Liverpool, was published in 1991 by Oxford University Press and reprinted in 2004. Drawing on ethnographic research with amateur rock musicians, it explores tensions between creativity and commerce in music-making. A second monograph, Decline, Renewal and the City in Popular Music Culture, was published by Ashgate in 2007 and examines music and urban change through a case study on Liverpool and comparative research conducted in other cities. I have authored numerous journal articles and book chapters, and am co-author of Harmonious Relations (1991) and Liverpool’s Musical Landscapes (2018), and co-editor of Sites of Popular Music Heritage (2014) and Troubling Inheritances (2022).
Research grants
AHRC IAA 22-25
ARTS AND HUMANITIES RESEARCH COUNCIL
April 2022 - December 2025