Listening to popular music and watching television have become the two most common activities for postwar generations in Britain. From the experiences of programmes like Oh Boy and Juke Box Jury, to the introduction of 24 hour music video channels, the number and variety of television outputs that consistently make use of popular music, and the importance of the small screen as a principal point of contact between audiences and performers are familiar components of contemporary media operation. Yet there have been few attempts to examine the two activities in tandem, to chart their parallel...

Since the emergence of rock'n'roll in the early 1950s, there have been a number of live musical performances that were not only memorable in themselves, but became hugely influential in the way they shaped the subsequent trajectory and development of popular music. Each, in its own way, introduced new styles, confronted existing practices, shifted accepted definitions, and provided templates for others to follow. Performance and Popular Music explores these processes by focusing on some of the specific occasions when such transformations occurred An international array of scholars reveal that...

John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr are four of the most famous names in the history of music. In the 1960s, the Beatles became the bestselling pop band in the world, inspiring legions of fans and developing into popular music icons. Fifty years later, their recordings are still in demand. But none of this happened overnight. As Ian Inglis reveals in this tale of the band's early years, before they took the world by storm, the Beatles were little more than an inexperienced, semi-professional group of talented musicians in dire need of practice.

Inglis tells the...