J Mark Percival (Queen Margaret University, UK)
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This paper argues that the conflation of two strands of constructed authenticities, those around the British pub as social space and those around both pub rock and punk rock the mid 1970s as “stripped-back” forms of rock, is both supported by and supports canonical narratives of cause and effect in popular music histories, and that it seeks to exclude genres and ideologies that don’t fit the argument that those narratives make.
In this presentation I consider the ways in which these narratives emerged in London in the mid-1970s and very quickly became canonical history. I go on to discuss the ways in which these narratives were embraced and challenged in Glasgow local live music scenes in the late 1970s and very early 1980s, where audiences seeking “back-to-basics” live music experiences were often drawn from genres not considered “stripped-back” in any conventional musicological sense – and in particular around the emergence of the neo-progressive rock movement in Scotland, led by Aberdeen band Pallas.