ABSTRACT
In the Liverpool of the 1980s and 1990s de-industrialization and economic restructuring encouraged an emphasis on local difference that was influenced by social, cultural and economic factors specific to Liverpool – including local relations of class, gender and ethnicity. Economic hardship was also widely perceived as an explanation for local musical creativity, and as motivating and sharpening music entrepreneurship, thus helping to distinguish Liverpool from other British cities. Tensions between commerce and local difference, creativity and authenticity were at the same time fuelled by aspects of the regeneration process. The tensions and contestations surrounding claims on popular music as Liverpool culture also exposed some of the inequalities that characterized commercial music production and music tourism in Liverpool. For a specific period of time during the 1980s and 1990s popular music became the focus of a poetics of place, loss and abandonment in Liverpool, and for initiatives aimed at local economic restructuring and urban regeneration.
