ABSTRACT
In the summer of 2012 four plaques were created to commemorate important sites of popular music heritage in England. One marked the venue where The Jam performed in Canterbury in 1978, which was the first gig ever attended by a wide-eyed young mod and his friend. Another paid tribute to an influential record shop in the north Kent coastal town of Whitstable, where several years earlier a fledgling music fan had bought his first-ever record. This was a second-hand single (costing five pence) by the glam rock singer Gary Glitter, a performer who since being convicted for child sex offences in the late 1990s has become someone most people would prefer to forget than remember. The 1970s were also commemorated by a plaque marking the site of a London teenager’s first and last experience of attending a disco. Another recalled the family home where many of her first musical memories had taken root, impressions that themselves bore the imprint of a wider musical and family heritage in the form of the records played by her father, ranging from Beethoven, Shirley Bassey, to the Arabic songstress Um Khultum (see Figure 15.1).
