ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors discuss two aspects of the experience of live music in the rock era, which were essential to it but for which people are not often nostalgic: on the one hand, the constant threat of physical assault in and around gigs; on the other hand, the effects of the visual media on both the economy and the aesthetics of musical performance. They examine a rather different way in which the live music experience in 1968–84 was framed ideologically: by its representation in cinemas, on television and by means of video. In establishing live music as a site in which the politics of music were disputed, so rock events became settings where more general political arguments could be staged. In a 1973 report for The Sunday Times, Colin McGlashan argued that in at least some parts of London there had been a clear ‘crossover’ musical culture among young white and black Cockneys in the late 1960s.
