Andrew Dubber     

Tim, Dr Jazz and Jez in front of our grand hotel in Scarborough

It’s not quite ‘New York, London, Paris, Munich’… but I did spend last week in that many cities – and we did talk about Pop Music.

Liverpool
I returned from Copenhagen on Sunday, washed my clothes, repacked my bags and set off on Monday morning to a conference in Liverpool to meet up with some of my university colleagues: Tim, Simon, Paul and Jez.

It was the big IASPM conference (that’s the International Association for the Study of Popular Music), and people from all over the world had gathered to talk about all sorts of interesting things – from the meanings of Hip Hop in Arctic Canada; the use of cassettes during the Chilean military dictatorship; and modes of Islamic representation in Turkish pop music – through to the ‘Art within Art’ of Gnarls Barkley’s ‘Crazy’.

It was mostly pretty cool – though there’s always the dire academic conference presentations where some dull moron has written a 12,000 word esoteric essay, has copied and pasted it in its entirety onto powerpoint slides – and wants to read it to you in a monotone.

Jez wows the crowd with his Birmingham Music Archive talk

Because we all mock bad academic presentations so mercilessly, we tend to do them quite well ourselves. We make sure they are, at least, entertaining. Tim‘s went down very well (full video of that here) and Jez’s was a real hit (video of his one coming soon).

We arrived in Liverpool on Monday afternoon, caught a few presentations – some of them great, others less so, dumped our bags in a really lovely hotel, had a bite to eat and then went to the free drinks and nibbles sessions with the other academics.

It was in a bar called Hannah’s in town, and it was nice to note that a musician I’d done some consultancy for in the past was scheduled to play there later in the evening. Good to catch up with him – but I actually couldn’t stick around, as I’d made other arrangements.

Tim and I ended up going to a great gig that a friend of mine I’d met on the Aftershock Project in Italy had invited me to. She’s a harpist based in Liverpool, and was playing with a singer-songwriter called Ogo who was quite reminiscent of Terry Callier.

We got talking afterwards, and Rachael (my harpist friend) invited Tim and I, as well as some of her other musician friends to her home for a meal the following night. We gratefully accepted and very nice it was too. Good food, met some great people and had some very good whisky, which also helps.

Scarborough
On Wednesday afternoon, we jumped on a train for the three-hour journey from Liverpool across to Scarborough. Jez, Simon (hereafter ‘Dr Jazz’ – a nickname that’s stuck after his recent PhD about jazz record labels), Tim and I are working on a project with the Scarborough Jazz Festival about putting what they do online, and researching how jazz festivals can better use the internet.

It’s not about making a brochure about the festival – it’s about actually putting the festival online. Partly as an extension of its cultural impact, but mostly to entice a new, fresh – and most importantly, younger audience to to the festival in future. Scarborough is essentially one big seaside retirement village.

That’s not to say the festival’s not popular – they play to sell-out capacity crowds every time – and not in small venues. Check the main hall of the Scarborough Spa Theatre:

And the sun terrace at the same venue:

It’s all quite impressive and I’m really looking forward to heading back there in September for the festival itself. It’s going to be a lot of work – a lot, in fact, like the Aftershock Project in many ways, but with at least four people manning the decks, blogging, capturing material and so on.

We’ll be handing out digital video cameras, and we’re already having fun ideas like mounting them on the bottom of remote control helicopters for aerial shots along the beach and over the heads of the jazz punters. We’ll see if the budget stretches to that.

The team hard at work

Best thing about Scarborough though… is that a lot of it seems to be from the 1950s. It’s real seaside resort stuff.

The donkey rides, the entertainment at the Futurist Theatre, the horrible decor of the underground bunker rooms and customer service at the Grand Hotel (which is lovely on the outside, but desperately bad in so many ways on the inside) – and, best of all – the milk bars.

Dr Jazz enjoys a milkshake

I’m not going to lie to you – yes, we did a lot of work in Scarborough, but actually it was quite a lot like being on holiday with your friends. We had a really great time.

Manchester
After our overnight stay and our beachside treats in Scarborough, we mostly went our separate ways. Jez and Dr Jazz were back off to finish the IASPM conference, Tim was off home to Birmingham, and I had an appointment giving a presentation in Manchester the following morning.

Manchester. Glass building on the left is Urbis, where I did my speech

I managed to convince Jez & Dr Jazz to hop off the train in Manchester (it’s on the way), and have dinner and a few drinks. Dr Jazz is also something of a whisky enthusiast, and Jez used to own a bar and so has an appreciation as well. We called it a night fairly early, and I went back to my hotel where I worked on finetuning the following morning’s speech.

The Manchester gig was as part of the Manchester International Festival. They’d organised what they called an International Talent Campus: 30-odd arts producers from all around the world gathered together for seminars and educational stuff that would, theoretically, enhance what they do and connect people from different places so that new ideas might emerge. It was pretty cool actually.

My co-presenter, Tassos and our thoughtful chair, Steven – all caught on film

Friday morning was me and another guy by the name of Tassos, who works for a company that stages something in the space between live theatre and online games. Really fascinating stuff. The company is run by a Rabbit. Or someone called Rabbit. Hard to tell.

I talked about the internet, as I tend to do. With questions, it went on for a couple of hours.

After lunch, I declined the invitation to some of the amazing shows on offer at the M.I.F. – but instead collapsed into a train and headed home to Birmingham, where I’ve been all weekend.

Birmingham
My sister Kerryn, who lives in London drove up to spend the day and a night with us. Thoughtfully, she brought her newborn infant son Asher with her, so I could get to meet him for the first time. I’d already met her husband and her other two boys, so they stayed home.

Remarkably for me, I didn’t get my camera out and start taking lots of snaps or video footage. I think I was a bit lensed-out after all my picture-taking in Copenhagen & Scarborough in particular – so the photo above is from Kerryn and Haydn’s blog. This what he looked like a few weeks back. He’s way bigger now.

It was lovely to see them. We had a nice meal (even if I do say so myself – I was the chef on this occasion) and just kind of hung out and looked at Asher.

Jake headed out to a party at his friend Ethan’s place, and Kerryn, Bobbie and I just kind of chilled – which was exactly what I needed after a couple of weeks of buzzing about. Good to have a bit of quiet time.

Clutch came over this evening, and we just listened to records, watched Youtube clips, chatted and had a whisky or two. I didn’t really have much to contribute. Despite a four hour nap this afternoon, I’m just completely devoid of energy. Glad all that’s over, to be honest. Pizza and an early night.

Next week – Canada.