With baby boomer parents steeped in Sixties pop culture, I grew up in a household fixated with music, film and television. While the Eighties provided a glamorous sheen to the imaginative landscape of my childhood, this contrasted with the more low-fi Nineties aesthetic that dominated my adolescence.

 

Struggling to understand the sudden grey-scaling of Pop post-Grunge, I took refuge in the music press and the retrospective sensibility of Q. PhD's are perhaps always autobiographical, but it was actually coincidental that my own project focused on the first ten years of my life: when I experienced the music, but was not really conscious of the culture.

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"Reconfiguring Authenticity in the British Music Press 1978 to 1988" is a look at the the way in which pop music, heritage and masculinity implicated each other during the period in the production of narratives to sell music, magazines and  lifestyle. Smash Hits footprint in the 1970s and the legacy of Nick Logan had never really been explored before; and, likewise, the role of Q in the construction of a white male-dominated musical canon, cohered around the classic album and the CD as a preferred medium for consumption, seemed interesting...

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Since completing the project I have worked in various capacities teaching Media, English and Cultural Theory and written variously on pop music, television, film and marketing. I have taught various undergraduate courses at Bournemouth University Media School and run the Media Department at The Burgate School and Sixth Form.

 

I am always interested in involving myself in new projects, particularly if they are linked to pop music culture and the 1980s and am very happy to support research students looking at the music press from this era.

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shill@burgate.hants.sch.uk