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The Arena Concert: Music, Media and Mass Entertainment is the first sustained engagement with what might said to be - in its melding of concert and gathering, in its evolving relationship with digital and social media, in its delivery of event, experience, technology and star - the art form of the 21st century. This volume offers interviews with key designers, discussions of the practicalities of mounting arena concerts, mixing and performing live to a mass audience, recollections of the giants of late twentieth century music in performance, and critiques of latter-day pretenders to the throne. The authors track the evolution of the arena concert, consider design and architecture, celebrity and fashion, and turn to feminism, ethnographic research, and ideas of humour, liveness and authenticity, in order to explore and frame the arena concert. The arena concert becomes the "real time" centre of a global digital network, and the gig-goer pays not only for an immersion in (and, indeed, role in) its spectacular nature, but also for a close encounter with the performers, in this contained and exalted space. The spectacular nature of the arena concert raises challenges that have yet to be fully technologically overcome, and has given rise to a reinvention of what live music actually means.Love it or loathe it, the arena concert is a major presence in the cultural landscape of the 21st century. This volume finds out why.>
About the author
Benjamin Halligan is the Director of the Doctoral College of the University of Wolverhampton, UK. His publications include Hotbeds of Licentiousness: The British Glamour Film and the Permissive Society (2022), Desires for Reality: Radicalism and Revolution in Western European Film (2016) and Michael Reeves (2003), and the co-edited collections: Politics of the Many (2021); Stories We Could Tell (2018); The Arena Concert (2015); The Music Documentary (2013); Resonances (2013); Reverberations (2012); and Mark E. Smith and The Fall (2010).Kirsty Fairclough is Professor of Screen Studies at the School of Digital Arts (SODA) at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. She is the co-editor of The Music Documentary: Acid Rock to Electropop (2013), The Arena Concert: Music, Media and Mass Entertainment (Bloomsbury, 2016), Music/Video: Forms, Aesthetics, Media (Bloomsbury, 2017), The Legacy of Mad Men: Cultural History, Intermediality and American Television (2020), Prince and Popular Culture (Bloomsbury, 2020), and author of the forthcoming Beyoncé: Celebrity Feminism and Popular Culture (Bloomsbury). She is the curator of Sound and Vision: Pop Stars on Film and In Her View: Women Documentary Filmmakers film seasons at HOME, Manchester and Chair of Manchester Jazz Festival.Robert Edgar is Professor of Writing and Popular Culture in the York Centre for Writing based in the School of Humanities at York St John University, UK. He has published on Screenwriting (2009), Directing Fiction (2009), The Language of Film (Bloomsbury, 2010 and 2015), The Music Documentary (2013), The Arena Concert (Bloomsbury, 2015), Music, Memory and Memoir (Bloomsbury, 2019), Adaptation for Scriptwriters (Bloomsbury, 2019), and Venue Stories (2023). He is co-editing the forthcoming Bloomsbury publication, Horrifying Children: Hauntology and the Legacy of Children’s Fiction.Nicola Spelman is Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Salford, UK, where she teaches composition, musicology, and professional practice. She is Course Leader for the BA Music programme Popular Music and Recording, and her research interests surround issues of representation within popular music. Nicola’s publications include Popular Music & the Myths of Madness (2012) and Resonances: Noise and Contemporary Music (Bloomsbury, 2013; co-edited with Michael Goddard and Benjamin Halligan).
