Archiving Youth Cultures - Connecting Research

Pop music and youth cultures can define who you are and where you come from. For a decade, Professor Matt Worley’s research has explored how these youth cultures reflect and shape the broader process of social, political and economic change. Here Professor Worley explains how his own teenage experience of punk culture informs his research and work with the Youth Culture Archive, and has led to an exploration of fanzines as archives of grassroots activism.

Public Submission from Caxton Youth Trust, Museum of Youth Culture

For me, growing up in Norwich in late 1970s and 1980s, my formative years were shaped – and soundtracked – by the fallout from punk, a noise and a style that seemed to permeate everything from haircuts to trouser width. In fact, the post-punk period saw new and revived sub-cultural styles do visual – and sometimes actual – battle, as if punk’s tearing up the cultural fabric caused a collective identity-crisis across the UK. Mods and skinheads reappeared and rockabillies revived. New romantics deferred to David Bowie and started rummaging around the dressing up box for ‘futurist’ couture, while punk’s darker impulses began to seek out what eventually became Goth. Rude boys and rude girls meshed punk and ska to make 2-Tone. On the terraces, boot boys morphed into casuals. A little later, by the mid-1980s, the influence of Hip Hop was evident. In the meantime, gaggles of indie kids and unrepentant punks skulked in alternative clubs waiting for the bomb to drop or a job to arrive or a student grant to cash. Clothes smelt of smoke (and perfume); I can still feel the sticky carpet under foot.

Like minds

My research for a decade now has been concerned with looking at how these youth cultures reflected, shaped and grappled with broader process of social, political and economic change. This led to the founding of a Subcultures Network with colleagues from a range of disciplines to enable dialogues on related subjects. The Network was conceived to be outward-facing, becoming a loose affiliate of academics, writers, subculturalists, musicians and anyone who finds youth and subcultures fascinating. To this end we have developed a book series with Palgrave Macmillan, held numerous events and published various books and journal special issues.

Public Submission from Bob Abraham, Museum of Youth Culture

My own focus has centred on punk-related cultures in the UK. No Future: Punk, Politics and British Youth Culture, 1976-84 (CUP, 2017) asked why punk was seen to embody the fractures of the 1970s and engaged with the socio-political changes enacted into the early 1980s; it considered punk in response to boredom and the bomb. Key to this was developing a history from below, understanding how those practising (or purchasing) punk-related culture saw themselves and the world of which they were part. The research led to a project called Punk in the East, with the punks of Norwich, archiving and recording the influence and impact of punk in the city. Together, we made a fanzine, organised events and developed an online archive. Much fun was had by all.

A Museum of Youth Culture

More broadly, the research has led to my working with the Youth Club Archive towards developing a Museum of Youth Culture. Colleagues from the archive contacted me during a Network conference held at Reading, keen to suggest ways by which we could combine historical analysis of youth culture with the historical traces kept in shoe boxes, stashed under beds or buried deep in the loft. We each recognised how important youth and subcultural identities were to people … and, in some ways, how bound they were to the history of Britain. Indeed, the pictures collected by the Youth Club Archive serve to evoke flashbacks and trigger memories of teenage thrills and spills. Mainly pre-social media, they capture times less documented than today. Candid and often snapped on a pal’s Kodak or polaroid, they don’t have the polish of TV footage or a style magazine photoshoot. They recall the lost but never forgotten, bringing into focus the moment between childhood and adulthood when anything was possible and life promised to be fun. Just as the sounds of youth bring back feelings lost to the mists of time, so images make tangible that favourite jacket, that terrible haircut, that poster on the wall.

Public Submission from Sharon Long, Museum of Youth Culture

Of course, each generation and each youth cultural style has different memories. Fifties Teds standing resplendent against bombsites lived through post-war reconstruction and the birth of rock n roll, their colourful drapes jarring with an age of austerity. Mods signalled the optimism and mobility of the 1960s, when things opened up and cross-cultural influences began to transform what we listened to and how we wished to look. Punk all but embodied the tensions of the 1970s, ripped and torn. If pop music transmitted the teenage news, then the styles and behaviours of young people became portents for the future. In effect, youth cultures mark the changing of the generational guard, meaning they can represent both a bright new tomorrow and a world gone-to-the-dogs depending on who’s doing the looking.

Living histories

Britain, moreover, has excelled at youth culture. A combination of the post-war welfare state, increased living standards, extended leisure time and education allowed cultural identities to be reimagined through style and sound. American, Jamaican, European and wider influences were absorbed as Britain’s demographic and social-economic base transformed. With technology and the advent of consumer society, so the means and the spaces were able to develop for cultures forged at the grassroots to be serviced through the cash register. In many ways, youth cultures served – and still serve – as a way to navigate the world you are born into. The pictures of Youth Club Archive and Youth Culture Museum are therefore similar to holiday snaps, recording the best moments of a life’s journey to be treasured forever.

These are living histories, able to be updated and engaged with by the people who made them. In similar fashion, my current research is centred on fanzines: home-made magazines, self produced and committed to teenage obsessions. What were oft-created in a moment of enthusiasm and deemed ephemeral now provide a rich historical resource. Again, I have chosen the late 1970s and early 1980s, during which time punk’s emphasis on doing-it-yourself led to an upsurge and reimagining of fanzine culture. My interest is in how they gave voice to those beneath the radar of the London-centric media and music industry, providing insight to semi-private diaries and scrapbooks.

But zines remain very much alive today. Though the digital age briefly threatened their point and purpose, the collective practice and material culture of zines has proven attractive to an array of cultural milieus. If riot grrrl had already revamped the (fan)zine in the 1990s, then activist groups have consistently recognised them to provide an intimate means of communication and expression. The future, I hope, will see dialogues between academics, archivists and practitioners towards the preservation and development of zines within wider histories of youth culture, self-publishing and grass-roots activism. In a world that seems to be falling apart, perhaps glue-guns and staples are the best we can hope for. Either way, the future will be shaped by the youth.

Public submission from Carolynne Cotton, Museum of Youth Culture

Professor Matt Worley works in the History Department at the University of Reading and is a founder member of the Subcultures Network.

The Museum of Youth Culture is a new museum dedicated to the styles, sounds and social movements innovated by young people over the last 100 years. working to open a physical space by 2023.