¹ This isn’t the place to define free improvisation, but in addition to the sources cited throughout, a touchstone that includes the British scene is Bailey, Derek, Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice (Prentice-Hall, 1980).Google Scholar

² Travis A. Jackson, ‘You’ve Got to Be Agonistic: The (Un‑)Democratic and (Anti‑)Utopian in Jazz Improvisation’, colloquium presentation, Cornell University (2017), pp. 1–21. See also Benjamin Givan, ‘How Democratic Is Jazz?’, in Finding Democracy in Music, ed. by Robert Adlington and Esteban Buch (Routledge, 2020), pp. 58–79. On an ‘ethics of cocreation’, see Fischlin, Daniel, Heble, Ajay, and Lipsitz, George, The Fierce Urgency of Now: Improvisation, Rights, and the Ethics of Cocreation (Duke University Press, 2013 Google Scholar). The positive valence of democracy in jazz is ubiquitous; for a recent discussion, see Clark, Gregory, Civic Jazz: American Music and Kenneth Burke on the Art of Getting Along (The University of Chicago Press, 2015).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³ Jackson, ‘You’ve Got to Be Agonistic’, p. 2. Lucid summaries of Mouffe’s theories appear in Chantal Mouffe, Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically (Verso, 2013). See also Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (Verso, 2000) and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (Verso, 1985). Although I refrain from engaging, Jacques Rancière’s thought parallels these discussions. For a consideration in music, see Rancière and Music, ed. by João Pedro Cachopo, Patrick Nickleson, and Chris Stover (Edinburgh University Press, 2020).

⁴ Robert Adlington and Esteban Buch, ‘Introduction: Looking for Democracy in Music and Elsewhere’, in Finding Democracy in Music, ed. by Adlington and Buch, pp. 1–18 (p. 3). This collection of essays offers a good point of reference for studies of music and democracy broadly, as does Adlington’s other work on the subject, some of which broaches free improvisation in the UK. See Adlington, Robert, ‘Music Together, Music Apart’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 144.1 (2019), pp. 191–204, doi:10.1080/02690403.2019.1575595 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I say ‘card-carrying or enacted’ because the term democracy rarely appears explicitly in contemporaneous materials about the LMC. I do not see that as a problem, since ‘democracy’ is a commonplace in improvisation discourse and is thematized regularly in organized settings and co-present interaction. Adlington makes a similar point about the analytical value of democracy despite that tacit character in ‘Music Together, Music Apart’, p. 197.

⁵ Born, Georgina, ‘After Relational Aesthetics: Improvised Music, the Social, and (Re)Theorizing the Aesthetic’, in Improvisation and Social Aesthetics, ed. by Born, Georgina, Lewis, Eric, and Straw, Will (Duke University Press, 2017), pp. 33–58 (p. 46)Google Scholar.

⁶ Jackson, ‘You’ve Got to Be Agonistic’.

⁷ Danielle, Goldman, I Want to Be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom (University of Michigan Press, 2010), p. 3Google Scholar. For another take on liberation tropes, see Siddall, Gillian and Waterman, Ellen, ‘Introduction: Improvising at the Nexus of Discursive and Material Bodies’, in Negotiated Moments: Improvisation, Sound, and Subjectivity, ed. by Siddall, Gillian and Waterman, Ellen (Duke University Press, 2016), pp. 1–20 (pp. 3–4).Google Scholar

⁸ Raúl Fornet-Betancourt and others, ‘The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom: An Interview with Michel Foucault on January 20, 1984’, trans. by J. D. Gauthier, Philosophy & Social Criticism, 12.2/3 (1987), pp. 112–31, doi:10.1177/019145378701200202.

⁹ Maggie Nicols, interview with George McKay, 23 November 2002 <https://georgemckay.org/interviews/maggie-nicols/> [accessed 12 November 2018].

¹⁰ A gloss of Foucault’s concept can be found in Piekut, Benjamin, Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and its Limits (University of California Press, 2011), p. 149 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Another Foucauldian view appears in Lewis, George E. and Piekut, Benjamin, ‘Introduction: On Critical Improvisation Studies’, in The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, ed. by Lewis, George E. and Piekut, Benjamin (Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 1–36 (pp. 7–8).Google Scholar

¹¹ The Wire magazine, quoted in Clive Bell, ‘A Brief History of the LMC’, Resonance, 8/9.1/2 (2000), pp. 4–13 (p. 5).

¹² Although I use the original volumes in this text, facsimiles of Musics have been published in Musics: A British Magazine of Improvised Music & Art 1975–79 (Ecstatic Peace Library, 2016).

¹³ The provenance is murky, but it has been suggested that Nick Kimberly of the Compendium bookstore in Camden gave Musics this nickname, which has appeared repeatedly in discussions about Musics since its founding.

¹⁴ Paul Morley, ‘Penseur in Patchy Light: David Cunningham’, New Musical Express, 25 November 1978, in Rock’s Backpages (henceforth RB).

¹⁵ I allude to Bell’s ‘A Brief History of the LMC’, the indispensable starting point for anyone interested in the Collective. The reader might also consult Trevor Barre, The London Musicians’ Collective: ‘An Obstinate Clot of Invention’ (Limbic Books, 2020). The latter is a decidedly non-scholarly text that may prove useful given its discussion of the Collective’s activities across its multi-decade history, many of which exceed the scope of this article’s admittedly partial concentration on the LMC’s earlier years. I cite Barre’s other writing on the LMC and free improvisation throughout.

¹⁶ Quoted in Bell, ‘A Brief History of the LMC’, p. 5.

¹⁷ Paul Burwell, ‘London Musicians Collective: A Personal History’, from archival materials at University of the Arts London (henceforth UAL). The stress that ‘anyone could join’ contrasted with the LMC’s predecessor, the Musicians Co-op.

¹⁸ These observations are based on flyers and press releases housed at UAL. Titles include ‘Welfare State, the Dream Weavers’, ‘Celluloid Meets Flesh’, ‘A Recital by the English Gamelan Orchestra’, ‘Movement and Music ‘81’, and multitudinous others.

¹⁹ Quoted in Bell, ‘A Brief History of the LMC’, pp. 7–8.

²⁰ Sue Steward, ‘Free for All’, Time Out, 29 February–6 March 1980, p. 16, UAL. For more on such entities, see David Toop, Into the Maelstrom: Music, Improvisation and the Dream of Freedom before 1970 (Bloomsbury, 2016) and Trevor Barre, Beyond Jazz: Plink, Plonk & Scratch. The Golden Age of Free Music in London 1966–1972 (Compass Publishing, 2015).

²¹ I cull Stevens’s phrase from the sleeve notes of Spontaneous Music Ensemble, Karyōbin, John Stevens, Evan Parker, Derek Bailey, Dave Holland, and Kenny Wheeler (Emanem 5046, 1968) <http://emanemdisc.com/E5046.html> [accessed 25 October 2019].

²² Trevor Barre, Convergences, Divergences and Affinities: The Second Wave of Free Improvisation in England, 1973–1979 (Compass Publishing, 2017), p. 115. The idea does not originate with Barre but comes from Hakim Bey, whose writing was also published in Resonance, the LMC’s magazine through the 1990s. See Bey, ‘The Will to Power as Disappearance’, Resonance, 1/2.2–3 (1993).

²³ Graham, Stephen, Sounds of the Underground: A Cultural, Political and Aesthetic Mapping of Underground and Fringe Music (University of Michigan Press, 2016), p. 16 Google Scholar0. On transformations in this arrangement across the arts, see Chin-tao Wu, Privatising Culture: Corporate Art Intervention since the 1980s (Verso, 2003).

²⁴ Richard Leigh, ‘Merely Subjective’, 6 September 1980, p. 1, UAL.

²⁵ Quoted in Bell, ‘A Brief History of the LMC’, p. 8.

²⁶ Peter Riley, untitled letter, in Musics, 8 (1976), p. 3. Riley targeted Phil Virden’s ‘The Musical Myth of Necessary Hierarchy’, Musics, 6 (1976), which other writers also criticized.

²⁷ Mouffe, Agonistics, p. 5.

²⁸ Connolly, William, Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (University of Minnesota Press, 2002).Google Scholar

²⁹ Quotes in this paragraph are from ‘Technique and Improvisation’, Musics, 19 (1978), pp. 4–12. Italics in the original (and henceforth). Round-table contributors included Beresford, Parker, Toop, Leigh, Burwell, Charles K. Noyes, Dave Solomon, and others. The racial and gender homogeneity displayed by the round table of white men was not uncommon and proved a target of critique as time went on, as we’ll see in the upcoming section.

³⁰ On these aspects of Beresford’s decades-long career, see Hamilton, Andy and Beresford, Steve, Pianos, Toys, Music and Noise: Conversations with Steve Beresford (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³¹ An early instance is Teatime (1975), featuring Beresford, Gary Todd, Dave Solomon, John Russell, and Nigel Coombes, which was released on Incus, the label fronted by Parker and Bailey.

³² See for instance Couldry, Nick, ‘Turning the Musical Table: Improvisation in Britain 1965–1990’, Rubberneck, 19 (1995), pp. 3–38 (p. 10).Google Scholar

³³ Quoted in Corbett, John, ‘Steve Beresford: M. O. R. and More’, in Extended Play: Sounding Off from John Cage to Dr. Funkenstein (Duke University Press, 1994), pp. 192–200 (p. 199).Google Scholar

³⁴ Barre, Convergences, Divergences and Affinities, p. 149.

³⁵ More detail about each venture can be found in Hamilton and Beresford, Pianos, Toys, Music and Noise.

³⁶ On the PS, see Jeffrey Steele, ‘Collaborative Work at Portsmouth’, Studio International, 182.984 (November–December 1976), pp. 297–300. See also ‘Portsmouth Sinfonia’, in Hamilton and Beresford, Pianos, Toys, Music and Noise.

³⁷ Ansell, Kenneth, ‘Steve Beresford’, Impetus, 6 (1977), pp. 261–62 (p. 262).Google Scholar

³⁸ Lake, Steve, ‘Steve Beresford Talks to Steve Lake at Steve Beresford’s Flat on April 6th’, Musics, 14 (1977), pp. 12–15 Google Scholar (p. 13).

³⁹ Ibid., p. 15.

⁴⁰ In dialogues and interviews, Beresford has stated that Parker used the phrase, though he has not suggested that he adopted it explicitly in the 1970s and 80s as a description of his own practice. One also notes its appearance in the title of Eddie Prévost’s No Sound Is Innocent: AMM and the Practice of Self-Invention, Meta-Musical Narratives, Essays (Copula, 1995).

⁴¹ Quoted in Brian Case, ‘Murdering the Pop Song’, Melody Maker, 29 September 1979, pp. 28 and 55 (p. 28), Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive (henceforth EIMA).

⁴² Quoted in Wickes, John, Innovations in British Jazz (Soundworld Publishers, 1999), p. 312.Google Scholar

⁴³ Ben Watson, Derek Bailey and the Story of Free Improvisation (Verso, 2004), p. 215.

⁴⁴ Ansell, ‘Steve Beresford’, p. 262.

⁴⁵ Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise, p. 149.

⁴⁶ Ibid.

⁴⁷ Accounts of Nicolson’s presence at the LMC are few, but see for instance Burwell, ‘London Musicians Collective’, pp. 28–29, UAL. See also Annabel Nicolson, ‘The Lambs Are Deafening’, Resonance, 8/9.1/2 (2000), pp. 16–17.

⁴⁸ For an example of Nicolson’s writing on the topic, see her ‘Artist as Filmmaker’, Art and Artists (December 1972), pp. 20–26. Much has been said about structural materialism and related ‘expanded cinema’, but for contextually specific sources about the LFMC, see Shoot, Shoot, Shoot: The First Decade of the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative, 1966–77, ed. by Marc Webber (Lux, 2016), and Joy Payne, Reel Rebels: The London Film-Makers’ Co-operative 1966 to 1996 (Authorhouse, 2015).

⁴⁹ Parker, Kayla, ‘Jamming the Machine: The Personal-Political in Annabel Nicolson’s Reel Time ’, in The Arts and Popular Culture in History: Proceedings of The Role of Arts in History Cross-Disciplinary Conference, ed. by Emmett, Rebecca (Plymouth University Press, 2013), pp. 217–33Google Scholar. There are other analyses of Reel Time, but for a recent and useful one, see Zinman, Gregory, Making Images Move: Handmade Cinema and the Other Arts (University of California Press, 2020), pp. 138–41.Google Scholar

⁵⁰ I draw the phrase ‘woman as sign’ from Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism, and Histories of Art (Routledge, 1988). For a useful theorization of UK feminism’s ‘avant-garde moment’ in the 1970s and 80s, see Pollock, Griselda, ‘Moments and Temporalities of the Avant-Garde “in, of, and from the Feminine”’, New Literary History, 41.4 (2010), pp. 795–820, doi:10.1353/nlh.2010.0030 Google Scholar. On Gee Vaucher’s collages, see essays in Introspective, ed. by Stevphen Shukaitis (Firstsite, 2016). On Tutti’s ambiguous feminism, see Wilson, Siona, Art Labor, Sex Politics: Feminist Effects in 1970s British Art and Performance (University of Minnesota Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On Kelly’s Brechtian strategies, see Pollock, Vision and Difference.

⁵¹ They were far from the last all-women group. Other examples are Contradictions and Les Diaboliques, both of which had FIG members.

⁵² Quotes from this paragraph are from Hemmings, Susan and Pitfield, Norma, ‘The Feminist Improvising Group’, Musics, 15 (1977), p. 20.Google Scholar

⁵³ Discussions of FIG, this event, and/or feminism in British free improvisation appear in Barre, Convergences, Divergences and Affinities; Born, ‘After Relational Aesthetics’; McKay, George, Circular Breathing: The Cultural Politics of Jazz in Britain (Duke University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; and Smith, Julie Dawn, ‘Playing like a Girl: The Queer Laughter of the Feminist Improvising Group’, in The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue, ed. by Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble (Wesleyan University Press, 2004), pp. 224–43.Google Scholar

⁵⁴ Nicolson was involved in Circles, the distributor of feminist film in Britain. She also contributed to the artist-led repudiation of ‘Film as Film’, an exhibition on structural materialism that was criticized for tokenism on the basis of gender. See Annabel Nicolson and others, ‘Woman and the Formal Film’, Film as Film: Formal Experiment in Film, 1910–1975 (Arts Council of Great Britain, 1979), pp. 118–29. Nicolson’s work should not be reduced to ‘feminist’ in toto, however. Her activities were varied, and the artist herself has expressed hesitance that her work be interpreted solely on the basis of gender. The involvement of FIG members in the women’s movement was manifold and engaged socialist-feminist, lesbian-feminist, and adjacent feminist debates in art worlds and beyond. For example, Cooper and Born had been part of Henry Cow, the Marxist rock band whose landmark experimentation was influenced by their critique of power relations in the group and its hetero-patriarchal associations. See Piekut, Benjamin, Henry Cow: The World Is a Problem (Duke University Press, 2019); pp. 126–32Google Scholar are evocative of Cooper’s politics in particular, which were not synonymous with Born’s. Nicols, for her part, notes that she and Cooper had crossed paths prior to FIG’s founding as active members of the Musicians Union, when Nicols was also part of the Socialist Labour League and Cooper performed with the Ritual Theatre, flagging a mutual investment in leftism that affected FIG. See Maggie Nicols, ‘Lindsay Cooper: 3 March 1951–18 September 2013’, 17 October 2013 <https://womensliberationmusicarchive.co.uk/2013/10/17/lindsay-cooper-3-march-1951-18-september-2013/> [accessed 18 February 2022]. Potter was a stalwart in feminist film and theatre, with her short film Thriller (1980) and later Orlando (1992) being staples of the feminist avant-garde; for more, see Sharon Lin Tay, ‘On the Edges of Art Cinema: Sally Potter and the Feminist Response’, Women on the Edge: Twelve Political Film Practices (Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 84–107. Post-FIG musical efforts were wide-ranging, but feminist-inspired examples include Nicols’s and Schweizer’s Les Diaboliques and the European Women’s Improvising Group, an outgrowth of FIG in the early 1980s. However, these examples are not comprehensive, nor should they suggest a coherent politics among FIG members.

⁵⁵ Phillips, Anne, Democracy and Difference (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), p. 17.Google Scholar

⁵⁶ Quotes in this passage come from Cooper, Lindsay, ‘Women, Music, Feminism~Notes’, Musics, 14 (1977), pp. 16–19.Google Scholar

⁵⁷ An instructive discussion of such debates in ‘homosocial communities’ appears in Peraino, Judith A., Listening to the Sirens: Musical Technologies of Queer Identity from Homer to Hedwig (University of California Press, 2006)Google Scholar, especially chapter four.

⁵⁸ Born, ‘After Relational Aesthetics’, p. 56.

⁵⁹ Another archival flyer (UAL) indicates that an open discussion called ‘Sexual Politics and Music’ was also held at the LMC around this time, focusing ‘on how sexual politics affect “new music” and how this relates to the work of the LMC and how we can change relationships’.

⁶⁰ Nicols, interview with George McKay.

⁶¹ Quoted in Smith, ‘Playing like a Girl’, pp. 237–38.

⁶² Wilmer, Val, Mama Said There’d Be Days Like This: My Life in the Jazz World (Women’s Press, 1989), p. 285.Google Scholar

⁶³ Hannah Charlton, ‘No Apologies’, Melody Maker, 8 December 1979, Lindsay Cooper Digital Archive; <https://digital.library.cornell.edu/catalog/ss:21812088> [accessed 12 April 2019].

⁶⁴ Goldman, I Want to Be Ready, p. 4.

⁶⁵ My overview in this paragraph summarizes ideas from the chapter ‘Post-Humanism: Life Beyond the Self’ in Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Polity, 2013), pp. 13–54.

⁶⁶ Ibid., p. 17.

⁶⁷ Ibid., p. 49.

⁶⁸ Quotes in this paragraph are from Boucher, Max, ‘A Method’, Musics, 6 (1976), p. 1.Google Scholar

⁶⁹ ‘Radical structure’ was a concept that Toop and Burwell, drawing on philosophy, anthropology, the natural sciences, and more, had developed to understand improvisation by contrast with music-theoretical analyses. See Paul Burwell, ‘Radical Structure: 1’, Studio International (November–December 1976), pp. 319–23.

⁷⁰ David Toop, untitled artist’s statement, 1976, UAL.

⁷¹ David Toop, ‘Was It Me? Lovens/Lytton’, Musics, 15 (1977), p. 5. This basic insight is couched within a far wider discussion about the musicians’ playing, the recorded object, and global sonic practices and theorizations.

⁷² ‘Music/Context’, Musics, 20 (1978), p. 4. Activities listed in this paragraph derive from this source.

⁷³ Quoted in ‘The Music/Context Seminar’, Musics, 20 (1978), p. 21.

⁷⁴ On the etymological relationship between the words ambiguous, ambient, and ambulant, see Roquet, Paul, Ambient Media: Japanese Atmospheres of Self (University of Minnesota Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, particularly the introduction.

⁷⁵ Paul Burwell, untitled information book about the artist, 1974, UAL, p. 2.

⁷⁶ The World Soundscape Project and joint initiatives peppered Musics. See for instance the interview published as ‘World Soundscape Project’ in Musics, 8 (1976), pp. 24–29.

⁷⁷ On cybernetics in the arts, see for example Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture (The University of Chicago Press, 2006). On ‘differentiation within multiplicity’, see Joseph, Branden, ‘Chance, Indeterminacy, Multiplicity’, in his Experimentations: John Cage in Music, Art, and Architecture (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), pp. 133–72.Google Scholar

⁷⁸ Bennett, Jane, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Duke University Press, 2010).Google Scholar

⁷⁹ David Toop, interview with the author, 15 December 2021.

⁸⁰ In his 2019 memoir, Toop notes that his work in the 1970s and 80s displayed ‘posthumanist’ traits, though during our 2021 interview he hesitated to endorse these earlier comments. The stress on posthumanism is mine, not fully his. He did, however, say that ‘anti-humanism’ makes sense. David Toop, Flutter Echo: Living within Sound (Ecstatic Peace Library, 2019), p. 71.

⁸¹ Brian Case, ‘Gorilla Noises & Mains Hum’, New Musical Express, 23 September 1978, pp. 44 and 49 (p. 44), EIMA.

⁸² Toop, interview with Melody Maker, quoted in Wickes, Innovations in British Jazz, pp. 310–11.

⁸³ See for instance David Toop, ‘Radical Structure: 2’, Studio International (November–December 1976), pp. 324–25.

⁸⁴ David Toop, the Bi(s)onics pieces, May to September 1972, UAL.

⁸⁵ Noyes, Charles K., ‘Dry/Wet: A 2 Part View of Bioacoustics’, Musics, 13 (1977), pp. 24–27 Google Scholar (p. 27); Toop, Flutter Echo, p. 84.

⁸⁶ For an example outside of New and Rediscovered, see Musics, 17, pp. 8–10, which republished an article by anthropologist Ragnar Johnson titled ‘The Instruments or Spirit Cries Played during Ommura Male Initiations (New Guinea)’.

⁸⁷ David Toop, New/Rediscovered Musical Instruments (Quartz/Mirliton, 1974), p. 6.

⁸⁸ Ibid., p. 25.

⁸⁹ Ibid., p. 3.

⁹⁰ Toop spearheaded a record label of the same name.

⁹¹ Ibid., p. 22.

⁹² Corbett, John, ‘Experimental Oriental: New Music and Other Others’, in Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation and Appropriation in Music , ed. by Born, Georgina and Hesmondhalgh, David (University of California Press, 2000), pp. 163–86 (p. 180)Google Scholar.

⁹³ One thinks of Burwell’s Bow Gamelan Ensemble and pieces like Whirled Music, led by Max Eastley. The contradictory nature of posthumanism is a common theme in the posthumanities. For an example that also concentrates on music and race, see Burton, Justin A., Posthuman Rap (Oxford University Press, 2017).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁹⁴ Bailey, Improvisation, p. 102.

⁹⁵ Corbett, ‘Experimental Oriental’, p. 177.

⁹⁶ On avant-gardes’ intrinsic transnationalism, see Harding, James M. and Rouse, John, ‘Introduction’, in Not the Other Avant-Garde: The Transnational Foundations of Avant-Garde Performance , ed. by Harding, James M. and Rouse, John (University of Michigan Press, 2006), pp. 1–17 Google Scholar. See also Alonso-Minutti, Ana R., Herrera, Eduardo, and Madrid, Alejandro L., ‘The Practices of Experimentalism in Latin@ and Latin American Music: An Introduction’, in Experimentalisms in Practice: Music Perspectives from Latin America, ed. by Alonso-Minutti, Ana R., Herrera, Eduardo, and Madrid, Alejandro L. (Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 1–17.Google Scholar

⁹⁷ Toop, interview with the author.

⁹⁸ Huyssen, Andreas, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Indiana University Press, 1987).Google Scholar

⁹⁹ For more on Beresford’s pop-aligned activity, see Hamilton and Beresford, Pianos, Toys, Music and Noise.

¹⁰⁰ For more, see Tony Reed, ‘Frank Talking’, Electronic Soundmaker & Computer Music, March 1985 <http://www.muzines.co.uk/articles/frank-talking/3769> [accessed 1 December 2021].

¹⁰¹ On Collusion, Musics, and their place in publishing, see Graham, Stephen, ‘From Microphone to the Wire: Cultural Change in 1970s and 1980s Music Writing’, Twentieth-Century Music, 16.3 (2019), pp. 531–55, doi:10.1017/S1478572218000336.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁰² It merits noting that Kilburn and the High Roads spawned from the aforementioned People Band, itself born out of the Continuous Music Ensemble.

¹⁰³ The phrase appears in scholarship frequently, but see for instance essays in The Popular Avant-Garde, ed. by Renée Silverman (Rodopi, 2010).

¹⁰⁴ Quotes in this paragraph are from Toop’s letter in LMC Newsletter, December 1980, UAL. Tim Dennis, mentioned in the block quote below, was an LMC member whose presence in archival sources is most pronounced in his administrative capacity, including as an editor of the newsletter.

¹⁰⁵ Margaret Thatcher, ‘Speech to Small Business Bureau Conference’, 8 February 1984 <https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/105617> [accessed 5 October 2018].

¹⁰⁶ David Toop, ‘Can Sound Sit on Chairs?’, The Wire, 400 (June 2017), p. 36.

¹⁰⁷ On new music in this vein, see Marianna Ritchey, Composing Capital: Classical Music in the Neoliberal Era (The University of Chicago Press, 2019). Analyses of contemporary music and neoliberalism are several, but for one whose dispassionate tone I wish to approximate, see Robin, William, ‘Balance Problems: Neoliberalism and New Music in the American University and Ensemble’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 71.3 (2018), pp. 749–93, doi:10.1525/jams.2018.71.3.749.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁰⁸ Anonymous, ‘Cybernauts in the Cultural Marketplace’, Melody Maker, 9 February 1980, pp. 19–20 and 51 (p. 19), EIMA.

¹⁰⁹ Morley, ‘Penseur in Patchy Light’. Although it’s wrong to call Cunningham naive, here is Morley’s extended quote: ‘He is a part, or a focus, in an overall pattern that is emerging in modern rock, somehow a furtive link between the imploding free music scene, the exploding free rock scene and the functions and messages of disco. In short, he’s an example of ambition, curiosity, speculation and peculiar naivity, like rock’s Mark Perry, Vic Godard, Mark Smith and free music’s David Toop, Paul Burwell and Steve Beresford. (And disco’s Giorgio Moroder?)’

¹¹⁰ Liner note to Grey Scale, republished on Cunningham’s website <http://www.stalk.net/piano/piano001.htm> [accessed 15 November 2021].

¹¹¹ The classic example of racial solidarities is Rock Against Racism, though scholars are working to chronicle reggae and dub histories from the standpoint of Black British experience. See for instance Narratives from beyond the UK Reggae Bassline: The System is Sound, ed. by William ‘Lez’ Henry and Matthew Worley (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).

¹¹² Morley, ‘Penseur in Patchy Light’.

¹¹³ Toop, interview with the author.

¹¹⁴ Quoted in Mike Barnes, ‘This Heat and Cold Storage: Once Upon a Time in Brixton’, The Wire, August 2005, RB.

¹¹⁵ Andy Gill, ‘This Heat: This Heat (Piano)’, New Musical Express, 8 September 1979, RB.

¹¹⁶ I wouldn’t want to overstate Cunningham’s involvement in this release, as he has deemphasized his contributions. What I wish to stress in this passage is his broader relationships with This Heat and other politically motivated artists, in addition to their seeming incongruity with a market-friendly disposition.

¹¹⁷ Barnes, ‘This Heat and Cold Storage’.

¹¹⁸ Helpful analyses of ‘ethics of enterprise’ can be found in Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Zone Books, 2015).

¹¹⁹ The Lizards were connected to other labels too. See Cunningham’s website <http://www.stalk.net/piano/disc_tfl.htm> [accessed 2 July 2022].

¹²⁰ Quoted in Mark Allen, ‘The Flying Lizards: A Band Arranged According to the Laws of Chance’, Sound Collector, 6 (2001) <http://www.markallencam.com/soundcollector2001-2.html> [accessed 13 December 2021].

¹²¹ Anonymous, ‘Cybernauts in the Cultural Marketplace’, p. 19.

¹²² Born, Georgina, ‘On Music and Politics: Henry Cow, Avant-Gardism and Its Discontents’, in Red Strains: Music and Communism Outside the Communist Bloc, ed. by Robert Adlington (Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 55–64 (p. 64).Google Scholar

¹²³ Mark Allen, ‘In 1979, the Flying Lizards Recorded a Top Ten Hit for $30’, Vice, 13 August 2013 <https://www.vice.com/en/article/4w7gdn/in-1979-the-flying-lizards-recorded-a-top-ten-hit-for-20> [accessed 13 December 2021]. The production costs seem shockingly low, though Cunningham remembers that recording cost ‘$9, plus the cost of a reel of tape and a couple of bus tickets. Of course I already had a bunch of tape recorders and couldn’t have done it without that resource.’

¹²⁴ Quoted in Mark Allen, ‘The Flying Lizards’.

¹²⁵ Better than the Original: The Joy of the Cover Version, dir. by David Vincent (BBC Four, 2015).

¹²⁶ David Cunningham, interview with the author, 22 January 2022.

¹²⁷ Ibid.

¹²⁸ Analyses of neoliberalization are numerous, but for sources relevant to this musical discussion, see for example Ritchey, Composing Capital; Robin, ‘Balance Problems’; Moore, Andrea, ‘Neoliberalism and the Musical Entrepreneur’, Journal of the Society for American Music, 10.1 (2016), pp. 33–53, doi:10.1017/S175219631500053X CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chapman, Dale, The Jazz Bubble: Neoclassical Jazz in Neoliberal Culture (University of California Press, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and James, Robin, Resilience and Melancholy: Pop Music, Feminism, Neoliberalism (Zero Books, 2015).Google Scholar

¹²⁹ Brown, Wendy, Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 40.Google Scholar

¹³⁰ Stahl, Matt, Unfree Masters: Recording Artists and the Politics of Work (Duke University Press, 2013).Google Scholar

¹³¹ David Cunningham, ‘Jack Plugs and Sockets’, Musics, 11 (1977), p. 27; Kerry Trengove and David Cunningham, ‘Music & Food’, Musics, 16 (1978), p. 13.

¹³² Toop, ‘Can Sound Sit on Chairs?’, p. 36.

¹³³ Chapman, Dale, ‘The “One-Man Band” and Entrepreneurial Selfhood in Neoliberal Culture’, Popular Music, 32.3 (2013), pp. 451–60 (pp. 452–53), doi:10.1017/S0261143013000317.Google Scholar

¹³⁴ Fischlin, Daniel and Porter, Eric, ‘Playing for Keeps: An Introduction’, in Playing for Keeps: Improvisation in the Aftermath , ed. by Fischlin, Daniel and Porter, Eric (Duke University Press, 2020), pp. 1–24 Google Scholar (p. 1).

¹³⁵ For one example, see Piekut, Benjamin, ‘Another Version of Ourselves: The Enigmas of Improvised Subjectivity’, Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, 14.1 (2018), pp. 72–89.Google Scholar

¹³⁶ This is not to say that scholars have ignored debates in avant-garde communities. For some classic presentations, see Lewis, George E., A Power Stronger than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (The University of Chicago Press, 2008).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹³⁷ Stuart Hall, ‘On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall by Larry Grossberg’, in Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, ed. by Morley, David (Duke University Press, 2019)Google Scholar, i, Foundations of Cultural Studies, pp. 222–46 (p. 235).

¹³⁸ Callon, Michel and Çaliskan, Koray, ‘Economization, Part 1: Shifting Attention from the Economy towards Processes of Economization’, Economy and Society, 38.3 (2009), pp. 370–400.Google Scholar