When the Brazilian Antônio Carlos (Tom) Jobim died in December 1994, twentieth-century Western music lost one of its greatest popular songwriters. That may be a contentious assertion, and one open to endless debate, if his work is to be judged against that of the other major composers of the age on purely aesthetic grounds. It is indisputable, though, if the criteria are Jobim's role as a founder and leading songwriter of the bossa nova movement, given the influence of that tradition within Brazil and beyond, and as Latin America's most successful musical export (Treece 1992).

This article focuses on the issue of meanings in ‘world music’ practices. The main questions addressed are how such musical cultures take on meanings, and what meanings are constructed by such cultures. As Deborah Pacini has indicated, the term ‘world music’ in this case does not refer to a musical genre. It is used, rather, ‘[as] a marketing term describing the products of musical cross-fertilisation between the north – the US and Western Europe – and south – primarily Africa and the Caribbean Basin, which began appearing on the popular music landscape in the early 1980s’ (1993, p. 48). From 1985, the expanding ‘world music’ umbrella has come to include practically any musics of cultures of non-European origin.

Serious students of popular music and song are rightly curious about the workings of the music business; but when we try to find out about how the industry works, even in terms of economics, we find that virtually all the empirical data comes from internal sources, from the International Federation of Phonographic Industries (IFPI), or from affiliates such as the British Phonographic Industries (BPI) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). In other words, we get only those statistics and ‘facts’ which this most secretive of industries wishes us to have; so we will look in vain for detailed production figures, or for sales of individual recordings (unless they are outstandingly successful), or for hard numbers relating to what IFPI calls ‘piracy’ (let alone the information on which the published numbers and projections are based). Similarly, from the individual company accounts of Sony, EMI or BMG, we may find numbers relating to pension and investment funds, but we will never find the real profits or losses of any company, let alone the rate of exploitation of any artist (or manufacturing or distributive worker); and in any case it is well-known that the published ‘bottom-line’ on a balance sheet is, at best, an informed opinion.

Although much has been written about the changes wrought to art in the age of mechanical reproduction, these same changes as they have impacted on music through the phenomenon of the phonograph have not received equivalent attention or, if they have, then their discussion has been restricted to particular sectors of the music industry. This failure to address an important facet of contemporary music practice derives from a continuing tendency to abstract musical questions from their context and to obscure the material contributions that technology makes to such practice (Shepherd 1977, 1991; Scott 1990). With some musics this is more apparent than others. For instance, while there has been an extensive analysis of the degree to which the recording industry has influenced and been an integral element in the development of popular music, there has not been an equivalent analysis of its influence on classical music. This is because in the case of the former the links between the two have been somewhat more dramatic. The recording industry, particularly through its links with radio and television stations, has in large measure facilitated the spread of popular music across the world as a dominant element of a globalised culture, as one of its master codes.

In this article I want to consider the importance of the pub rock scene as a resource for the consumption of popular music. Considering its role as one of the primary sites for the production and consumption of live music, very little has been written about pub rock. Moreover, in those studies that have made reference to pub rock, emphasis has often been placed upon its role as a training ground for musicians and songwriters (see, for example, Laing 1985, p. 8), or as a stepping stone to full-time professional music-making rather than ‘a locally expressed and tangible manifestation of music in its own right’ (Finnegan 1989, p. 235). Indeed, if only a few published works exist on the production of pub rock then there are, to the best of my knowledge, no studies devoted to pub rock audiences. What I want to do here is to begin redressing this imbalance. I will focus upon two specific examples of pub rock audiences and thus hope to demonstrate that the production of pub rock is inextricably linked to the localised patterns of consumption that inform its reception, and that the significance which an audience attaches to a particular pub rock event is an essential, if not the essential, aspect of that event. The first audience study presented here is drawn from my experience of working as a part-time musician in a pub rock band. The second study, which pursues a slightly different line of enquiry to the first, is based upon fieldwork material that I am currently collecting as part of my doctoral studies at Durham University.