This is a repository copy of ‘Only one can rule the night’: Fairs and music in post-1945
Britain.
White Rose Research Online URL for this paper:
http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/125906/
Version: Accepted Version
Article:
Trowell, I.M. orcid.org/0000-0001-6039-7765 (2018) ‘Only one can rule the night’: Fairs
and music in post-1945 Britain. Popular Music History, 10 (3). pp. 262-279. ISSN
1740-7133
https://doi.org/10.1558/pomh.34399
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1
O usic in post-1945 Britain
Abstract
This article charts and examines the relationship between popular music and the British
travelling fairground in the post-1945 years. I set out a historical trajectory of the
importance of sound and noise within the fairground, and examine how music in the post-
1945 years emerged as an important aspect of this wider soundscape. The complex spatial
characteristics of the fairground are considered as fragmented zones with interiors-within-
to facilitate certain music and sounds. This progresses to encompass and
engage the subcultural explosion in British society. The fairground becomes a complex
mode of musical consumption, facilitating access to music, enhancing the sound through
somatic engagement and providing a temporary space for subcultures to flourish. I draw on
historical materials, archival evidence and gathered testimony to look at the 1950s period of
new music, then plot a course to the current phase of dance music and club culture.
Keyword: fairgrounds, subcultures, soundscape, popular music, listening
Introduction
The British travelling fair holds a distinctive allure in its coming-to-be, active duration and
evanescent departure. It is provided by a nomadic community who seemingly have their
own separate domain of existence, bringing the fair through the dead of night with a
remarkable effort of organisation to assemble an array of vehicles and wagons. By the
morning light activity is always well under way; teams of staff are unfolding and unpacking
structures, making it all fit together just so. The fair will occupy a regularized space within
the urban nexus, either a continuous plot such as a greenspace or a car park, or a loose
network of discrete locations within a city centre. The duration of the fair disrupts both the
allocated functions of spaces (consumption, commuting, parking) and the rhythms of
normality associated with those spaces (opening/closing, parking by micro-divisions of the
hour). It is a temporal and spatial intervention.
The fair exists as its own discrete world; carrying a supply of goods as prizes (referred to as
swag by showpeople) that cannot be purchased elsewhere, providing a magical enclosed
space that allows a suspension of disbelief and a bounded amphitheatre for performance,
offering a vibrant and vernacular art gallery that mixes iconography and figurative work
from popular culture wrapped up in a unique visual imprint of the fairground style and
colour scheme
only resides temporarily in the stomach, and setting off a dense cacophony of sounds and
music that would not be tolerated in other spaces and circumstances. F somewhat
adaptable list of heterotopias (Foucault 1984) makes reference to the carnival space, though
we can classify the fair at various levels of his loose ontology; as deviation, as juxta
positional, as time-heterochroni -within-
2
As visitors to the fair we share an intersubjective suspension of disbelief evolving around the
tensions of the phenomenal and noumenal, shifting what might be thought acceptable and
everyday into the realm of the transgressive, surreal and thrilling, and pulling out the
impossible and unimaginable into the realm of the sensory (or near-enough-sensory). The
fairground
disorients in a polysensory excess of sounds, smells, tastes, lights, visuals,
rootedness, social conventions and performativity. As Toulmin (2003: 61) states, the fair is
And finally, the magical coming-to-be of the
fair is mirrored with its departure. Just as it comes from elsewhere, it departs to another
elsewhere, leaving a trace of compressed rings in the grass and residual artefacts such as
broken light caps, food remnants, dislodged and scattered coins and traces of packaging
from cheap swag prizes that looked so tempting under the fairground lights.
Travelling fairgrounds are a worldwide phenomenon and though approximately coeval in
terms of a developmental shift from acts and shows to mechanised thrills, there are
distinctive factors that give fairgrounds a national flavour. This includes organising principles,
rules and regulations at local and national levels including religious cultures, and specifics of
the popular cultures prevalent in the country or region concerned. For example, the
uniqueness of British fairgrounds is down to numerous factors: their sole organisation by an
exclusive and exogenous community known as showpeople, the relatively short duration of
events (compared for example with similar events in Germany and the USA), and the British
celebration of pop and dance music alongside the iconographic excesses of celebrity, film
and cartoon culture. These factors combine to give the spatial, social, visual, olfactory,
gustatory and acoustic features of the British fairground.
In any week there are up to 150 travelling fairgrounds set up across the UK, with each event
lasting anything from a single day to a couple of weeks. The fairground itself will consist of
larger rides (adult rides), smaller rides (juvenile rides), side- and round-stalls offering a
variety of games, supplemented by food stalls (sweet and savoury) and a smattering of
hawkers selling balloons and associated swag. The fairground season traditionally runs from
February 14
th
(St V D K L M F
November (the season ending with the charter fair at Loughborough). In recent years the
start and end points of this period have been extended further, with newly established
Vale K L
fairs pushing towards the end of November, alongside Long Eaton Chestnut Fair which falls
the week after Loughborough. With the current fashion for Christmas lights switch-on
events and Christmas and New Year fairs, the season is now no longer a season as such,
more so a continuous occurrence.
In terms of literature sources, the earliest fairground writing consists of autohagiographic
works by prominent showmen and circus proprietors utilising a tradition of self-bestowal
, and this was slowly replaced by a growing body of
3
work produced by, and for, the nascent fairground enthusiast movement in the latter half of
the 20
th
century. This work focusses on particular fairs, rides or showpeople families, setting
on encyclopaedic details of fleets of lorries and family trees. A handful of more general
books emerged (Dallas 1971; Starsmore 1975; Cameron 1998; Toulmin 2003), and attempts
have been made to bridge across into architecture (Braithwaite 1968) and art (Weedon and
Ward 1981).
Historical overview of noise, sound and music on the fairground
Noise proliferates on the 19
th
century fairground. Dallas (1971: 3) references Charles
Dickens Hard Times and the stentorian character Mr Gradgrind approaching the fairground:
H
nor country, and yet was either spoiled, when his ears were invaded by t
T G
W W H The Rural Life of England describes an
N G F
Toulmin (2003: 13) quotes from an undated scrapbook in the collection at the National
Fairground Archive, describing the coming of the heavy fairground machinery in the early
1900s:
Noise, great noise, loud noise, rough noise, harsh noise, shrill noise, overall,
noise. The noise of young men laughing, of old men grunting; the noise of
young maidens shrieking, of old maidens sobbing; the noise of roundabouts, of
steam engines, or flip-flaps, or toboggans, of sirens, of rattles, of everything
and of all things. Noise! Noise! Noise!!!
Prior to recorded music the musical sound of the fairground was dominated by mechanical
organs playing popular melodies and waltzes. The music from each individual organ had to
compete with the other similar musical sources (homogenous cacophony) or compete with
other sounds (heterogeneous cacophony). The din of Nottingham Goose Fair is disparagingly
remarked upon by J.B. Priestley on his tour of England:
The brazen voices of the showmen, now made more hideous and gargantuan
than ever by the amplifiers and loudspeakers, battered our hearing, which could
not pluck words out of those terrifying noises. The mechanical organs blared in
batteries, so closely ranged that the ear could never detect a single tune: all it
heard was the endless grinding symphony. (Priestley 1934: 148)
The provision of music as a key aspect of the constellation of sound sources has shifted with
social modes, cultural tastes and technical capabilities. The British fairground is now
dominated by pre-recorded and amplified music, though even the mode of presentation of
this sound changes constantly. Initially records were played on early systems known as
panatropes, a device that has become associated with the historical fairground of the 1930s
4
and the need to play music at a substantial volume.
1
Whilst these new systems allowed pre-
recorded music to be played on the fairground, with early jazz records popular, the
replaced by loud speakers and amplifiers each shrieking a different jazz tune at the same
T Standard record players came into use with the auto-change
system allowing several records to be stacked and played in sequence, with an audible drop
in revolutions per minute as the ride starts its motion due to the power for the whole
machine ensemble (motion, lighting, music) being drawn from a single source. In addition,
the record would jump as the ride gained speed and began to shake, leading to the
utilisation of coil springs to suspend the record deck. The evolution of tapes and then CDs
allowed a smoother presentation of music, with continuous mix CDs allowing a seamless
soundtrack. This has now evolved to digital downloads of dance music mixes.
Speaker technology was embraced by the fairground at the earliest opportunity, with a mix
of acoustic strategies such that certain speakers are positioned outward facing, with sound
centrifugally amplified into the general fairground space, whilst other speakers are
positioned inward facing, with sound centripetally amplified into the enclosed space of the
specific ride. This necessitates a finer unpacking of the spatial dynamics of the fairground,
which I develop below, but first I outline a proposed total soundscape of the fairground.
A proposed soundscape of the fairground
Schafer (1994) introduces the idea of the soundscape, equating it to the perceivable
acoustic environment. Truax (2000), as part of the World Soundscape Project, develops the
the totality of all sounds within a location with an emphasis on the relationship
F C
soundscapes is challenging because it is also necessary to consider the context of the
S
studies generally evolve in an altruistic manner to identify aspects of noise or discomfort,
attempting to isolate such sounds and address their possible nullification through various
strategies. In contrast to this, the fairground is a deliberately noisy and complex soundscape,
staking out a certain space and hijacking a set period of time, when volume, cacophony and
sonic excess is legitimized and engaged.
Existing within a wider polysensory excess (vision, smell, taste, performativity, light) it is
possible to mark a provisional fairground soundscape. This initially consists of an overlay
between various sources of sound including music amplified through the sound systems
associated with the fairground rides, the exaggerated noise of machinery such as the hiss of
hydraulics and the rattle of metal against metal, a panoply of amplified special effects
1
See
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/panatrope
