Leisure, Popular Culture and Memory: The Invention of Dark Age Britain, Wales, England, and Middle-earth in the songs of Led Zeppelin

In the period of high modernity, and in the process of establishing the imperial nation-state of Great Britain, historians, archaeologists and enthusiastic amateurs searched high and low for material evidence and primary sources from what was called the Dark Ages. There is a gap in knowledge about this past, and all discussion rests on finding meaning in fading inscriptions, or dark earth, or trusting completely the writings of Bede and Gildas. The search for an identity and history for the nation for Great Britain was based on nationalist beliefs about Englishness, Britishness or Welshness. In the twentieth-century, the problem of Englishness, place and myth led Tolkien to write his Middle-earth stories in his leisure time. At the same time, the problem of Welshness or Britishness saw a growth in interest – in film and books - in Arthurian traditions, and a tourist interest in the Celtic fringe of Britain. In this paper, I show how the songs and album covers of Led Zeppelin, and their film The Song Remains the Same, draw upon both the work of Tolkien and the Arthurian traditions to construct ideas of masculine belonging in some mythological medieval time and place. While this constriction is idiosyncratic to the artists, they are drawing on and justifying the wider problem of England, Wales and Britain in leisure and culture

The Sound of Geopolitics:Popular Music and Political Rights

In respect of its subject matter, much popular music tends to be introspective and parochial. Its focus rarely falls upon international affairs and global politics. However, there are instances when popular music does engage with wider, political issues and even affects the relations between states. This article draws attention to some of these instances, from the recent imprisonment of Pussy Riot in Russia to Live 8 in 2005. It asks how and when music comes to engage with the geopolitics of human rights and what impact it might have