1

Notes for Finland

Introduction

Thanks to Kimi and Kari for having me and to Martin for helping to organise the event. I am
very pleased to be in Turku.

Today I’m going to speak about a couple of Scottish singers who probably don’t mean very
much to most people in the room.

And if you look at the slide of Kenneth McKellar and Lulu you may well wonder what you
have let yourself in for. I’ll introduce you to some of their music in a few minutes.

You are probably already rightly wondering ‘is this not a bit self-indulgent’?

And it probably seems that I have come a long way to come to talk about some artists who
have probably not featured too much in your thoughts recently, if ever.

But that’s ok – it is kind of the point.

But if you forgive me for using some close to home – for me at least - examples, the main
point of the paper is to address a much more fundamental debate about how, as
researchers, we study popular music, the music profession and the industries around it.

In short, I’m using McKellar and Lulu to raise questions about research methods, and if
nothing else, I think I can make some claim to originality on that front.

And while I am using musical examples, I would hope that these methodological debates are
also of interest elsewhere in the cultural industries.
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My main argument is that close, analytical studies and the study of musicians’ career paths
– what I am going to call a kind of thick biography - is a hugely useful and underutilised
route to widening our understanding of the music profession and industries around it.

My point here is not necessarily to rubbish the methods that have dominated previous
studies of the music industries, but to highlight what I think can be added to them by taking
something of an ethnographic/ biographical turn.

So that’s the main claim.

Structure SLIDE

Here’s how I’m going to do it.

To begin I’ll give an overview of some of the existing literature to identify what I see as the
problems.

I will then talk specifically to my own work in the last ten years or so: my PhD, work with
Martin on the music industries and musical labour, and my most recent research on music
as it has appeared on Scottish television, which is where the two examples stem from.

In doing so, I will reflect on how my own approach to researching the music industries has
moved away from top-down studies of big companies, organisations and institutions to
thinking about the roles and agency of individual actors within them.

In the third part, I will introduce and outline the careers of Kenneth McKellar and Lulu, as
very short case studies.

And in the fourth, I will give examples of how, by closely studying their careers as
entertainers, I have been forced to think again about the workings of music industries
during the period.
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Here I will discuss what I think are three hugely significant, but neglected aspects of the
music industries in the 1960s and 1970s as evidence of the value of this type of
methodological approach.

Finally, I will make a few remarks about how we can conduct such research and its value in
more contemporary contexts.

But to begin I’m going to take a step back.

Part 1 / Approaches and Problems

SLIDE

So, I’m going to take a step back to begin and look at some of the existing literature around
the music industries and musicians from both within academia and beyond.

Music industries
Ten years ago, Martin and I problematised this and much of that critique remains valid.

And while there have been several attempts to unpack and theorise changes in the way
music has been distributed in the digital era since, I would argue that there are four main
problems with the existing literature.

Firstly, there is still no holistic contemporary account of the music industries, only curdled
fragments that focus on individual sectors, debates or, very occasionally, artists.

Secondly, it is characterised by an understandable preference for top down approaches with

a focus on recording. Third is the near complete lack of musicians in the accounts and fourth
is the fact that the best work is now extremely dated.

I’ll briefly say a bit more about each.

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It is perhaps not a coincidence that most of the best accounts come from, and are largely
evocative of the glory days of the recording industry between the 1960s and 1990s.

Here I am thinking of the pioneering work of Hirsch (1969, 1972), Peterson and Berger
(1975) and Frith (1978) in the 1970s through to Keith Negus’ work in the 1990s (1992, 1996,
1999).

But these all, to a greater or lesser extent, focus on trying to explain how the record
companies, not the artists signed to them, work. More recent accounts have been similarly
limited in their scope.

In the best of these, Mike Jones (2012) and Trajce Cvetkovski (2105) have both made
substantial contributions in trying to theorise the operations of certain parts of the
industries, but both continue to marginalise musicians within in the music industries.

Indeed, Jones’ chapter on musicians - ‘musicians in four dimensions’ - is a prime example of

this.

It is notable for its lack of attention to any specific musicians, with only a few mentioned in
passing as examples. He argues that ‘where the music industry is concerned, musicians are
not musicians, they are acts and music is not music, it is the centre of a symbolic good
created from a text originated by musicians whose every aspect of the performance of
music and of themselves as musicians makes up the text’ (2011: 51).

From this perspective, it is obvious why musical careers may not be of much interest – not
least because they would produce a degree of complexity that would disrupt a neat
theoretical construct in favour of the lived reality of musicians’ engagement with the music
industries.

In short, it is more complex than this and by focusing purely on the music industry he also
ignores a huge amount of musical activity – something I will come to in my later examples.
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If these represent some problems with the attempts to fully understand the music
industries, then there is a small body of academic literature – mostly over twenty-five years
old, which has paid more attention to the musicians than the industries.

The work of ethnographers Ruth Finnegan (1989) and Sara Cohen (1991) on relatively
unknown musicians in Milton Keynes and Liverpool remain the best examples of such a
detailed approach.

Even older is Geoffrey Stokes’ Star Making Machinery (1977), still one of the best of
accounts of a single artist – Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen – and their
dealings with the music business of the time.

And while Jones is correct to note that he does little in the way of theorising these
encounters, Stokes provides the type of hard data and evidence lacking in Jones’ own work.

This inability to see the possibilities of in other approaches is perhaps the best argument for
a combination of theory and biography, of journalistic and academic approaches across
popular music studies.

There are some excellent examples at this intersection, just not many of them.

Dave Laing’s work on George Michael (2000) and Elton John (2007) is exemplary in
combining academic rigour with journalistic flair and a feel for the main story. In both
instances, it tells us about the artist, the music industries and why these stories are of
greater importance.

Likewise, Tim Lawrence’s (2009) biography of Arthur Russell, Marcus O’Dair’s biography of
Robert Wyatt (2014) and work by Emily Lordi (2016) on Donny Hathaway all offer
exceptional insights into the music industries while conforming to relatively straight
biographical conventions.
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Simon Frith, writing in 1983, was right to note that biographies are often ‘the dominant
source of pop information’ (271) and to predict that ‘the documentation of rock in particular
is going to depend increasingly on biographical material’ (ibid).

But surveying the field generally, it seems that this has not transpired and biography has
struggled to find legitimacy as approach with popular music studies more broadly.

Part 2 / My research

I will now discuss how I have dealt with this in my own work before looking at the examples.

I guess my own research has shifted towards biographical studies partly because of
frustration with existing approaches and a growing realisation of its value in informing
accounts of the industries and institutions within them.

It wasn’t always thus though.

My PhD focused on the music industries by looking at the changes in them from the
perspective of the new types of company that emerged at the start of this century. It was a
classic, top-down, institutional approach. No musicians were harmed in – or even close to –
the analysis.

With Martin and Simon Frith, some of the ideas in it were developed in papers about the
organisational structures of the music industries (2007) and its place in relation the wider
creative industries (2009) and academia (2011).

But this began to change in the next project I worked on with Martin, a history of the British
Musicians’ Union.

Outwardly, it may have looked like more of the same – an institutional history looking at a
superstructural part of the music industries.
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But the most satisfying aspect of it –as a researcher – was the level of detail and colour that
we added to such a history from the use of archival material and the use of interviews. At its
heart, we saw it as a social history more than an institutional one.

As part of the project, we interviewed twenty-five people, chosen for their connections to
the Union. This meant they were chosen not because of their fame or reputation, but
because of their role in the Union’s history and the story they had to tell.

Most of the interviewees were over the age of fifty and their careers stretched back, in a
couple of instances, to the 1940s.

While they gave us insight into the union's workings, it was only towards the end of the
project that I realised that by asking them, in the first instance, to talk about their careers as
musicians, that we got a different, parallel, and perhaps more interesting story.

In short, this was the story of British music through the second half of the twentieth
century, from orchestras and big bands through skiffle and early rock-‘n’-roll to synth pop
and beyond.

Most of those we spoke to had little or no commercial success and some gave up playing
music professionally to work for the Union, but their life stories filled in considerable detail
around what it was to be a a worker in the music profession over a large part of the Union’s
120 years.

So, we ended up with a parallel unintended and unpublished outcome – an oral history of
aspects of the British music profession in the second half of the twentieth century built
around the life stories relayed to us by our interviewees.

A similar pattern has emerged in my current research. My study of music on Scottish

television has lead me to examine in detail the careers of some of its early stars drawing on
material from archives.
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Specifically, the BBC written archives and those of The Stage magazine and daily Scottish
newspapers offer the kind of information that can build a real understanding of the music,
television and entertainment industries of the time.

I’ll now move on to discuss this in more detail.

Part 3: 2 careers in television and entertainment

Introduction
For today, I have chosen to talk about Kenneth McKellar and Lulu but there are others I
could have chosen from the same era.

But the difference is age, gender and musical genre make for an interesting comparative
study.

Another reason for turning my attention to them is that neither has been particularly well-
served by existing biographies. The one account of McKellar’s life (Cameron 2011) is truly
dreadful even by the low standards of the genre, while Lulu’s two autobiographies (1985,
2002) at least offer detailed accounts of her career, even if they are often lean towards the
personal rather than professional.

This is perhaps surprising given that both were major figures in the history of Scottish – and
British – television.

I’ll now explain why and introduce you to some of their work in and around the music and
television industries.

McKellar
McKellar was a tenor singer whose career spanned from the late 1940s until he retired in
the 1990s. He predominantly sang traditional Scottish songs, but embraced a variety of
styles, including classical, church music and even easy listening pop for his dalliance with the
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Eurovision Song Contest in 1966. He was rarely seen in public without his trademark kilt /
Highland regalia.

Here he is performing at Eurovision in 1966.

His career was largely defined by recording and television.

His lengthy recording career, which began in the 1950s, saw him produce over thirty albums
for the Decca label. During the 1960s, he was routinely producing two albums a year, and, in
1963, was the label’s second biggest selling artist, behind Mantovani.

Many of these sales were driven by his regular appearances on television. Since the 1950s
he had been a regular on shows that broadcast in both Scotland alone and across the rest of
the UK. He became synonymous with St. Andrew’s Day, New Year and Burns’ Night for
television audiences around the UK.

McKellar kept recording until 1996 and retired from performing in 1997 at the age of
seventy. He died in 2010.

Lulu
Lulu may be more familiar.

She arguably became the first Scottish pop star in 1964 when her hit single, a cover of the
Isley Brothers’ ‘Shout’ propelled her to national fame. Over the following years she enjoyed
global success, most notably having an American number 1 single with ‘To Sir, With Love’
from the Sidney Poitier film of the same name.
CLIP
In the 1960s and 1970s she collaborated with Maurice Gibb of the Bee Gees and David
Bowie and had a few intermittent hits. In later life, she enjoyed an unlikely alliance with
Take That on ‘Relight My Fire’ rejuvenated her career and she continues to perform and
record.
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Like McKellar’s, her career was closely linked to television – initially in Scotland, but then
across the UK.

Her first performances were on a Glasgow based show, Stramash, but success quickly
propelled her to Top of the Pops and other UK wide shows. From the late sixties until the
mid-seventies, she was a fixture on the BBC, hosting prime time variety shows like Lulu’s
back in Town and It’s Lulu.

Show Clip.

There are a few general points that can be made about these two artists from the very brief
biographical detail I have given.

Both built incredibly successful careers with longevity – both made money from music for
over fifty years, or their entire adult lives.

Arguably, both were in the right place at the right time. Technology and geography were
both important factors in manufacturing their stardom.

The growth of the recording industry and television respectively provided them a vehicle for
producing and distributing their music and a highly effective medium for advertising it.

In terms of geography, the politics of Scotland within the UK provided both with
opportunities at least in television.

Because there is a degree of devolution within the BBC and independent television in the UK
is organised on a regional (or in Scotland’s case, national basis) it perhaps allowed both
more opportunities to appear on the medium than their English counterparts, especially
McKellar.

While his identity was tied up with notions of Scottishness and his primary market a
combination of the domestic and Scottish diaspora, Lulu was criticised for being quick to
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divest her Scottish roots (and accent) as she sought to appeal to a truly international
audience.

However, it was the same changes in technology and ease of travel that allowed both to
forge international careers though not always reputation.

Hopefully that offers some brief biography for those who are unfamiliar.

I will now turn to some very specific instances from their careers that highlight some of the
wider points about the way the music industries worked at the time that I think have been
overlooked.

Here I am going to focus on career choices and the influences behind them before looking
more generally at the management of individual fame and celebrity.

Part 4 / What Lulu and McKellar tell us about the music industries.

Introduction

To do this, I am going extrapolate three things of note from their careers and provide
examples.

The first argument is that we cannot, and should not, consider the music industries outside
the entertainment industry more widely.

Secondly, I will argue the importance of managers and agents in making both creative and
business decisions in artists’ careers, raising questions of agency and

Thirdly, I will claim that the idea of musicians as entrepreneurial brands is not a new one –
both these acts were examples of this fifty years ago.

Career opportunities?
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So, the first thing to note is that, like many others of their era, Lulu and McKellar were
operating across all aspects of the wider entertainment industries and far more than mere
voices.

I have already spoken a bit about their recordings and appearances on television, so will
now use some of the thick biography I was talking about earlier to explain their activities in
other fields.

Their career choices, whether determined by taste, economics or luck and whether decided
by them as artists, their advisors or a combination of both, are revealing.

And it is also important to recognise the full range of their activities these artists undertook
– both were extremely hard working, though the fields in which they operated sometimes
overlapped and sometimes diverged. I will look at them turn.

McKellar makes for an interesting case study as, by the time he began working as a touring
opera singer for the Carl Rosa Opera Company in 1953, he had already built something of a
freelance musical career while studying at the University of Aberdeen and Royal College of
Music in the early 1950s.

He first auditioned for the BBC in 1947 and appeared regularly on radio shows from the
BBC’s Aberdeen studios.

He had signed to Parlophone Records in 1952 made his first television appearance in 1953,
when producer, Eddie Fraser, contacted him and asked ‘can you do television 17th August
wearing kilt? Reply paid’ (BBC WAC).

McKellar subsequently launched his career on a live performance from HMS Caledonia
which was based in the Scottish port of Rosyth. For this he was paid £7 and 7s and shortly
afterwards he ended his stint with Carl Rosa, finding himself unsuited to touring as part of a
company. He chose to be a freelance musical worker over a waged one. In 1953.
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Recording and television constituted much of McKellar’s work in the 1950s and 1960s – he
released 17 albums between 1959 and 1970, was a regular on BBC’s White Heather Club,
The Kilt Is My Delight as well as having his own show, A Song For Everyone, from 1959.

But my point is that it was far from all he did – he was versatile both musicially and beyond.

He moved seamlessly from comedic musical turn in pantomimes to performing opera for
Benjamin Britten; interpreting the songs of Robert Burns and appearing on Eurovision.

But he also performed live regularly, touring America for the first time in 1959 and focusing
on ex-pat audiences in South Africa, New Zealand and Australia along with occasional forays
in to Europe, usually part of all Scottish variety shows.

He continued to appear regularly in the theatre, and was a regular in pantomimes

throughout the 1960s. These drew huge audiences and stars were well rewarded.

A Wish for Jamie – a show starring McKellar - drew a total audience of 240,000 in 1960 at
the Alhambra Theatre in Glasgow. Unsurprisingly, given its success, it and various sequels,
were repeated throughout the 1960s.

Acting, alongside singing and comedy were all part of his act, as and when he saw fit. In his
later career, he wrote a sketch for Monty Python, but became a typecast, tartan clad
representation of a very particular notion of Scottishness.

Not for nothing, but perhaps harshly, both McKellar and Lulu feature in journalist Allan
Brown’s book Fifty People Who Screwed Up Scotland (2014).

Lulu, although operating across a much narrower range of music, was also quickly cast as an
all-round entertainer.
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Her initial recordings and tours were with the four-piece backing band, The Luvvers, but
after appearing on some package tours in the UK and an unlikely tour of Poland, she
decided to pursue a solo career, which rapidly diverted her from music into acting and
television presenting.

Despite some chart success in 1964 and 1965, by the start of the following year, Lulu was
otherwise engaged, without the Luvvers.

Initially, this was to be a move into television. She had been offered the chance to host a
series of six shows of her own by David Bell at BBC Scotland, but engagement that was
cancelled when she received the offer to appear in To Sir, With Love.

But both acting and television were to be the focus of her career for much of the next ten
years. They meant that she not only appeared in films but on television, firstly with Mike
Yarwood and Ray Fells as one of ‘Three of a Kind’ in 1967, before hosting her own shows on
primetime television, with audiences in the tens of millions.

As with McKellar, theatre was to be an important source of work and income. She appeared
in pantomime at Wimbledon Theatre’s Babes in the Wood in 1966 and in the 1970s and 80s
she became synonymous with the perennial Peter Pan, in which she starred in Manchester
and at the London Palladium.

What is clear is that both McKellar and Lulu responded to the many opportunities presented
to them during the early part of their careers and that these were often a result of, but not
directly related to, their musical and television careers.

Singing may have been what got them noticed, and they were undoubtedly part of the
music industries, but there was far more to them, as both entertainers and business people
/entrepreneurs.

So, my first point, based on these examples, about the music industries is that in the 1960s,
they simply could not be viewed separately from the wider entertainment industries.
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There is much more to be said here about cause and effect, but I’ll move on to consider
examples of how these choices were influenced and determined by those around them.

Starmakers and Svengalis

Both McKellar and Lulu had important deal makers working on their behalf, almost from the
beginning of their careers.

For most of the period, McKellar was self managed, making most decisions himself, working
with his agent and secretary.

From the outset of her career, Lulu, who was 16 in 1964, was managed by Marion Massey,
who remained in post until 1989. Her agent, Dick Katz, was also to play a pivotal role in her
career.

I’ll say a bit about the agents first and then briefly talk about Massey’s role.

In most careers, the appointment of an agent is a signifier of a certain level of success – that
there is work to be had and money to share from performances. This was certainly true of
both these examples.

It is also worth noting that in the 1960s, agents booked not just live performances but also
TV and radio bookings, theatrical work and public appearances. In other words, they had an
involvement in all the artists’ activities except recording and thus looking at their decision
making gives an excellent insight into the relative importance of different types of work at a
given point in time.

When, in 1955, McKellar notified the BBC that he wanted ‘all his bookings to be made
through Fosters’ Agency, London’ (WAC/ McKellar), he now had an intermediary (Hyman
Zahl) who could trade off television against tours or appearances in the theatre – usually
based on which would generate most income for his client.
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For example, Zahl delayed various television performances by McKellar when he was
offered the chance to appear in pantomime in 1958.

At the time, he was being offered £200 per show to make a series of six editions of A Song
For Everyone, against £3500 for a ten week run in His appearances at the Empire Theatre in
Glasgow, on the other hand, netted him £350 per week for ten weeks. This would be the
equivalent of around £77,000 or €70,000 now. Not bad for ten weeks’ work.

We can therefore learn from this that, at this point, in Scotland, the tipping point suggested
by Murray Forman, where ‘one night on TV was worth weeks at the Paramount’ (2012) had
not quite been reached.

Disappointed by losing McKellar’s services, the BBC then sought to negotiate a new, more
lucrative deal with him.

To this end, Zahl was then able to harness McKellar’s star power and interest from the
newly formed STV, to secure McKellar an exclusive (to television) contract with the BBC in
1961 on highly favourable terms.

This guaranteed him a certain number of shows per year on television at a rate of £400 per
show and limited the windows for recording these to allow him to tour internationally and
continue to make summer and Christmas season theatrical appearances.

Similar choices and tipping points can be seen in Lulu’s career, though these were perhaps
more complicated because of her age.

As a minor at the time she was embarking on her career, the need for management was
perhaps more pressing, and while Massey adopted a more paternal role, both her and Lulu’s
agent, Dick Katz, played huge roles in shaping Lulu’s career in the 1960s commercially,
musically and personally.
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Perhaps the most notable instance of such an intervention was May 1966, when Katz wrote
to the Television Contracts department at the BBC to decline a proposed BBC Scotland
series, which would have given Lulu her first star vehicle on national television. He explained
that:

‘her manager, Marian Massey, informs us that she feels obliged, in the interests of Lulu’s
career to accept a major film offer (To Sir, With Love) which has come along for seven
weeks, starting May 30th’ (BBC WAC SC 88/2/1).

The resultant success of the film and its title song in the USA effectively launched Lulu as an
international star and provided a solid financial base for years to come. And while rejecting
a TV series may have appeared a risky move, it only delayed her career in British television.

By moving into film and television, Lulu rapidly became ambivalent about going back to
touring, though she continued to record and signed a deal with Atco Records in 1968.

She reflected that television ‘offered a comfort zone. Instead of rattling around the country
in draughty old vans and living on takeaways, I had my own dressing room with my name on
the door, a hairstylist and make up girl. I had a musical director, an orchestra and a set
designer. It’s very easy to be seduced by these things’ (2002: 94).

I hope these two examples show how managers and agents were not only crucial to these
specific careers but also highlight various tipping points in terms of the influence of different
parts of the 1960s music industries.

Brand extension

Lastly, I want to turn briefly to my point about McKellar and Lulu as brands, even though
they were not thought of in that way at the time.

Both could use their fame to generate income from commercial activities, albeit to different
extents.
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Outside music, McKellar wrote books and comedy sketches for Monty Python, and used his
fame to work for charities and undertake commercial ventures. Here he is opening a branch
of Woolworths in Edinburgh in 1970. PIC

For Lulu, there was more on offer. With widespread exposure in the press and on television
she was a magnet for companies wanting to sell their products. She advertised soap, beauty
products, shampoo, Freemans catalogues (for twenty years) and shoes (CLIP).

My final point then is that the idea of stars as brands, like the recently popular notion of the
360-degree music business and artists within it, advocated by the likes of Diane Hughes et al
(2016) in The New Music Industries is not a new one. It was ever thus.

Part 4 / some conclusions

To conclude, what I have tried to do today is make a plea for more biographical research in
relation to the music industries and popular music more generally.

Although I have had a relatively small amount of time today, I have tried to show using two
examples, how, as Jenns Zinn argues, empirical research into single cases can still make for
compelling analysis of wider social, political and industrial contexts (2004: 8).

I would go further and claim that, as researchers, we need to be willing, as Gabrielle

Rosenthal argues, to be less reluctant to generalise (2004: 50) from such single case studies.

And given that the popular music of the late twentieth century is well documented and that
many of its protagonists are still alive and have revealing and stories to tell, there is a solid
base for more than just, as critics of narrative research would have it, reliving the past.

Instead, such thick biography can help both explain the past and in doing so help us
understand the present.
 19

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