Yet another excellent monograph to be published by Duke University Press that we’ve indexed recently, Gavin Butt’s forthcoming No Machos or Pop Stars: When the Leeds Art Experiment Went Punk is a thorough-going history of one of the most influential (and least studied) regional post-punk music scenes. In the aftermath of punk’s advent, many art students in the northern English city Leeds began to branch out and away from traditional expressions of visual art and began making music influenced and inspired in part by ideas from the world of avant-garde art. Structured by sharp historical and cultural analysis and based on extensive interviews with members of Leeds-based acts such as Gang of Four, Mekons, Delta 5, Fad Gadget, Soft Cell, Scritti Politti, and others, No Machos or Pop Stars details “how England’s state-funded education policy brought together art students from different social classes to create a fertile ground for musical experimentation,” resulting in dark-toned art punk and electro-dance music indebted to the ideas and modes of deconstruction, the Situationist International, and performance art. To be published in October 2022, you can find out more information about this forthcoming work at the Duke University Press website.
SOUTHWEST HUMANITIES 