About

Late Voice presents the work of Richard Elliott, a writer, teacher and cultural musicologist based in Newcastle upon Tyne (UK). I am the author of the books Fado and the Place of Longing: Loss, Memory and the City (Ashgate, 2010), Nina Simone (Equinox, 2013), The Late Voice: Time, Age and Experience in Popular Music (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), The Sound of Nonsense (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018) and DJs do Guetto (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022). I’ve also published articles and reviews on popular music, literature, consciousness, memory, nostalgia, place and space, affect, language and technology, details of which can be found elsewhere on the site.

I’m a Senior Lecturer in Music at the International Centre for Music Studies at Newcastle University, where I specialise in popular music studies. Prior to this, I lived on the South Coast of England, where I taught courses on popular and classical music, contextual music studies, and music and media at the University of Sussex. I have also worked as a teacher of English for Academic Purposes, a journal editor and a reviewer of books and music.

My research interests are wide but mostly connect to ways in which music reflects and produces time and space. I’ve long been fascinated by the roles played by loss, memory, nostalgia and revolution in popular music. My work in these areas is heavily influenced by theories of place and spatiality and I am particularly interested in how music creates or evokes ‘memory places’ for individuals and communities. Just as important for me is the way that music soundtracks lives and histories and, to this end, I’ve written about the representation of time, age and experience in popular song.

More generally, I research, teach and write about various global popular musics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, music and cultural theory, urban musicology, the poetics of song and the politics of authenticity. I have a background in a variety of disciplines, with a BA in Comparative American Studies, a MA in Popular Culture and a PhD in Music.

Publications

BOOKS

DJs do Guetto (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022). More

The Sound of Nonsense (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018). More

The Late Voice: Time, Age and Experience in Popular Music (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). More

Nina Simone (Sheffield: Equinox, 2013). Series: ‘Icons of Popular Music’. More

Fado and the Place of Longing: Loss, Memory and the City (Ashgate, 2010). More

JOURNAL ARTICLES & BOOK CHAPTERS

Some of the essays listed here are available to read on this site – see ‘Essays‘ section.

‘The Reincarnation of an Egyptian Queen: Dystopian Lateness and Speculation in Nina Simone’s Afrofuturism’. Jazz Research Journal 15, no. 1-2 (2022): 25-50.

‘The Most Annoying Noise of All Time’. Australian Humanities Review 70 (2022): 58-66. http://australianhumanitiesreview.org/2022/11/30/the-most-annoying-noise-of-all-time/.

‘Aneka, “Japanese Boy” (1981)’, in One-Hit Wonders: An Oblique History of Popular Music, edited by Sarah Hill (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), 129-37.

‘Brilliant Disguises: Persona, Autobiography and the Magic of Retrospection in Bruce Springsteen’s Late Career’, Persona Studies 5/1 (2019): 17-32. DOI: https://doi.org/10.21153/psj2019vol5no1art848.

‘Sounding Out Popular Music History: A Musicological Approach’, in The Routledge Companion to Popular Music History and Heritage, edited by Sarah Baker, Catherine Strong, Lauren Istvandity and Zelmarie Cantillon (London: Routledge, 2018), 46-54.

‘Species of Sonic Spaces’. Literary Geographies 3/1 (2017): 69-86.

‘“Words Take the Place of Meaning”: Sound, Sense and Politics in the Music of Robert Wyatt’, in The Singer-Songwriter in Europe: Paradigms, Politics and Place, edited by Isabelle Marc and Stuart Green (London: Routledge, 2016), 51-64.

‘“My Tongue Gets t-t-t-”: Words, Sense and Vocal Presence in Van Morrison’s It’s Too Late to Stop Now’. Twentieth-Century Music 13/1 (2016): 53-76.

‘Words from the New World: Adventure and Memory in Patti Smith’s Late Voice’, in Patti Smith: Outside, edited by Claude Chastagner (Montpellier: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2015), 113-35.

‘Across the Evening Sky: The Late Voices of Sandy Denny, Judy Collins and Nina Simone’, in Gender, Age and Musical Creativity, edited by Catherine Haworth and Lisa Colton (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 141-53.

‘“Time and Distance Are No Object”: Holiday Records, Representation and the Nostalgia Gap’, Volume! 11/1 (2014): 131-43.

‘You can’t just say “words”: Literature and Nonsense in the Work of Robert Wyatt’, in Litpop: Writing and Popular Music, edited by Rachel Carroll and Adam Hansen (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 49-62.

‘The Choreography of Longing: Songs, Screens and Space in Carlos Saura’s Fados’, Quaderns de Cine 9 (2014): 71-8.

‘So Transported: Nina Simone, “My Sweet Lord” and the (Un)folding of Affect’, in Sound, Music, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience, edited by Marie Thompson and Ian Biddle (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 75-90.

‘Free, Confused and Lonely: On Age, Pop, Fashion and Incompatibility‘, Radical Musicology Volume 6 (2012-2013), http://www.radical-musicology.org.uk/2012/Elliott.htm. PDF

‘Public Consciousness, Political Conscience and Memory in Latin American Nueva Canción’, in Music and Consciousness: Philosophical, Psychological and Cultural Perspectives, edited by David Clarke and Eric Clarke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 327-41.

‘The Same Distant Places: Bob Dylan’s Poetics of Place and Displacement’, Popular Music and Society 32/2 (2009): 249-70.

‘Popular Music and/as Event: Subjectivity, Love and Fidelity in the Aftermath of Rock ’n’ Roll’, Radical Musicology 3. (2008).
http://www.radical-musicology.org.uk/2008/Elliott.htm. More

‘Reconstructing the Event: Spectres of Terror in Chilean Performance’, British Postgraduate Musicology 8.
PDF

ENCYCLOPEDIA ENTRIES

‘Aging and Popular Music’, in Encyclopedia of Gerontology and Population Aging, edited by Danan Gu and Matthew E. Dupre (Cham: Springer, 2019). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69892-2_259-2

‘Beatboxing’, in Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018).

I am the revising author for the following entries in Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World originally authored by Richard Middleton:

• ‘Singing’ (revised 2018)
• ‘Solo’ (revised 2018)
• ‘Song’ (revised 2018)
• ‘Songwriter’ (revised 2018)
• ‘Vocalized Tone’ (revised 2018)
• ‘Voice as Instrument’ (revised 2018)