Patrimonialiser les musi The Spectre haunting Rock Music — The wallpaper, furniture, posters, and sound track were all of the right vintage — everything matched up, except for one detail: the music was being played on a stereo sound system with loudspeakers.
Then, in September , back in the footsteps of the Beatles, the group that has haunted me since childhood. I was invited to speak at Liverpool University.
I took advantage of the occasion to walk around the town, as it was my first visit. Museums devoted to the Beatles had sprung up almost like mushrooms along the docks.
Together with emeritus musicologist Philip Tagg, I decided to take a ride in one of the many taxis offering tourists a motorised pilgrimage in the footsteps of the most famous group of the town, the United Kingdom, and the whole world. The driver-cum-guide, with his hard-core skinhead look, really went to town for us, offering a route that would have found favour with historian Carlo Ginzburg, with his evidential paradigm.
The dominant note, however, was the disturbing feeling that never quite went away, despite the traces, signs, clues and symptoms of variable kinds: from the interpretation of an inscription on a gravestone that echoed the coded lyrics of songs to an official plaque authenticating the house where John Lennon grew up — it was difficult to tell for sure whether the reference was to something that had actually existed or merely to an artefact. Our taxi stopped in front of a wrought iron gate behind which stretched some kind of wasteland.
