‘A Different Vibe and a Different Place’: Re-telling the Riots – A Round Table Discussion

Abstract

This chapter is an edited transcript of a discussion that took place as part of a one-day event, ‘Re-telling the Riots’, organised in Bristol by the Subcultures Network. By bringing together participants and commentators we explored the role of the local in youth culture, as well as the role of youth culture in the forms of resistance and rioting seen in cities across the country in the early 1980s and the summer of 2011. Although there was a strong sense of the specificity of local experiences within Bristol, and of the networks that facilitated forms of resilience and resistance in communities, the Bristol experience simultaneously spoke of the national context. What emerged was a complex sense of community building with youth at the heart of it, and of the role of popular music as both a shared experience and as a way of building a shared historical memory. Participants included academic Paul Gilroy and musicians Shane Baldwin, Joshua Moses and Mike Darby, who now runs Bristol Archive Records.