Imagining the scene and the memory of the F-Club: Talking about lost punk and postpunk spaces in Leeds

Abstract

Abstract The F-Club in Leeds, UK, was a punk and post-punk night club from the 1970s to the 1980s. Leeds as a city has a reputation for alternative music scenes, and the F-Club is part of the history recalled by musicians and fans locally. In this article, we interview people who publicly identified with going to the F-Club back in their youth, to map connections as well as memories, identity-work and myth-making. We are interested in leisure spaces and leisure lives, as well as cultural spaces and identity-work. We explore the history of the F-Club, its place in wider networks, and the memories of it by those who attended it. We explore the ways in which the F-Club is remembered and talked about by self-declared members of the scenes around the club. Our interest is not so much in mapping and understanding the identity-work and the community of the F-Club as it actually happened, but in how our respondents construct these things now from their own memories. This article also contributes to methodological and theoretical debates about network analysis against ethnography in the sociology of music, and defends the latter as a way to construct an emerging public sociology of leisure.