ABSTRACT
This chapter examines what it means to be a performing musician in the digital age while recognising that “the digital revolution” in music was shaped by existing assumptions about creativity and professionalism as well as by historical consciousness. The rules of the rock band game could be remarkably detailed. Remembering his first tour with Inspiral Carpets, Tom Hingley writes that, “as with all groups, a massive over-importance is attached to the order in which band members are dropped off at home at the end of the tour”. Throughout the 1980s, it seems rock musicians were still trying to hang onto to the 1960s sense of counterculture by which rock was originally defined. For successful female musicians, rock’s retro ideology was perhaps less of a challenge than the broader cultural changes of the Thatcher era, particularly its competitive individualism and valorisation of conspicuous wealth.
