Using the example of Cliff Richard fans, this article investigates to what extent the rites and rituals exercised in fandom can be regarded as representations of a religious form as understood by the French sociologist Émile Durkheim in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Because empirical research has established its significance, the pop concert experience and its echoing effects are used as a starting point to explore the thesis that fans draw and cultivate a distinction between a profane and a sacred domain in their lives. These suggestions are further enriched by Randall Collins' and Gabriele Mordt's analyses of passions. This article adopts their concept of the sacred object as a passion-preserving device. In addition, the argument of popular music scholar Daniel Cavicchi (based on Bruce Springsteen fans) is taken one step further. Finally, I suggest a typology of fan experience that differentiates between primary interaction ritual, secondary interaction ritual, the cult of the individual and special rites.

Although yodelling has been a part of English-language popular music since the early decades of the 19th century, it lacks prestige in contemporary popular music. This essay charts the change in the yodel's fortunes from its use in the early 19th century as a signifier for ideas relating to a pastoral Golden Age to its present-day association with hillbillies and comic stereotypes. It examines the contexts in which yodelling was most frequently heard in order to elucidate its primary associations and connotations. By examining the changing attitudes towards the ideas associated with yodelling, the essay analyses the gradual decline in the prestige of the yodelled voice.

This article responds to Frith and Cloonan's (2008) call for researchers considering the relationship between the state and popular music to analyse more closely the ideologies of governance that undergird music policy. Building on Cloonan's ‘promotional state’ and drawing on recent New Zealand experience, this paper shows how New Zealand's Labour government (1999–2008) developed policies to support the export of ‘Kiwi’ pop which requires a reconsideration of state music policy as interventions in the market. The work of the New Zealand Music Commission in generating and coordinating working partnerships with diverse music industry actors illustrates emerging forms of ‘after neo-liberal’ ideology and governance, wherein state-related actors and musicians each and together adapt to market arrangements through supply side, social inclusion and new institutional policy settings and modalities. This article offers points of comparison to types of ideological and governing/institutional formations we can expect to see emerging in promotional states elsewhere.

The Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) is one of the most-watched entertainment programmes in Europe. Apparent national differences in using the show as an instrument for national-cultural representation can be explained by reducing its complexity to seven essential and interconnected ‘dimensions of meaning’.