Dr Kevin Donnelly, Reader in Film Studies at the University has recently been awarded the Southwest Popular and American Culture Association’s 2016 Peter C. Rollins Book Award in the category of Film/Television for his book, Magical Musical Tour: Rock and Pop in Film Soundtracks.
Magical Musical Tour is the first sustained and focused survey to engage the intersection of film and music on both an aesthetic and industrial level. The chapters include historically-inspired reviews discussing numerous films and musicians, whilst others feature more concentrated and detailed case studies of individual films.
Exploring the history of the intimate bond between film and music, Kevin charts the upheaval that rock’n’roll caused in the mid-1950s to the more technical aspects regarding ‘tracking’ and ‘scoring’, running from David Bowie’s ‘score that never was’ for The Man Who Fell to Earth to censored rap music in Bad Lieutenant.
Published in 2015, the book is highly regarded among film academics:
‘By syncing “1, 2, 3, 4!” with “Lights, Camera, Action!”, Donnelly offers an illuminating recontextualization of cinema’s pop aspirations and pop imagination – from the classics to the curate’s eggs. Magical Musical Tour is one of the precious few studies to venture out into that contested interzone of vinyl and celluloid, and film criticism and liner notes, and across paralleled galaxies of star systems. Donnelly mediates deftly between the projected visualities of pop music soundscapes, and the bootleg mixtapes embedded in feature films.’ said Benjamin Halligan, Director of Postgraduate Research Studies for the College of Arts and Social Science, University of Salford, UK and author of Desires for Reality: Radicalism and Revolution in Western European Film.