Occupying a substantial section of the Cunard Building on Liverpool’s waterfront, the British Music Experience is a permanent exhibition covering over 20,000 square feet and tracing the history of British popular music from 1945 to the present day. The museum arrived in Liverpool in 2017 after its original incarnation inside The O2 in Greenwich, London, where it opened in March 2009 with a private concert by The View. That first installation ran until April 2014, and on 10 September 2015 it was confirmed that the Cunard Building would be its new home.
Origins and Funding
The project was spearheaded by music industry figure Harvey Goldsmith, designed by Land Design Studio and funded by AEG, the owners of The O2. It was conceived to fill a gap in the UK heritage sector for rock and pop music – a gap that the National Centre for Popular Music in Sheffield had previously tried and failed to fill before closing due to poor visitor numbers. The British Music Experience operates as a charitable trust backed by £9.5 million of investment from AEG. Sponsorship from the Performing Rights Society, Gibson Guitars and Sennheiser has helped sustain the exhibition, and in 2010 the Co-operative Group signed on as the main sponsor, pledging to distribute 15,000 free tickets over three years.
Galleries and Interactive Exhibits
Rather than grouping its content into neat decades, the exhibition is arranged around the actual moments of cultural shift that reshaped British music across its 70-year span. Each gallery has an interactive timeline – a projected matrix of events with a foreground interface giving access to digital material, magazine-style headlines, images and footage. Visitors can explore exhibits including Hey DJ!, Anatomy of a Pop Star, Dance The Decades, Atlantic Crossing and the Gibson Interactive Studio, among others. These have been developed by specialist suppliers Clay Interactive Ltd, iso design and Studio Simple, with curatorial input from Robert Santelli, who also worked on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio and the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles. The original curatorial team of Paul Lilley, Sarah Clarke and Laura Bailey assembled the extensive collection of artefacts on display.