Aylesbury - Popular Culture

Popular Culture

There used to be a club in Aylesbury in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s renamed the Friars' Club in 1969 where many of the top bands of the time played, including Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, Cream, Otis Redding, The Clash, Hawkwind, Queen, Genesis, U2, David Bowie, Marillion & The Ramones. Friars' Club celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2009, by holding three special concerts that reflected the various phases of the club's musical history. The first concert in June featured the Edgar Broughton Band, the Groundhogs and the Pretty Things. In October, Stiff Little Fingers, Penetration and the Disco Students appeared to celebrates the punk/new wave era. In November, Kid Creole & the Coconuts and China Crisis played.

The band Marillion have a close association with Aylesbury. They originally formed there, with the band's first single, 1982's "Market Square Heroes" taking its title inspiration from Aylesbury's Market Square. The band continue to be based in the area, with their Racket Records studio still close to Aylesbury, and in 2007 the band performed together with their original lead singer Fish for the first time in 19 years at Aylesbury.

Scenes from the film A Clockwork Orange were filmed in Friars' Square in Aylesbury, but did not make it to the final cut. This is the 'Librarian Scene' where outtakes from the shoot and rehearsal can be seen in Alison Castle's The Stanley Kubrick Archives published by Taschen. The opening scene when the droogs beat up the elderly Irish man is mistakenly cited as being filmed in the underpass linking Friars' Square Shopping Centre with the railway station. Although Christiane Kubrick's book Stanley Kubrick — A Life In Pictures states this, the underpass in the film has a different shape to the one in Aylesbury and these sequences were actually filmed in Wandsworth.

According to Malcolm McDowell on Camera 2 in the summer of 2002: "We did a sequence in Aylesbury. The town square was decorated with giant rubber ducks, weird animals, they were huge, and we accosted an old guy from the library. I ripped out these priceless books that he had and I threw them up. I remember my line, it was taken from the book, it was: 'There's a mackerel of a cornflake for you.' The pages from the ripped books fall like confetti. The retribution was that Alex goes to the library when he is cured and all the old codgers in the library go: 'You were the one!'"

The County Court building and Aylesbury Market Square regularly feature in the BBC Television series Judge John Deed.

Aylesbury Methodist Church holds an annual organ recital, which has become very popular and attracts prominent organists from throughout the UK.

The Roald Dahl Children's Gallery in Church Street, Aylesbury, is a children's museum in honour of novelist Roald Dahl that opened on 23 November 1996. Aylesbury hosts the Roald Dahl Festival, a procession of giant puppets based on his characters, on July 2.

Comedian and actor Ronnie Barker (1929–2005) began his acting career in the town in the late 1940s and in September 2010, almost five years after his death, a bronze statue of him was unveiled by actor David Jason and Barker's one time co-star Ronnie Corbett (the other half of the Two Ronnies) on a new public place in Exchange Street.