12 Articles by:
Ben Thompson is a critic and ghostwriter, and the host of The London Ear on Resonance FM.
Modernist architecture in India and colonial West Africa may have been introduced by jobbing English architects, but new generations of local architects quickly made the style their own. A new exhibition at the V&A tells the story.
The British Library’s new Beyond the Bassline exhibition is an ambitious attempt to showcase five hundred years of black British music — but fails to do this rich history justice.
Chris Blackwell’s memoir of his life between Jamaica and Britain is attuned to the uses of a posh accent in the post-colonial music industry.
‘Grime-punk’ duo Bob Vylan talk to Tribune about Margaret Thatcher, Jimmy Savile, and the importance of pissing people off.
Celebrated critic Greg Tate passed away earlier this month. His music writing contained multitudes, mixing together politics, poetry and theory – and earned him renown as the ‘godfather of hip-hop journalism’.
The British left of the 1950s eschewed modern jazz in favour of folk and trad – but Eric Hobsbawm bucked the trend, writing a secret music column about the radical potential of ‘jazz solidarity.’
Four new books show the emergence of a new tradition of London music writing, which swaps myth and hyperbole for the poetry found in harsh political realities.
Poet John Cooper Clarke’s memoirs are an addictively readable set-text of a drug-fuelled, working-class and autodidactic life.
Mike Davis and Jon Wiener’s history of Los Angeles in the 1960s can sometimes feel as long as the decade itself, but is a monumental and moving tribute to a heroic, violently suppressed moment of possibility.
New books by veteran music writers Ian Penman and David Toop show that, at its best, there is no higher category than music journalism.
London’s 1960s new town, Thamesmead, is remembered in a new book. A former resident wonders what went wrong, and where.
Historian and philosopher Paul Gilroy gives a critical assessment of racial politics in Brexit Britain.