History is made at night

'Cockney Rebels: Popular Music in Tower Hamlets, 1624-2003' is a free exhibition at Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archive...

'40 coffee bar night spots- some of them dimly lit cellars were teenagers go on unlimited necking parties - have earned for the seaside ...

'you Frug, Surf and Watusi and you don't need a band - Discotheque Dancing.  As of last night, the smart dances to do were the Frug,...

Stuart Hall (1932-2014), who died yesterday, was of course one of the founders of 'cultural studies', and one of the first British-b...

'I'm your man: the life of Leonard Cohen' (2012) is an excellent biography of everybody's favourite Jewish-Buddhist-Canadian...

So there I was talking to a neighbour and the Situationists came up in the conversation, and he says to me I think I've got some of th...

Playwright and actor Steven Berkoff (b.1937) wrote an autobiography 'Free Association' in 1997. Born in a Jewish family in Stepney ...

'Drag is about many things . It is about clothes and sex. It subverts the dress codes that tell us what men and women should look li...

The historian Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012) died yesterday at the age of 95.  There's plenty to criticise in his political judgement  as he...

Last week I had the opportunity to visit a rarely opened archive in South London. The basement of New Cross Learning (the volunteer-run l...

1950s Soho clubs are one of the enduring obsessions of this site, but I didn't realise until recently that there was a specifically an...

This article 'Retort Goes to a Party' by Holley Cantine was originally published in the Autumn 1951 issue of Retort, a journal of a...

'The extent to which the music is integrated with the literal meaning in soul is apparent in some of its basic stylistic conventions, th...

Alan Sillitoe died earlier this year, 50 years after he came to prominence with the classic post-war Northern working class novel, Saturday...

54 by Italian collective author Wu Ming is a novel set in 1954, with a fine plot involving the mafia, secret services, communist ex-partis...

Rob Young’s Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music is an ambitious, accomplished and entertaining survey of 100 years of music-...

In our search for the origins of rave , we have previously looked at the revivalist and trad jazz scenes in London from the late 1940s to th...

Most of the obituaries to Lena Horne (1917-2010), who died last weekend, mention her involvement in the civil rights movement. But what is ...

Jazz musician John Dankworth died last month . As this BBC film from 1959 shows, one of his early achievements was to chair the Stars Campai...

This sublime image has turned up on a number of blogs including Royal Quiet Deluxe and Lucky Charm (I was alerted to it by Drumz of the S...