History is made at night

An early start for the long hot summer of 2011, with the warm weather prompting people to head out on to the streets and thegreat outdoors. ...

Just got back from today's Justice 4 Smiley Culture demonstration in London, pretty impressive with maybe a couple of thousand people he...

An early regulation against noisy parties ('revyling') was included as Rule 30 in London's The Lawes of the Market in 1595. Seem...

At the Salvation Army charity shop on Deptford High Street this week I came across this classic 12" from 1980. I knew it was a sign tha...

Today is the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's trip into space, the first human to leave the planet's atmosphere - and the first to...

Thirty years ago this weekend Brixton exploded in the middle of Operation Swamp 81 - a police operaation that saw almost 950 mainly black yo...

And in a wild and sudden dance We mocked at Time and Fate and Chance And swept out of the wattled hall And came to where the dewdrops fall A...

Some reflections on last Saturday's anti-cuts March for the Alternative in London (March 26 th )... I knew it really was going to be a b...

An electrifying event at Lambeth Town Hall tonight, the first public meeting of the Campaign for Justice for Smiley Culture . By 7 o'cl...

Disco legend Loleatta Holloway died last night at the age of 64. For me, her best tracks were on the great Salsoul label in the 1970s, incl...

Skateboarding park on the South Bank, pictures taken September 2010

Shocking news of the death of Smiley Culture (real name David Emmanuel) in a police raid today. According to the Voice : 'The Police Off...

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

Twenty years ago today - Thursday 14 March 1991 - I was standing in a crowd outside the Old Bailey in London waiting for the release of the ...

Great to hear tonight of the occupation of the mansion in Hampstead , north London, belonging to Saif Gaddafi - son of the hopefully soon to...

All pictures taken last month, mostly around the 'Northern Quarter' area of Manchester.

Negri and Hardt are quite right that the current wave of revolts are 'sweeping away the racist conceptions of a clash of civilisations...

'A moderate revolution is a contradiction in terms, though a moderate putsch, coup or pronunciamento is not. However limited the ostensi...

Le Carnival Tamara Karsavina of the Ballet Russes as the Firebird Laura Knight (1887-1970) was a prolific painter of dancers and other perf...

A rejoinder from William Gibson to the claim that the 20th century music industry was a natural state of affairs: 'In the early 1920s.....