History is made at night

I found this CBS inner sleeve in an old record the other day - actually it was Leonard Cohen's Songs from a Room from 1969. It sets out ...

The punitive UK immigration controls against musicians have been highlighted here before . A particularly poignant example this week, with a...

Another in the series of posts on the 1981 summer uprisings . 30 years ago today, on Saturday 11 July, riots raged in Leicester, both in the...

Another in the series of posts on the 1981 summer riots . 30 years ago today, on Friday 10 July, Brixton exploded for the second time in thr...

Number five in a series of posts on the 1981 summer riots - following on from Southall , Liverpool Manchester and Wood Green , on Thursday...

All this talk of the short hot summer of 1981 has naturally got me thinking about continuities and discontinuities between then and now. On...

The fourth in a series of posts on the summer riots of 1981 . On Tuesday 7 th July 1981, on the same night as the first stirrings of the up...

The third in a series of posts on the summer riots of 1981. The fighting in Toxteth died down on Monday, but the following day the torch (...

The second in a series of posts on the 1981 summer uprisings in England: Night number two was in Toxteth, Liverpool, 30 years ago on Saturd...

The first of a series on the 1981 July uprisings/riots in Britain. Night number one was in Southall: On Friday 3 July 1981, several 'Oi...

In the 17th century, the Quakers and other English religious radicals caused a scandal by refusing to take off their hats to their social ...

The pictures on the Camberwell Snooker Club in South London (junction of Camberwell New Rd and Camberwell Passage) are a bit past their best...

Last week in Iowa, Michele Bachmann launched her bid to become the Republican candidate in the nex US presidential election. On the Tea Part...

Mark Angelo Harrison, aka Stray Wayward, was involved with early free party sound system Spiral Tribe. So good to hear that he is working on...

Wandering the streets of Peckham this evening I came across a box of records outside a house, mostly 1970s and 1980s and mostly not very goo...

Darryl Pandy died yesterday (10 June 2011). Here's why he was important:   Before the internet and satellite/cable channels the musical ...

Twisted (or Twisted a.m.) was a late 1990s/early 00s club night in Brixton playing a unique mixture of what the Alabama 3 once called 'S...

Some heavy-handed arrests at the Jefferson Memorial in Washington DC on Saturday. It was the latest in a saga that started in 2008 when Mary...

Photographier Molly Macindoe has a new book out 'Out of Order: A Photographic Celebration of the Free Party Scene' . I haven't g...

Sad to hear of the death yesterday of Gil Scott-Heron. Among many other things, he was a consistent critic of the Space-Military-Industrial ...

These murals are on the Rockingham Estate, near the Elephant and Castle in South London. They were done in 2009 by Morganico with local you...

Jamie Potter ( http://twitter.com/jamiepotter ) gives us the low down on 21st century nights out in Hull, Leicester and Leeds. 1. Can you r...

Tone Loc's 1989 Funky Cold Medina is both an old skool rap pop classic and a slightly dubious paean to slipping an aphrodisiac into wom...