Shaking The Foundations: Reggae soundsystem meets ‘Big Ben British values’ downtown. My article for Datacide issue 11 is now online. I wrote it a couple of years back in preparation for the talk I did at the launch event for the previous issue. But actually it has stood the test of time quite well, anticipating …
Public Meeting Called by The Emmanuel Family 7pm, Thursday 24 March Brixton Town Hall, Brixton Road, London SW2 1RW “The family have asked it to be known that the meeting will start on time and that they will not want a long protracted meeting. They are still in the process of grieving they will want …
I make no apologies for the amount of coverage I have given to Smiley Culture this week. Having said that I expect to write a little less next week. In the meantime here are some updates: Official Statement from the Emmanuel family Justice 4 Smiley Facebook page and Twitter feed Cockney Translation An interesting article …
A press conference was called today by the family of the late David Emmanuel aka Smiley Culture. The event took place at the Karibu Education Centre in Brixton. You can see the whole thing on ustream. What follows are my impressions from having attended. The room was packed – I estimate that there were at …
Hours after my post yesterday about the occupation of the Libyan emabassy in 1986, a group called Topple The Tyrants squatted Gaddafi’s son Saif’s £10 million mansion in Hampstead. Far be it for a humble man like myself to suggest that there is any connection between these two events… History is Made at Night came good with …
Jez: Look Mark, I’m a musician, in case you’d forgotten. Yeah? I answer to a higher law. The law of “if it feels good, do it”. Mark: Oh, that’s a great law isn’t it? What’s that, Gaddafi’s law? Jez: It’s the musician’s law. Colonel Gaddafi could not lay down a bass hook, Mark. That should …
Continue reading ‘Colonel Gaddafi’s Kentucky Fried Britain’ »
My article in Datacide touches on the gradual acceptance of soundsystem culture in the UK over the last 60 years. I’ve now discovered that this process can be illustrated just as well by checking Hansard, the record of discussions in the UK Parliament. It seems that in the seventies and eighties, reggae was only ever …
The Radical History of Hackney A new archival site featuring radical publications from this corner of North East London. Items added so far include A “Hackney Against The Cuts” newsletter from 1991, which is obviously quite topical right now as well. The first issue of the original “Hackney Heckler” newsletter, also from 1991, which includes …
I had to overhaul the uncarved shop. Someone hacked my site through the old shop and installed a phishing scam on uncarved.org. Basically a load of faked bank webpages were on there. I’m not quite sure what to think about that. I’m not keen on people preying on the naive and vulnerable, but it’s not …
A double whammy from Dan Hancox on Grime and the recent London protests: Lethal Bizzle’s Pow! (Forward) was the unofficial song of the recent student protests. Dan Hancox charts how it went from grime-scene scapegoat to righteous rallying cry: Pow!: anthem for kettled youth | Music | The Guardian. Following the lazy misrecognition of the ‘bunking’ …