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Category: 1950s

1950s

Talking Fashion and the King’s Road with design legend Sue Timney

Tomorrow I’ll be talking to interiors, homewares and textile designer Sue Timney about the fashion legacy of the King’s Road, the two-and-a-half mile thoroughfare in west London’s Chelsea where the late Mary Quant kicked off the boutique boom by opening her clothes shop Bazaar at 135a in 1955.  

September 29, 2023
1920s

Totally Wired: Music publications that made a difference

When he launched the small-format 32-page song sheet The Melody Maker in 1926, Tin Pan Alley music publisher Lawrence Wright sparked the media revolution that created the music press. This multi-million pound business eventually straddled the Atlantic and simultaneously proved a fertile breeding ground for generations of writers, photographers, film-makers and performers who made their […]

June 28, 2023
1950s

Totally Wired: Female music writers kicking against the pricks

One of the narrative threads of my book Totally Wired: The Rise & Fall of the Music Press – which is published in paperback next week – traces the ways in which women writers have been forced to fight long and hard against white male dominance of the field. This process was kicked off in […]

June 27, 2023
1920s

First copy of Totally Wired is in!

I’m really jazzed about getting my hands on the first finished copy of Totally Wired, my history of the music press which is published by Thames & Hudson this autumn. Designer Daniel Streat has done wonders with the day-the-world-turned-dayglo jacket concept and my choice of cover star Poly Styrene. There are 60 or so illustrations, […]

August 5, 2022
1950s

Enough Get Backery! Let’s celebrate Yoko Ono’s 70 years at the vanguard

“People said Yoko Ono ruined the Beatles, but I think the Beatles ruined her in many ways” Anne Bean, artist, to The Guardian, 2021. Saturated as mass culture has recently been by Get Backery, I note the lack of celebration for another significant anniversary: 70 years since Yoko Ono became the first female student to […]

February 9, 2022
1950s

Farfouiller dans Les Archives: Robert Rubbish’s Nouvelle Vague show on Instagram

London  antique dealer James Jackson is currently presenting an Instagram exhibition of a folio of new works by the British artist Robert Rubbish. Farfouiller dans Les Archives (Rummaging in the archives) consists of 10 original A3 artworks; James is posting one work daily on his IG account. “In the summer of 2019, I started making […]

February 20, 2021
1940s

Word In Your Attic: Around Malcolm McLaren in 10 objects

Tomorrow night (April 14) I was supposed to be appearing at London’s regular event Word In Your Ear, the live successor of the much-missed The Word magazine founded by publishing titans Mark Ellen and David Hepworth. In the era of social distancing Mark and David have come up with the online Word In Your Attic, […]

April 13, 2020