Fergal Kinney is a freelance music and culture journalist based in Manchester.
Spotify’s excesses — ghost artists, boring mood playlists, and AI — don’t indicate some evil inherent to streaming. They stem from the major labels’ effective oligarchy over the music industry.
A new book shows how a tight-knit group of left-wing Labour politicians emerged from the politics of the 1970s, eventually taking control of the party under Jeremy Corbyn. If they could topple Blairism, then today’s Labour left can take on Starmerism.
Despite pop cultural nostalgia for the protest songs of the ’60s, the march to war in Iraq seemed not to interest musicians — with one glorious exception.
In Britain, punk is often seen as a reaction to national decline, coming up from the streets, while its roots in Situationist political pranking have been discredited. Maybe it’s time to look again at Malcolm McLaren and his ten-point plan.
Beneath the strings and sequins, the Sound of Philadelphia was the backing track to the economic crisis that hit black America in the 1970s.
Peter Jackson’s Get Back, the latest revisionist Beatles product, has glimpses of the political moment that made the band possible — and how distant we are from it today.
Britain is rightly known for its multicultural popular music — but these musical styles have frequently emerged in the face of legal attempts to suppress them.