Books and Magazines


“Spirited… elegant… highly enjoyable… Shirley Collins’s descriptions of her beloved Sussex, along with the richness of her culture, make an elegant case for reclaiming a variant of English history.” The Guardian “In these pages Shirley Collins completes her comeback, reclaiming her rightful place in the English folk revival from those who placed obstacles in her way.”Billy Bragg in The New Statesman “Luminous… All in the Downs traces the rhythm of a life with the old songs and music. Deeply moving… [it] allows us to read Collins in the landscape and the landscape in her.” The Wire“Another strong female voice to add to the chorus of music history, going against the grain, so tunefully …it’s a book that makes you want to hear those old ballads about love and loss, full of hunger and heat.” Mail on Sunday “All In The Downs dissolves time, darting between distant memory and history and the events of her recent renaissance, dissolving the years between incidents, bringing ghosts, both metaphorical and literal, striding over the downs into life before us.”From the introduction by Stewart Lee   A legendary singer, folklorist, and music historian, Shirley Collins has been an integral figure in the English folk music scene for more than sixty years. In her new memoir, All in the Downs, Collins tells the story of that lifelong relationship with English folksong—a dedication to artistic integrity that has guided her through the triumphs and tragedies of her life. All in the Downs combines elements of memoir—from her working-class origins in wartime Hastings to the bright lights of the 1950s folk revival in London—alongside reflections on the role traditional music and the English landscape have played in shaping her vision. From formative field recordings made with Alan Lomax in the United States to the “crowning glories” recorded with her sister Dolly on the Sussex Downs, she writes of the obstacles that led to her withdrawal from the spotlight and the redemption of a new artistic flourishing that continues today with her unexpected return to recording in 2016. Through it all, Shirley Collins has been guided and supported by three vital and inseparable loves: traditional English song, the people and landscape of her native Sussex, and an unwavering sense of artistic integrity. All in the Downs pays tribute to these passions, and in doing so, illustrates a way of life as old as England, that has all but vanished from this land. --- Shirley Collins MBE  is a renowned folk singer who has recorded over 20 albums, and the author of America Over the Water (2004). She is the president of the English Folk Dance and Song Society in London. Her critically lauded album Lodestar, released in 2016, marked a triumphant return to performance after thirty eight years. Shirley was recently the subject of a feature documentary film, The Ballad of Shirley Collins

Shirley Collins – All in the Downs

out of stock

In People Get Ready, musicians, scholars, and journalists write about jazz since 1965, the year that Curtis Mayfield composed the famous civil rights anthem that gives this collection its title. The contributors emphasize how the political consciousness that infused jazz in the 1960s and early 1970s has informed jazz in the years since then. They bring nuance to historical accounts of the avant-garde, the New Thing, Free Jazz, "non-idiomatic" improvisation, fusion, and other forms of jazz that have flourished since the 1960s, and they reveal the contemporary relevance of those musical practices. Many of the participants in the jazz scenes discussed are still active performers. A photographic essay captures some of them in candid moments before performances. Other pieces revise standard accounts of well-known jazz figures, such as Duke Ellington, and lesser-known musicians, including Jeanne Lee; delve into how money, class, space, and economics affect the performance of experimental music; and take up the question of how digital technology influences improvisation. People Get Ready offers a vision for the future of jazz based on an appreciation of the complexity of its past and the abundance of innovation in the present. Contributors. Tamar Barzel, John Brackett, Douglas Ewart, Ajay Heble, Vijay Iyer, Thomas King, Tracy McMullen, Paul D. Miller/DJ Spooky, Nicole Mitchell, Roscoe Mitchell, Famoudou Don Moye, Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Eric Porter, Marc Ribot, Matana Roberts, Jaribu Shahid, Julie Dawn Smith, Wadada Leo Smith, Alan Stanbridge, John Szwed, Greg Tate, Scott Thomson, Rob Wallace, Ellen Waterman, Corey Wilkes

Edited by Ajay Heble; Rob Wallace; Rob Wallace – People Get Ready: The Future of Jazz Is Now!

out of stock

Publisher ‏ : ‎Equinox Publishing Ltd;Language ‏ : ‎EnglishPaperback ‏ : ‎356 pagesISBN-10 ‏ : ‎1781796459ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎978-1781796450Dimensions ‏ : ‎15.6 x 2.46 x 23.39 cmProvincial Headz: British Hip Hop and Critical Regionalism draws upon spatial practice, material culture, human geography, ethnomusicology and cultural theory in order to present an interdisciplinary counter-narrative to that of hip hop as a strictly urban phenomenon; providing an insight into the relocation of hip hop culture from its inception in New York ghettos to its practices in provincial and rural Britain. Hip hop culture truly arrived in Britain in 1983, a decade after its origin in New York City, and although many important events, artists and recordings that evidence hip hop’s existence in 1980s Britain are well documented, these are almost exclusively urban. Additionally, the narratives embedded in these representations remain too convenient and unchallenged. This book reveals parallel and dialectical experiences of British hip hop pioneers and practitioners dwelling outside the metropolis, discussed under the recurring themes of relocation, territory, consumption, production and identity. These narratives are framed within a rich contextual discourse drawing upon Bhabha, Bourdieu, Foucault, DeLanda and contemporary hip hop scholarship. Shifting hip hop research from urbanism to rurality, the book serves as an introduction to the complexities of its historical narratives in Britain and reveals another hip hop history and how we understand it.

Adam de Paor-Evans – Provincial Headz British Hip Hop and Critical Regionalism

out of stock

Put together by Alan Rider, Adventures in Reality, was a fanzine from Coventry in the early 1980s that both fitted snugly inside the post-punk landscape of the time and did its utmost to avoid many of the tropes most fanzines were given to. Like most of them, however, each edition was produced with a youthful energy and passion itself manacled to an attitude only really emboldened by this cultural shift. In between diatribes and a salubrious dash of humour, Adventures in Reality proved itself to be amongst the vanguard, running countless reviews, putdowns of the apathy dominating the city, and interviews with all from Attrition and Human Cabbages to Wah! and SPK. Somewhere along the way an excerpt taken from the lyrics of The Jam’s poignant ‘That’s Entertainment’ also appear, as indeed do cartoons, various lists and suchlike. Everything adds up to an intoxicating mix absolutely perfect for the time that spawned it. Over the course of its 13 issues, plus a few other related titles originally published anonymously and designed to upset rival fanzine editors and their own supporters, Adventures in Reality proved itself to stand above its immediate competition so well it made a formidable impression not only nationally, but also internationally. This compendium gathers all 13 issues in their entirety, as well as the other titles and additional ephemera, alongside insightful introductions to each of them, an interview with Alan Rider, a foreword by Matthew Worley, blurb by Nicholas Bullen (himself inspired by AiR enough to start his own ‘zine), and several other bonuses. Collected in an A4 book similar in size to the Grim Humour one also published by Fourth Dimension, this makes for a perfect return trip to a time long gone still of interest to either those informed by it or those who wish to navigate their way to why it was so unique in the first place. As Alan himself says, "Fanzines were never intended to form a part of mainstream pop culture.They were underground, counter culture, an alternative that existed to shine a light on new music in a way that commercial publications could not and would not. Wilfully obtuse, Adventures in Reality sought to seize that ground, breaking the mould of what a post-punk fanzine was expected to be and by doing so, adding an extra dose of subversive originality to the pool of UK underground alternative music culture "

Alan rider – Adventures in Reality:The Complete Collection

out of stock