Welcome to the party, pal
Plus a little round-up of what I've been up to
Hello and welcome. Like every other journalist, I have started a Substack. I simply missed the golden age of blogging too much; plus I’ve just finished my next book (Multitudes: How Crowds Made the Modern World, out October 2024), and I’m excited to start some new projects; plus that billionaire fraud with the burning cars has ruined Twitter as a means of disseminating basic information. So here we are.
Promises, promises: what you’ll get if you subscribe (FREE)
I’m not going to bombard you with my every single fevered thought about Masterchef: The Professionals, the new Unknown T single, the soaring number of escape rooms in our cities, or Why That Thing Keir Starmer Just Said Is Wrong — but there will be some of that. You will receive one email/post a month, sometimes two.
This will be a one-stop shop for updates on my writing, podcasts, events, and occasional one-off mini-essays or posts that are just too damn niche or weird for The Guardian. There will be music, and politics, and food, and cultural commentary, and urban studies stuff, and love and romance — all the hits — so do please sign up for free now.
As with the Patreon for Cursed Objects — the podcast about cultural history, politics and tat I make with my good friend Dr Kasia Tee — there is an option for a paid subscription, too. Writing is astonishingly badly paid, our media is a hot mess and has been for my entire 20-year career; so any support is welcome. But you don’t have to pay! You can subscribe for free.
Here’s what I’ve been up to recently
Here’s a piece I wrote for The Guardian about the idea that London nightlife is OVER, FINISHED, KAPUT. There have been a lot of histrionics lately about London not being a 24-hour city, not just from the Daily Mail and the Tories, who were pushing this as an unsubtle, Islamophobic-coded means of getting at Sadiq Khan, but also from a surprising number of moany left-leaning catastrophists who hadn’t bothered to read the NTIA report on club closures, and haven’t really got a proper handle on what gentrification is. (Eg: it’s not really about hipsters and cereal cafes.)
Here’s my review for The Observer of Ghetts’ final tour show at the three-dimensional tension headache that is ‘Here at The Outernet’.
Here’s my cover story for the April issue of Crack magazine about the legendary Flowdan, one of the most interesting MCs to emerge from the grime scene, a man finally getting his flowers a full 25 years into his career. His is a lovely story, and Flowdan was one of the most humble and wise musicians I’ve ever interviewed — so this was a pleasure. The physical mag is out now.
Multitudes — my new book on crowds
There will be a lot more on the subjects of crowds, crowd policing, crowd behaviour and psychology, riots, carnivals, protests, festivals and other mass gatherings, over the next six months. But for now, here is the cover of my next book, which will be published by Verso in October 2024. I’m very excited to share it with you all.
More soon, thanks for signing up.