Latest news with #WiganCasino
Scoop
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scoop
Pulp Share New Single & Video 'Got To Have Love'
'Love' is a word I was unable to say until I was approaching 40', explains Jarvis Cocker, 'I listened to love songs all the time but couldn't use the word in real life. The words to this song are me having a word with myself about this state of affairs. I gave myself a real talking-to. I have now learnt how to say it whilst keeping a straight face. 'You've got to have love'. Oh yes you have.' Pulp are pleased to announce they are releasing a brand new single 'Got To Have Love'. The song offers a second taste of the new record – the band's first in almost 24 years, released on 6 June – following their acclaimed return with Spike Island in April. "It's a slightly hysterical song that tries to talk about love as I see it now," Jarvis Cocker reveals of the track, which seems destined for immediate live anthem status when the band kick off their UK & Ireland Arena tour in June, followed by more dates – including a full North American tour – later this year. A Jarvis Cocker-directed video for the track has been created which pairs the song with footage from the iconic 1977 Wigan Casino documentary directed by Tony Palmer. Weaving the footage of Northern Soul dancers together with Pulp's music, the video underlines the 'Got To Have Love' dancefloor credentials. 'I love dancing - & this is the best footage of dancing I've ever seen. I first saw it in Mark Leckey's 'Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore' video' says Jarvis. We say: Get down.
Scoop
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scoop
Pulp Share New Single & Video 'Got To Have Love'
'Love' is a word I was unable to say until I was approaching 40', explains Jarvis Cocker, 'I listened to love songs all the time but couldn't use the word in real life. The words to this song are me having a word with myself about this state of affairs. I gave myself a real talking-to. I have now learnt how to say it whilst keeping a straight face. 'You've got to have love'. Oh yes you have.' Pulp are pleased to announce they are releasing a brand new single 'Got To Have Love'. The song offers a second taste of the new record – the band's first in almost 24 years, released on 6 June – following their acclaimed return with Spike Island in April. "It's a slightly hysterical song that tries to talk about love as I see it now," Jarvis Cocker reveals of the track, which seems destined for immediate live anthem status when the band kick off their UK & Ireland Arena tour in June, followed by more dates – including a full North American tour – later this year. A Jarvis Cocker-directed video for the track has been created which pairs the song with footage from the iconic 1977 Wigan Casino documentary directed by Tony Palmer. Weaving the footage of Northern Soul dancers together with Pulp's music, the video underlines the 'Got To Have Love' dancefloor credentials. 'I love dancing - & this is the best footage of dancing I've ever seen. I first saw it in Mark Leckey's 'Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore' video' says Jarvis. We say: Get down.
The Guardian
16-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Five things you didn't know about Black British cultural history
Hello and welcome to The Long Wave. I'm Lanre Bakare and I usually cover arts and culture for the Guardian, but I'm taking over the newsletter this week to tell you about my new book, We Were There, a cultural history of Black Britain. It's set between 1979 and 1990, covering the rise and premiership of Margaret Thatcher, the UK's first female prime minister, whose divisive but transformative remodelling of Britain is still felt today – and within that political upheaval, race dominated the headlines. But it was also a time when modern Black British culture was forged. I'll talk you through five things I learned from my research. Three years ago, in the early stages of my book research, I wrote about Black British people who attended northern soul nights in the 1970s. Clubs hosted 'all-nighters' when fans would dance to often discarded soul tracks from a decade earlier. I was always told that northern soul, despite being a scene built on African American music, was a white movement and that Black British kids weren't really interested in it. But when I went back and watched Tony Palmer's amazing documentary Wigan Casino, which took film cameras inside an all-nighter at the famous club night, I spotted half a dozen Black faces in the crowd. As soon as I saw them, I wanted to know their stories and how they had become part of this scene. What I discovered was teenagers who were obsessed with mod culture, football and soul music; young migrants who, for various reasons, had left places such as St Kitts, Jamaica and Ghana and settled in northern towns and cities. They were young people searching for a sense of belonging and northern soul gave that to them. The lesson I learned is that whenever someone presents an assumption about Black Britain and the subcultures we've belonged to, you'll almost always find a counter-narrative of lives that have long been obscured. TV reflected Black life beyond the capital In the 1980s, when Black Britain was portrayed on television there was an understanding that Black life extended beyond the capital. Programmes such as Black Bag and Ebony on the Road made a concerted effort to tell true stories about Black communities in Chapeltown in Leeds and Butetown in Cardiff. The late 70s soap opera Empire Road, written by Michael Abbensetts, was shot on location on the streets of Handsworth in Birmingham. It's hard to imagine Black television set in the Midlands or Wales today, as commissioners look to London for a supposedly more 'authentic' representation of Black Britain. Think of the recent Black dramas and comedies that have had success – I May Destroy You, Queenie, Dreaming Whilst Black, Supacell, Riches – they are all set in the capital. The BBC drama This Town, released last year, was a welcome exception – yet it's clear we've lost the ability, or the interest, to look across the UK for stories about our culture. As the most recent census reveals, for the first time since at least 1991, the majority of Black people live outside London. To explore the true nature of Black Britain, we must document all of it. Thatcher and Powell gave Labour a pass Thatcher's stance on race and immigration was hostile. In 1978, as leader of the opposition, she claimed that areas of Britain were being 'swamped' by foreigners. Her comments after the Liverpool unrest in 1981, when she claimed the rioting was by young men 'whose high animal spirits' had 'wreak[ed] havoc' on the city, were clear dog whistles. But during this period the Labour party, typically viewed as more progressive than the Conservatives, was also incredibly hostile to immigrants and often benefited from more outrageous comments by the Tories. Enoch Powell's racist 'rivers of blood' speech in 1968 came two months after the Labour home secretary, Jim Callaghan, claimed that the 'increased flow' of south Asian migrants from east Africa to the UK was 'continuing and might become a flood'. The influx, he argued, was 'more than we could absorb'. The 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act followed – and for the first time denied British citizens entry to the country on racial grounds. Callaghan's biographer Kenneth Morgan points out that 'from Callaghan's perspective, Powell's antics were a valuable distraction. They enabled the government to appear, by contrast, sane and balanced.' In reality, Callaghan (who would become prime minister and was the MP for Butetown) laid the groundwork for the legislation that led to the Windrush scandal. Sign up to The Long Wave Nesrine Malik and Jason Okundaye deliver your weekly dose of Black life and culture from around the world after newsletter promotion Urban renewal was one of Black Britain's biggest foes Urban renewal programmes intended to rebuild postwar Britain were, in fact, quite destructive to Black British communities. It's clear why renewal was necessary and desirable to remodel Britain: old, often dangerous housing would be replaced by new homes designed to modernist principles. Yet poor construction meant many of these new properties – for example, Hulme Crescents in Manchester – were not fit for purpose. A knock-on effect was felt by home-owning Black Britons whose properties were bought, often for tiny sums, and who were then relocated in new council accommodation. This significantly weakened the economic potential of Black Britons who could, for example, have used their homes as collateral in order to start a business. This pattern was repeated across the UK where Black communities were often on the frontline of the mass redevelopment phases that were introduced during the 1960s and reappeared in the 80s, first in London Docklands, then in Liverpool and Cardiff. Uncles and aunties had beef One thing that shocked me while writing the book was the amount of beef people from this era had with one another. Some people still don't talk because of things that happened in the 80s. It makes sense. Often they were in campaign groups or activist circles where one, usually male figure, would dominate. That led to some people being marginalised. Other times there were personality clashes, which isn't uncommon in an environment where outspoken, politically driven people come together for a cause. The final chapter is about Black rugby league players, who I assumed would all be friends, united by their position as outsiders in this ultra macho sport. But they often kept intense professional rivalries, in some cases to keep an edge over a competitor, in others because they genuinely despised each other. We Were There: How Black Culture, Resistance and Community Shaped Modern Britain by Lanre Bakare is published by Bodley Head (£22). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at Delivery charges may apply. To receive the complete version of The Long Wave in your inbox every Wednesday, please subscribe here.
The Guardian
06-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
We Were There by Lanre Bakare review – the forgotten voices of black Britain
'It's so hard to create something when there has been nothing before,' the Trinidad-born Nobel laureate VS Naipaul once complained to me, referring to his work for the BBC World Service programme Caribbean Voices (1943-58). That sentiment, that each generation of black Britons believes themselves to be bold pioneers working in a vacuum, has persisted since the beginning of mass migration to this country. But what if the contributions of black Britons were not carelessly neglected, but rather, as Lanre Bakare identifies in his estimable first book, We Were There, a history that has been more purposely obscured? The roots of the current Black Lives Matter-fuelled renaissance of black artistic practice in Britain were established decades ago in the relatively under-reported past. Bakare focuses on the Thatcher era of the late 1970s and 80s, 'the most restive period in postwar history', when, he argues, modern black Britishness was forged. The Bradford-born author complicates and deepens this story by shifting attention away from London, writing with quiet enthusiasm and sharp intelligence about black communities, including those in Bradford, Wolverhampton, Manchester, Liverpool, Cardiff and Edinburgh. He unearths forgotten stories of black participation in cultural movements such as northern soul, whose popularity coincided with the emergence of reggae sound systems in the 1970s. One such story is that of Steve Caesar, a Leeds-based teenage migrant from St Kitts and winner of the inaugural northern soul dance competition at Wigan Casino in 1974. 'Northern soul helped me find a sort of way of belonging,' says Caesar, and yet his story was excluded from the narratives of a movement historically cast as a white working-class phenomenon by music journalists. Building on the work of cultural historians such as Stuart Hall, Bakare champions advances made by social activists. These include grassroots campaigners who in 1979 overturned the miscarriage of justice suffered by Bakare's fellow Bradfordian George Lindo, imprisoned after he was framed by racist police for a robbery he did not commit. The toppling of the statue of the transatlantic enslaver Edward Colston in Bristol in 2020 was a very public reckoning with the city's toxic past. Bakare shows that this direct action had been rehearsed in Liverpool three decades earlier. In 1982, protesters tied a rope to the statue of the former Liverpool MP William Huskisson, who had links to the Atlantic slave trade, and dragged it to the ground. Bakare puts that toppling into the context of the riots in Liverpool 8 (Toxteth) the previous year. The violence was sparked by police brutality, neglect and the kind of prejudicial thinking expressed by Margaret Thatcher in the aftermath of the riots, which she characterised as the unlawfulness of young men 'whose high animal spirits' had 'wreak[ed] havoc' on the city. Bakare ably demonstrates the key disadvantage faced by black people – a lack of information about their predecessors. In my experience, the interventions and successes of our forebears have been cynically obscured, creating the impression that nothing had come before. This discontinuation has often followed short-term initiatives by white cultural gatekeepers who pat themselves on the back for their enlightenment, which only lasts until the novelty wears off and the next worthy group emerges to attract their attention. We Were There acknowledges the true tapestry of British culture by shining a light on committed activists/artists, such as the documentarian Bea Freeman, the producer of They Haven't Done Nothing, a film about the aftermath of the 1981 riots. But the publication of books about the forgotten cultural history of black Britons can only come about if commissioning editors recognise previous blind spots. We Were There bridges the gaps to missing links and admirably achieves what it sets out to provide: further evidence of 'Black people's influence on the UK'. If these stories are only shown in isolation, 'they can be dismissed as curiosities', writes Bakare, 'that don't alter our sense of what constitutes British culture'. We Were There: How Black Culture, Resistance and Community Shaped Modern Britain by Lanre Bakare is published by Bodley Head (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
