UK Upcoming Events

UK Past Events

2nd July – Rough Trade East, 18.00-21.00

Full details of the event TBC

3rd July – Dublin Castle, Rock n Roll Book Club – Interview on stage with Julie Hamill followed by signing

4th July – British Library

8th July – Slide Records, Bedford

10th July – The Quietus Social, with Celeste Bell and Tessa Pollitt


New York Events for Vivien Goldman’s “Revenge of the She-Punks”

Celebrate the New York launch of Vivien’s sixth book “Revenge of the She-Punks” - out now from University of Texas Press.

Viv is the pioneering female music journalist who was first published in the mid-1970s in the UK music weeklies, specializing in Afro-Caribbean and women’s punk music. Now she is an Adjunct Professor at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music. In between, she was an early 1980s post-punk musician, recording with The Flying Lizards and members of The Slits, PiL and The Raincoats. Her much-acclaimed retrospective compilation, Resolutionary (Staubgold) paved the way for the recording of her first ever album, produced by Youth of Killing Joke, due out later this year.

Please come and say hello to Vivien and hear her read, speak and even sing, at one of these three imminent, very different “Revenge of the She-Punks” gatherings this month:

Sunday May 12th: McNally Jackson, 3.00 pm – featuring a dialog with journalist Jenn Pelly. McNally Jackson, 52 Prince St, NYC 10012

Friday May 24th: Rough Trade, 7.00 pm – featuring a couple of Vivien’s songs performed with pioneering Afro-Punk bass player Felice Rosser of the band, Faith. Rough Trade, 64 N 9th St, Brooklyn, NY 11249

Wednesday May 29th: Sonos store, 7.00 pm - Vivien DJs songs from the “Revenge of the She Punks” book and discusses their significance. Sonos store, 101 Greene Street, NYC, 10012

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“Revenge Of The She-Punks” Sets Out To Rectify A Gender Imbalance

Marissa Lorusso reviewing for NPR:

Punk rock might be a relatively young genre, but the legend of its history has already become more or less solidified.

Ask what makes punk punk and you'll probably get a story that starts in 1970s London, or maybe New York; you'll get The Sex Pistols, The Ramones or The Clash; counterculture, anti-establishment and leather jackets.

Would you hear about bashing the wage gap? Shutting down slut-shaming? Or even Patti Smith? If not, veteran punk (and punk scholar) Vivien Goldman has news for you. In “Revenge Of The She-Punks”, Goldman sets out to rectify this gendered imbalance, tracing the formation, rise and global reach of punk rock and demonstrating women's central place within it. A self-proclaimed "feminist music history from Poly Styrene to Pussy Riot," the book doesn't just retell the story of punk with an added woman or two; it centers the relationships between gender and the genre, showing how, through the right lens, the story of punk is a story about women's ingenuity and power.

In the manifesto that opens She-Punks - sorry, that's the "Womanifesto" - Goldman places the book's origins in 1976. She was fresh out of college and working as a journalist at the British rock publication Sounds when she saw, for the first time in her life, a woman onstage playing rock music. It led her to publish her first article about women in rock. By the '90s, Goldman says, this type of article had become "a predictable annual staple of rock magazines," fueled by lifeless cliches - but at the time, it was an exhilarating angle and, as this book attests, fertile ground for her lifelong dedication to the topic. Read the whole review.

 

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PITCHFORK

No One's More Punk than Vivien Goldman

Over her five-decade career, the 61-year-old has been Bob Marley’s first UK publicist, an esteemed music journalist, French pirate radio DJ, reggae backing singer alongside Neneh Cherry and the Slits’ Ari Up, NYU’s visiting “punk professor,” Kid Creole’s biographer, and now the writer of a musical about his life, to name just the marquee gigs. 

Pitchfork | July 14, 2016


 
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The Quietus

Punky Reggae Party Politics: Vivien Goldman interview

Ahead of her concert at Pop Kultur in Berlin this summer, the esteemed journalist and author talks to David Chiu about her recording career during the late 1970s and early 1980s that included working with The Flying Lizards, John Lydon and Robert Wyatt.

The Quietus | July 9, 2018

 

COMPLEX

The Best Music Documentaries on Netflix Right Now

ReMastered: Who Shot The Sheriff, 2018 | Director: Kief Davidson

Bob Marley as a dorm-room-poster, energy-drink-adorning icon is familiar to millions. But the story of Bob Marley, man caught in violent political crosswinds is less well-known. In 1976, there was an attempted assassination of Marley. This Netflix doc, the first in a series about music-related crimes, uses that incident as a jumping-off point to discuss Jamaican politics, gangs, colonialism, and how the attempt ended up, surprisingly and ironically, helping Marley to become an even more popular international superstar. Research and interviews with the singer's friends and family help make an incredibly complex situation understandable and compelling. Plus, any doc that has Vivien Goldman in it is awesome by default. —Shawn Setaro

Complex | November 16, 2018


Greil marcus

Real Life Rock Top 10

9. Vivien Goldman, “Private Armies,” from Resolutionary (Staubgold) – From 1979 to 1982 the music journalist made dub music in London and Paris. None of it is ordinary, but nothing really touches this six-minute cultural travelogue, one of her first tracks, about how you can no longer walk down your own, suddenly racialized street. With Vicky Aspinall of the Raincoats on violin, Keith Levene of PiL on bass and guitar, John Lydon producing, and Goldman singing in a voice that can’t quite believe what it’s describing, snakes slither through the rhythms, then turn into rhythms; you can see the notes bend.

Greil Marcus | September 29, 2016

 

BOMB

Vivien Goldman by Michael Patrick MacDonald

“Dub was my sound because of postcolonial movements. I grew up in it. I bathed in it. I breathed it. So why shouldn’t it be mine?”

June 17, 2016