Rebel Musix, Scribe on a Vibe

Rebel Musix, Scribe on a Vibe collects the extraordinary output of Vivien Goldman from 1975 onwards; spanning a time when punk burnt its scalding flame to scorch our musical earth and clear it for new genres, like post-punk and hip-hop. One of only a handful of women writing in the Golden Age of music journalism, Vivien was the first, most elegant and passionate chronicler of reggae, funk, free jazz and Afrobeat; a pioneer when music was a wild frontier business, lawless and exhilarating, with new epiphanies emerging as the counterculture mutated.

The sheer breadth of pieces here is overwhelming, from early encounters with Brian Eno, Robert Wyatt and Can; to rebels like Britain’s first she-punks, The Raincoats and The Slits; covering British groups like the Sex Pistols, The Clash and Aswad; America’s Public Enemy, Curtis Mayfield and George Clinton; and Jamaica’s Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and Dennis Brown. They rub up against contemporary profiles of New York’s downtown royalty (Patti Smith, Talking Heads, Richard Hell), alongside legendary interviews with Vivien’s friends Fela Kuti, Ornette Coleman and Bob Marley, who reigns over this collection like a benign and timeless deity.

Vivien single-handedly changed the course of music writing and this collection reshapes some of her major pieces into a new narrative of the principal radical artists of the late twentieth century, in the process reaffirming that her reputation as ‘The Punk Professor’ will live on.