As a reader of The Wire, what has always spun my propellor in the best way are the pieces in which orthodoxies get overthrown, especially my own, pieces that almost vex me into reading them, or those pieces where I feel the traditionally marginalised are given a voice, whether it’s the artist, the author, or the community out of which emerges the music being written about. I think one of the first pieces I ever read in The Wire was one in which the writer averred that Culture Beat’s “Mr Vain” was superior to the entire recorded works of The Rolling Stones – of course as a massive Stones fan I was not going to agree but the sheer unbridled chutzpah of forcing through a vision of music is something I’ve always enjoyed in The Wire, especially in the hands of those writers I trust who have inspired my own footling attempts at writing about music. These pieces were all entertaining, illuminating, but crucially they felt like they had to be written.

Women’s March by Frances Morgan, The Wire 363, May 2014

Only The Wire would publish a whole issue on compilations, mixtapes and lists – the series of think-pieces that were in this issue were mind-blowing, none more so than the piece on gender specific compilations from the ever astonishing Frances Morgan. I was lucky enough to have Morgan as an editor at one point and their encouragement led directly to my book Eastern Spring. In this blistering piece, occasionally polemical but deeply nuanced and beautifully resigned, Morgan outlines the pitfalls and delights of women-only compilations. Crucially though, as I’ve always found with Morgan’s writing (particularly their unforgettable piece about Ursula Bogner), because you innately trust them, they lay down launchpads and trajectories for future reconnaissance that were revelatory and illuminating for me. This piece is only nine years old, but somehow still ahead of its time.

Invisible Women by Abi Bliss, The Wire website, April 2013

Another writer who regularly blows my mind is Abi Bliss, a name I seek out because I know whatever music she pushes towards me is going to be great and from somewhere I never thought of looking. This piece was one that needed writing so badly – about how the rock-crit habit of rehabilitating female sonic pioneers safely from the past was becoming sadly reductive, while continuing the playbook of misogyny and ignorance about contemporary female artists. In this piece I found a startling mirror of my own thoughts about how white critique hypostatizes Black music in safely distant high points of history, while turning a blind eye to those contemporary Black artists who might dare to problematise the overwhelming white supremacy of contemporary musical culture and critique. It’s a piece that flatly refuses to give the media the slap on the back it seems to endlessly give itself about questions of diversity and inclusion. Vital, necessary, made me feel less alone.

Le Tigre by Joy Press, The Wire 202, January 2002

A fascinating overview of Kathleen Hanna’s route from riot grrrl onwards, and I recall feeling faintly optimistic reading this in January 2002. Didn’t know of course that this was the decade in which alternative culture would become colonised by the far right and the alpha male. Agitant, engrossing reading.

Invisible Jukebox: Sparks by Emily Bick, The Wire 403, September 2017

Invisible Jukebox is usually the first thing I read in The Wire – nothing to me is more interesting than hearing musicians talking about music with depth and thought, and this is one of my favourite examples. Absolutely genius choices from Emily Bick are key here – they seemed to mark out connections I’d thought were only going on in my brain. I particularly dig the Maels’ thoughts on The Bomb Squad, Ice Cube and Faith No More. Proof if it were needed that great musicians are always critics as well. Inspirational.

Meredith Monk by Emily Bick, The Wire 468, February 2023

I’ve been at this malarkey for 30 years but I’m still absolutely terrified of doing interviews. The anxiety they cause is immense, and I’m always convinced that the features I turn in, like the conversations they come from, are overly dominated by my bullshit rather than the interviewees’ own thoughts. I was fascinated by this interview because I’d never read one with Monk before, and Emily Bick fleshed out her story and her work with real insight. Crucially though, what I took from it was a stylistic masterclass in how to let a subject speak, how to keep one’s voice clear but not dominate. I would kill to be this subtle, this measured, this effective in writing longform interview based features.

Moor Mother by Emily Pothast, The Wire 425, July 2019

I will never forget an old editor of mine – when I dared to suggest we put Roni Size on the cover of a magazine he was busy putting out of its misery – saying, with brute commercial condescension: “Black faces on the cover don’t sell.” The Wire throughout that period provided an inspirational alternative and continues to disregard those lies that white supremacist publishing perpetuates to keep Black artists and female artists marginalised. This brilliant feature by Pothast balanced both Moor Mother’s own intriguing animus and Pothast’s own concerns to great effect. Crucially, like all the pieces here, it felt needed, urgent and necessary.

The Woman Who Invented Rock ’N’ Roll by Greil Marcus, The Wire 118/119, December 1993/January 1994

I will never forget the issue this appeared in – David Toop’s piece on Nation Records was the only substantial and serious coverage I saw inspirational figures like FunDamental getting away from the inkies’ endless cheerleading for the English Rock Defence League (aka Britpop) at the time, and the cover feature compiling writers’ thoughts on Miles Davis was a mindbomb. This piece, which suggested that the entire history of rock ’n’ roll stemmed from a teenage Jewish girl from Baltimore, expanded on Marcus’s incredible writing about The Orioles’ “It’s Too Soon To Know” in Lipstick Traces: A Secret History Of The 20th Century to fully flesh out Deborah Chessler’s unique story. A piece that remapped, perhaps entirely reconfigured my ideas about the canon of pop, and how a writer can shape rather than be bossed by that canon.

DJ Spooky by Simon Reynolds, The Wire 138, August 1995

I was delighted, as an increasingly frustrated reader of the weekly music press, to find my writer heroes given a longer leash, longer word counts and the opportunity to trade thoughts with those artists exploring the increasingly intriguing interstices between hiphop, theory, cultural adventurism and the avant garde, and nothing exemplified this more than this hugely engaging dialogue between Simon Reynolds and DJ Spooky in 1995. In the same year that The Wire were putting illbient on the cover, and speaking increasingly to a welter of DJs and jungle/drum ’n’ bass producers who were connecting soundworlds and lineages with a frenzy of anti-hierarchical music.

Rhythms, Resolutions & Clusters by David Toop, The Wire 250, December 2004

In another triumphantly conceptual issue hinged around ideas of “the riff”, after 12 pages of fascinating, entirely non-traditional examples of heaviosity and riffage from everywhere except its traditional sources, David Toop’s enthralling look at how free jazz, modality, repetition and riffage came together in the 1960s and 70s remains an absolute mindbomb, and as ever with Toop, makes you want to listen to everything he talks about.

Mourning [A] BLKstar by Neil Kulkarni, The Wire 439, September 2020

Part of my ongoing failure to make a proper living out of this music writing thing is my rubbishness at pitching. At nearly every magazine I’ve ever worked for, my inability to come out with an “angle” bar “this is beautiful” or “I love this” has meant that a myriad artists I’ve been dying to write about have been reverse-midassed into obscurity. This was my first cover feature for The Wire and really emerged from me sending an email saying, “This new Mourning [A] Blkstar album is amazing. Can I write about them, please?” And it worked, which felt miraculous. The interview was during lockdown, I was teaching eight hours a day on Zoom, so speaking to all of the Cleveland collective (separate hour-long sessions with the instrumentalists, and then the vocalists) was a wee small hours odyssey of anxiety, but the piece that emerged was one I was really proud of. To see this marginalised, non-binary, multiracial collective on the cover of The Wire and to have a small part in that happening was a delight during a really tough time.

A fundraiser for Neil's family has been set up here.