Lanre Bakare: We Were There (Book launch with discussion, music and film)

Tickets: https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/sound-affects/lanre-bakare-we-were-there-book-launch/e-ajdrdp

Sound Affects is a night of talks about music and subcultures, how sound affects us and how music changes the world. It's organised and hosted by journalist and documentary filmmaker Jak Hutchcraft.

This is Lanre Bakare's book launch for We Were There: How Black culture, resistance and community shaped modern Britain.

It starts at 6pm. The evening will consist of author Lanre Bakare in conversation with journalist Jak Hutchcraft, with music and video accompaniments, and an audience Q&A.

We Were There is about a Black Britain that for too long has been unknown and unexplored – the one that exists beyond London.

From the late 1970s to the early 1990s Britain was in tumult: rocked by Margaret Thatcher’s radical economic policy, the rise of the National Front, widespread civil unrest. With anti-immigration policies in the political mainstream, Black lives were on the frontline of a racial reckoning. But it was also a time of unrivalled Black cultural creation, organising and resistance. This was the crucible in which modern Britain came into existence. We Were There brings into the spotlight for the first time extraordinary Black lives in once-rich cities now home to failing industries: the foundries of Birmingham, the docks of Liverpool and Cardiff, the mills of Bradford. We are in Wigan, Wolverhampton, Manchester and the green expanse of the British countryside. We meet feminists and Rastafarians, academics and rugby-league superstars; witness landmark campaigns and encounter radical artists and thinkers; tread dancefloors that hosted Northern Soul all-nighters and the birth of Acid House.

Alive with energy and purpose, We Were There decisively expands our sense of who we are. Confronting, joyful and thrilling, this is a profoundly important new portrait of modern Britain.

Lanre Bakare was born and grew up in Bradford, West Yorkshire. He is a correspondent covering arts and culture for the Guardian, where his writing focuses on the intersection of art, race and culture across multiple disciplines. He was senior correspondent on the award-winning Cotton Capital project and has worked in New York and Los Angeles as part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Guardian US team.

We Were There is out everywhere now and is published by Bodley Head/Penguin.

This event is upstairs at the East Street Tap in Brighton.

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