I've spent 25 years working at the intersection of music, culture, and media. I've written for The Guardian, The Face, FACT, Mixmag and The Wire to name just a few; co-founded theartsdesk.com; directed editorial at Boiler Room; and published three books including Bass, Mids, Tops (Strange Attractor / MIT Press).

I've programmed for Amsterdam Dance Event, A&R'd for finetunes distribution, curated music for Ninja Tune and Ministry, and worked across every part of the culture industry. For a decade before that I was deep inside subculture, making music and events in places that don't exist any more.
 

During all that time, I was in the little rooms where culture actually happens - basement studios, distributors' offices, record shop back rooms, pub discos: the bits of the music industry few write about. I wasn't chasing trends: I was working in those places while watching how grassroots innovation works, how it survives, how it spreads.

 

That's turned into something more focused now: helping organisations see what their systems miss. The stuff that doesn't show up in metrics - community bonds, creative ecosystems, the innovation happening at scales too small for institutional visibility. I help identify these assets and develop ways to actually support them, not just extract from them.

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I work as a bridge between grassroots innovation and institutional scale. I bring the rigour of twenty-five years as a professional journalist plus many years more as a practitioner to the messy reality of how culture moves. And I believe the most vital innovation happens in rooms too small for algorithms to crawl - we just need better ways to recognise and sustain it.