Black British Artists Reflect on Music's Iconic Photographs
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- Goldie credits his late girlfriend Kemistry — killed in an April 1999 car crash en route to a fill-in gig — and her DJ partner Storm with introducing him to drum'n'bass at Fabio and Grooverider's Rage night, saying the question of them being women DJs was "not a thing"
- Estelle credits Slick Rick with laying the foundation for British hip-hop storytelling, and collaborated with him on his 2025 album "Victory" and at this year's Mobos, noting that what people hear as her English accent is actually "the Slick Rick accent"
- Dennis Bovell recounts being recruited by Linton Kwesi Johnson after Johnson interviewed Bovell's band Matumbi for the BBC, leading to dub poetry records that declared "We're being swept under the carpet. We're being marginalised."
- Courtney Pine highlights 1930s Jamaican trumpeter Leslie "Jiver" Hutchinson — who became a military band leader and shares Pine's March 18 birthday — calling the surviving sheet music "a time capsule" of Caribbean musicians "concocting what jazz could be"
- AJ Tracey, a 32-year-old of Trinidadian descent who grew up in Ladbroke Grove, describes performing at Rampage sound system — where he had earlier watched So Solid Crew — as surreal because he was playing "on the streets I used to roam as a kid"
- Flo (Stella, Renée, Jorja) celebrate their first Brit award — a trophy designed by Nigerian artist Slawn — framing the win as honoring Black British girl group predecessors including Little Mix and Sugababes, who "made it possible for us"
Why it matters: By connecting 2020s stars (Flo, AJ Tracey, Estelle) to figures like 1930s bandleader Hutchinson and 1970s dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, the piece frames today's Black British music as continuation rather than emergence — a lineage the artists consciously claim and pass on. Flo's explicit recognition of Little Mix and Sugababes as predecessors marks a deliberate genealogy-building moment for Black British girl groups.
