Published in 2019
139 pages
Emma Warren has been documenting culture for decades. She’s a reformed music journalist turned community enabler who wrote for major UK and international publications including THE FACE and Fader in both staff and freelance positions and who worked for six years as an editorial mentor at Brixton’s Live Magazine. She set up a private press, Sweet Machine, to publish her first book Make Some Space: Tuning Into Total Refreshment Centre. The book was listed as one of 2019’s Best Reads in Mojo Magazine, on Vinyl Factory and on Gilles Peterson’s end of year list. In 2019 she also published Steam Down: Or How Things Begin with Rough Trade books. This was listed in The Irish Times as one of the books of the year.
What is this book about?
There’s an Edwardian confectionery factory in Hackney which doubles up as a time machine. Make Some Space invites us through the front door of London’s Total Refreshment Centre to meet a revolving cast of characters who created an accidental incubator of London’s new jazz renaissance.
The book combines Johnny Rotten’s politics teacher, new London jazz icons Shabaka Hutchings, Nubya Garcia and members of Ezra Collective, alongside Bob Marley, The Comet Is Coming, the Thompson Twins’ delay pedal, Wiley, and the 1912 Hackney mayor.
Emma Warren invites us to remember the venues and community centres that generated culture, and asks us to protect the few that remain.
