Can music make the world a better place? Can it really ‘belong’ to anyone? Can the magic, mystery and incertitude of music – of the human brain meeting or making sound – can it stop wars, rehabilitate the broken, unite, educate or inspire?
From Jimi Hendrix playing Machine Gun at The Isle of Wight Festival in 1970 to the Bataclan under siege in 2016, Ed Vulliamy has lived the music, met the legends, and asked, when words fail, might we turn to music? There’s only one way to find out, and that is to listen…
Ed Vulliamy is a journalist and author. He was a foreign correspondent for the Guardian and Observer for 31 years, leaving the papers to become a full-time freelance author, journalist and film researcher in 2016. He covered the Balkan wars, including the war in Bosnia, and was a prosecution witness at the trials at the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia, including including those of Bosnian Serb leaders Dr. Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic. As US correspondent for the Observer he covered the 9/11 attacks and subsequently the Iraq wars of 1991 and 2003. He also reported on the drug wars on the US-Mexico border.
Interested in learning more about Newham Bookshop and some of the people connected with it? We have four lessons for classroom or family use developed from On the Record’s oral history project centered around Newham Bookshop, Writing and Reading Newham. Click here for full details.
We are proud that Newham Bookshop is LoveReading’s Bookshop of the Month. The article features a Q&A with Vivian Archer, which you can read here.
