The Sound of Black Britain
The V&A East’s inaugural exhibition, traces 125 years of music, fashion and cultural change
By Dionne Walsh
By Dionne Walsh
“What we do want you to feel, though, is that music is a lot like air. It's everywhere. It's omnipotent,” remarks curator Jacqueline Springer.
The exhibition is an ambitious undertaking, and one that rewards curiosity. Its immersive soundscape pairs headphones and Sennheiser technology, connecting music to objects encountered throughout the galleries. It’s a wonderful sonic experience, filling the space with music and activating the senses. You can’t help but catch yourself, and others around you, swaying to a certain beat, moving to a familiar rhythm. Though the sheer volume of material can make it difficult to know where to linger. Moving through many of its compact spaces, I found myself trying to absorb as much as possible, occasionally at the expense of looking more closely. For an exhibition concerned with the histories and identities carried through music, the question is not simply how much can be shown, but how these stories are given room to resonate.
The landmark exhibition has been four years in the making, a process that required more than securing loans from celebrated musicians. “What was difficult was to persuade people that we were being genuine in our acknowledgement of them, Springer discloses,” reflecting on the trust involved in bringing these personal histories into a national collection. “There’s a great level of emotion running through the curatorial process, because some artists have never let these objects out their home.”
The exhibition also arrives amid a broader effort to reposition Black British music within the country’s cultural history. In 2024, the British Library’s Beyond the Bassline: 500 Years of Black British Music traced African and Caribbean musical contributions across five centuries, exploring the people places, and genres that have transformed the country’s musical landscape. Where Beyond the Bassline took a five-century view, The Music is Black narrows its focus to the past 125 years, tracing how Black musical traditions have evolved through Britain’s changing social and cultural landscape.
But to understand the cultural and commercial force of Black British music today, the exhibition first asks us to look backwards. Its opening acts (with four in total) trace the political and social histories that shaped the sounds, movements and musical traditions that would take root in Britain. Ben Enwonwu’s bronze sculpture The Drummer (1978) is one of the first objects you see, presenting the drum as more than an instrument, but a means of communication that connects modernity with indigenous African traditions. Nearby, a musical bow illustrates how these African musical traditions travelled across continents, influencing the development of the Diddley Bow and, in turn, blues music in the Mississippi Delta.
These exchanges sit alongside the violence of British imperialism. A 1663 charter, signed by Charles II, documents the Crown’s involvement in the trafficking of African people, while an abridged Slave Bible (1807) reveals how colonial authority extended into religious life. Passages, including Exodus, with its account of liberation from enslavement, were deliberately removed to promote a Christianity that justified captivity. Together, these objects expose the forces that sought to control Black lives, movement, and expression.
The act also gestures towards the cultural traditions that endured. An image of Haile Selassie I (1924) connects religious belief to music across the African diaspora, his titles woven into Rastafarian songs and reggae lyrics. The accompanying soundscape moves between spirituals, hymns, Qur’anic recitation and songs of resistance. Music emerges here not simply as cultural inheritance, but as a means of sustaining identity and negotiating histories of displacement.
“It describes African cultural and musical practices through descent, practices that survived,” says Springer. “As such, Black music is global proof of resilience.”
The evocation of these artefacts is enthralling. They sit beside a more abstract interpretation in Green Across (2025), a specially commissioned artwork by British-Guiana born painter Sir Frank Bowling. It was one of the works I was particularly looking forward to seeing, given Bowling’s longstanding engagement with Guyana’s landscapes and the complexities of migration. Yet the work’s positioning, compounded by glare across the painting’s surface, made it difficult to fully appreciate in the confined, dimly lit room.
The act explores a period of profound social and cultural change, as musicians and entertainers from Africa, Europe, the Caribbean and the United States found new performance and recording opportunities in Britain. Following the Second World War, Commonwealth migration further transformed the country’s musical and social landscape, whilst gramophones and radios changed how we access music entirely. Modern technology meant that people could now own and replay recorded music in their own homes.
Jazz, blues, gospel, and rock ‘n’ roll soundtracked the tensions of the period, offering escape and resistance, particularly for the disillusioned youth who challenged traditional values. Archival audio-visual footage and ephemera bring these musical histories into view, with key exhibits including Dame Shirley Bassey’s Goldfinger gown and Winifred Atwell’s fan-scratched ‘other’ piano, its carved names preserving traces of the audiences who gathered around her music. Elsewhere, the rural Black, queer roots of rock ‘n’ roll come into sharper focus through figures such as Big Mama Thornton, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and Little Richard, whose innovation has long been overshadowed by the mainstream appropriation and success of white performers such as Elvis Presley.
Calypso also found its footing in post-war Britain, with recordings by Lord Kitchener and Mona Baptiste bringing Caribbean sounds to British listeners. The act then traces the development of sound-system culture through the record box of Duke Vin, credited with introducing the practice to the country, and a sound-system pre-amplifier built by Percival Miller.
By the 1960s, reggae and sound-system were thriving within Black British communities, created as community spaces against a backdrop of a racist Britain. These histories extend into carnival, where the steel pan and visual culture reflect the enduring influence of the Windrush Generation. Charlie Phillips’ photograph of Kwame Ture, Stokely Carmichael at The Cue Club (1967) offers a window into nightlife and Black political life, while the Carnival paintings of Olayinka Burley-Nicol and Tam Joseph bring these cultural expressions into the visual realm.
Yet I left wanting more. Given the significance of sound systems as spaces of shared cultural and heritage I had expected this history to be explored in greater depth. With the 60th anniversary of Notting Hill Carnival this summer, there was also an opportunity to convey the spectacle and material culture of Carnival itself, perhaps through more elaborate costumes and dress, Instead, the section feels comparatively photograph-heavy, leaving some of these histories at a distance. For a musical culture so deeply rooted in collective experience, I wanted to feel more of the energy and atmosphere that has sustained it.
As Springer explains, the exhibition gives jazz and reggae their own moments of celebration because they are “imported musics.” The distinction is deliberate, considering how these sounds arrived in Britain and how they were interpreted, before turning towards the distinctly British genres that followed from these exchanges in Act three.
“We could have just made this exhibition onto Act Three, Springer reflects. “But we don't mind showing you that there's been a great depth of purpose and interrogation politically and culturally into this exhibition.”
There is something almost silent-disco-esque about the experience, with visitors weaving in and out of the space in their own worlds, absorbed in an intimate exchange with the music and the objects before them.
Lovers rock is a particular highlight. Emerging in the 1970s, the genre carved out space for romance and intimacy within reggae, reflecting the experiences of a generation of young Black Britons. This intimacy is brought to life in Sonia Boyce’s Lovers Rock (1998), which embosses the lyrics of Susan Cadogan’s ‘Hurts So Good’ onto wallpaper. The work illustrates how, in the face of racial exclusion, parties held in Black people’s homes became vital social spaces, where slower rhythms brought dancers closer together, leaving the wallpaper gently marked by their bodies.
Fashion offers another glimpse into the culture surrounding the music. The fur coat worn by Carroll Thompson recalls the look featured on the cover of her 1981 debut album, Hopelessly in Love, while the dress worn by Janet Kay for an early-1980s magazine shoot evokes the style of the era. With, ‘Silly ‘Games’ becoming a defining lovers rock classic, Kay’s presence speaks to the close relationship between music, image and the everyday lives of young Black women.
The exhibition moves through the sounds that followed, with fashion taking providing a solid visual thread. Pauline Black’s tailored ensemble and Neville Staple’s trilby and displayed alongside the politics of 2 Tone, a fusion of ska, reggae and punk that challenged racial divisions at a time when organisations such as Rock Against Racism were mobilising against the far right. Later, a jacket worn by Kool FM DJ gestures towards the pirate radio stations that helped jungle and drum and bass flourish beyond the reach of mainstream broadcasting. These were not simply new genres, but new ways of making, circulating, and listening to music.
The sheer density of the section is testament to the creativity it documents, though it can also feel as if each genre is competing for attention. Still, I enjoyed delving into the music, tracing the connections between subgenres, influences and wider cultural impact. The exhibition makes clear that these sounds did not emerge in isolation, but from communities, technologies, and political conditions overlapping that overlapped.
Grime offers a particularly telling example. Media coverage and political rhetoric have often cast the genre as a source of social disorder and violence. Here we see a more nuanced perspective, foregrounding its ingenuity and DIY spirit. Among the objects on display is JME’s Super Nintendo and Mario Paint game, which he used to experiment with music production before he could afford professional software. A reminder that innovation can begin far from the recording studio.
Rather than presenting contemporary genres as a neat progression beyond those of Act Three, the exhibition acknowledges that these musical histories have continued to develop beside one another.
Fashion remains a running thread, with some memorable music-meets-style moments. Sade’s ‘Sweetest Taboo’ music video look, Poly Styrene’s unmistakable ‘day glo’ uniform. Skunk Anansie front woman, Skin’s provocative lime-green ‘Clit Rock’ suit designed by Daniel Pollitt and spiked headpiece by Dayne Henderson, worn for the band’s 2022 Glastonbury performance, are a standout. Meanwhile Little Simz’ Comme des Garcons ensembled, worn for a Dazed cover shoot in 2023 speaks to the deliberate relationship between sound, styling and self-presentation in contemporary rap.
Stormzy’s Banksy-designed stab-proof vest, worn during his 2019 Glastonbury headline performance — the first by a Black British male solo artist — is one of the final objects on display. It pairs a Union Jack motif with a stark reminder of knife crime, racial inequality in the justice system, and the violence shaping perceptions of young Black men in Britain.
Springer describes the artists, represented in the final act as “fighting additional battles,” with prejudice continuing the shape how Black musicians are expected to present and sell themselves, especially in this globalised world. Commercial success, the exhibition suggests, does not necessarily mean that artists are free from the assumptions and restrictions that have long shaped the industry.
“Wherever there are humans, there is music,” Springer asserts. The question is whose stories we choose to hear, and whose we allow to shape the sound of Britain.