Vivien Goldman : The John Robb interview

Vivien Goldman : John Robb interview

The music journalist, writer and musician on her adventures in punk rock, her seminal punky reggae single recorded with John Lydon producing, her pre punk days doing PR for Bob Marley, her music writing days and her role as a punk professor in New York and her acclaimed ‘Revenge of the She-Punks’ book about women in punk…

From her website

“No-One’s More Punk than Vivien Goldman,” pronounced Pitchfork Magazine. In that freewheeling spirit, the boundary-busting Vivien Goldman is a writer, educator, broadcaster — and a musician, too. A Londoner, she has lived in Paris and Jamaica and now resides in New York. Since she started out in the vigorous British rock press of the 1970s, often working with Bob Marley (the subject of two of her books,) her can-do attitude and outernational insights have been on wide display:  journalism, books, radio, television, university teaching, multi-media lecturing, museum dialogs, the recording studio, the stage —  and her beat still goes on.

“Revenge of the She-Punks,” Goldman’s award-winning sixth book, (University of Texas Press, 2019) won Rough Trade’s Book of the Year in the US and the UK, and earned her the Best Music Journalist Award from Germany’s Reeperbahn Festival. It has been translated into seven international editions

In a unique career move, Goldman released her first album, ‘Next Is Now,’ in 2021, produced by Youth (Killing Joke, The Orb, Paul McCartney, Poly Styrene.) Brooklyn Vegan made it LP of the Week and The Washington Post, Forbes magazine and Pitchfork, among others,  enthused about what Lucie O’Brien called “a moving statement on love, exile, struggle and companionship.. Goldman sings with a sense of musical liberation.”  (Mojo)

It was a remarkable renaissance for the post-punk music Goldman made in the early 1980s as part of The Flying Lizards, and solo with members of PiL,The Raincoats, Aswad and Robert Wyatt. When this scattered work was re-issued in a 2016 compilation album, “Resolutionary,” it prompted HBO to use her cult classic “Launderette” in their series, “The Deuce.”

. “The Afrobeat Artist,” a book on the work of Lemi Ghariokwu, the visual artist whose sleeves projected Fela Anikulapo Kuti, the creator of Nigeria’s Afrobeat sound, will be published by Hat & Beard Books in 2022. A book of her collected music journalism, “Roots, Routes and Revolution.” will be published by White Rabbit Books (UK) in 2023.

A long-time Adjunct Professor at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recording Music, Tisch, her lecturing life has taken her to London, New York, Los Angeles, Munich, Bilbao, Lagos and beyond.

Goldman’s archive is collected at the Fales Library, NYU as The Vivien Goldman Punk & Reggae Collection.

Vivien Goldman : John Robb interview