All City is a newsletter by music journalist Ciaran Thapar. In it, he recommends music and food and gives a window into his travels, conversations and personal diaries. Rob Smith gets the lowdown from Ciaran…

All City seems appropriate in that you really ground your references to music with social context and interview features. Did you want to make a multi-disciplinary publication from the off?

Definitely. I’ve been writing as a freelance music journalist for about a decade now, focusing on UK rap, drill, grime and jazz. But I have also been writing about British society and identity, London and my community work, and building a core career as a youth worker and educator.

So the music focus was only ever part of a bigger picture, just like in life, I guess. I started All City to write more on my own terms, which means bringing all of these elements together in one place. Separating them out doesn’t make much sense to me; I see music as an active, living thing that happens because people interact and seek expression.

In my newsletter, I try to document my memories and experiences, from deep, interesting conversations to trivial or fleeting thoughts about a particular song.

From jungle rollers to 2-step garage experiments, electronic and dance music is pretty present in your blog’s playlist, how do you pick out tunes for your playlists? Whatever’s in your headphones? Or conscious selection?

The process is evolving. I thought of the idea to start writing about individual songs in February 2024, after one year of writing All City. For a few years, people had been saying to me that I should start a playlist. And I was trying to simplify and condense my posts and make them more fun, less self-conscious.

I was sitting on a beach in Jamaica on holiday and Blue Mountain by Breakage came on in my headphones. I’d been drinking Blue Mountain coffee all week; I saw road signs to the Blue Mountain on the roads (I sadly didn’t visit it). The song, a 2006 jungle slammer, reminds me of being young and carefree and has a special significance among my group of school friends. So I wrote all of this down — my emotions, memories, the context of my trip to Jamaica — and did a little digging into when and how it was made.

Ever since then, I have tried to choose songs that I know I will never, ever get bored of, because they are so deeply attached to my life. Some songs I love, but I don’t have much to say about them — they wouldn’t feature here. The ones that end up in the pages of All City are those which have stayed with me, that I think hard about, that remain in my rotation, unconditionally.

You’re an avid diary keeper, and access to your diary is one of the unique features of All City, what role do you think diary-keeping plays in contemporary society?

I started writing a daily diary when I was 19 to cope with my wavering mental health as an undergraduate student. I set myself a target of writing in it every day for six months. It created a habit of depositing my busy thoughts on the page to make sense of them and move on. And that’s never left me — I eventually turned it into a blog, and then journalism, and now a career as an author.

I’ve spent quite a lot of time with rappers over the years, either in studio sessions with young people, or whilst interviewing them for journalism, and I think writing prose is my version of rapping: a form of catharsis, of purging emotions. The best creative ideas and the most sensible realisations I have come from writing my diary.

The main advice I give to students on my Writing for Social Impact course is to write a diary. It’s the best place to hone your voice and practise your craft before opening it up to an audience, like a sprinter practising on a running track, or a dancer in their living room, or a singer in the shower.

Why was a Substack the next step after finishing your book, Cut Short?

Cut Short was published in hardback in June 2021; the paperback came out a year later. It’s a story about my youth work in south London from 2015-2020, and it tries to explain why violence happens in the inner city, as well as provide a blueprint of solutions to prevent it. I am very proud of the book and its journey, but writing it during the pandemic exhausted me. It’s taken me a few years to recover, frankly. Part of the problem was that, without ever intending to, I made writing my main source of income and self-worth.

As a creative person, that can be a toxic place to get to in an expensive place like London, because passion and expression pay your rent. I got to the stage where I wanted writing to feel free like it used to. I’ve never used Twitter much and I became disillusioned with the struggling state of freelance journalism — shrinking budgets, patronising editors, the shift away from long-form written word and towards short-form video. I craved my own space to write again on my own terms.

Then I was introduced to the good people at Substack just as they’d made their strategic launch in the UK. So I started All City at the start of 2023 as a solution to my situation. I’m still trying to figure out how to make it the best it can be; I still feel at the start of this journey, to be honest.

What value does music hold for you day-to-day in your youth work?

I am no longer a frontline youth worker, per se. I now work as Director of Comms and Public Affairs at the Youth Endowment Fund, a charity which funds and researches interventions for violence amongst children and young people. But for the best part of a decade — and in the ongoing interactions I have with young people and practitioners — music has played the most special, magical role in youth work. I have loved London music culture — particularly dubstep, garage, grime, rap, jungle, soul and other bits — since I was in my early teens.

Landing in south London as a 23-year-old youth worker back in the mid-2010s meant that the early signs of drill, the resurgence of grime and the growing umbrella of UK rap were all revealing themselves in the classrooms and youth clubs that I found myself working in. My ears tapped in. Holding collaborative, investigative conversations about music culture — its ethics, its sonic form, its local significance — with teenagers, particularly boys at risk of exclusion from school or criminality on the roads, proved potent as a method of engagement.

It often gave them a chance to open up about things they had been through or drop their guard to take in advice. I had a lot of success as a mentor to young people who might not have otherwise listened by simply talking to them about the music they liked. Being able to talk about hyperlocal music culture is like speaking a hidden dialect.

What changes need to happen in club culture to help better support youth work?

I can only speak for London because that’s been my patch, but the direction of travel doesn’t look good for underground club culture here. Or maybe I’m just getting old and less receptive to what’s happening out there. Probably a bit of both! Venues are shutting down, closing times are getting earlier, and parts of the city that were once thriving with grassroots culture are being gentrified. In itself, it’s no bad thing that the city is developing, it’s just the way this has been managed has worsened inequality and accelerated the pressures felt by ordinary working people.

The cost of living crisis is a tidal wave knocking over anything that’s fragile. I think this is relevant for the youth sector because it faces a comparable state of affairs: divestment, demonisation, devaluation. Youth clubs have closed, publicly-owned space is being sold off, and the bricks-and-mortar that birthed entire genres, like grime or dubstep, are being lost to history.

So I think if music venues and studios can step forward to bridge the gap with spaces where young people spend time, it would be an important move for a basic sense of solidarity and resistance. To most people, youth work is quite abstract, but if you care about music, you probably care about culture and people, and the cultures and people who have historically ended up defining musical trends in this country are young.

My simple call to action to anyone working in music or the arts in general is to sign up to mentor someone in your local area. Becoming a mentor changed my life forever. It gave me a window into a version of London that I might not have seen otherwise.

If you had to choose one feature from your Substack that sums it up what would it be?

Definitely the music playlist. I’m having such fun with it at the moment and it’s getting good feedback. It’s free, simple, quickly lets you know about a song and its historical significance, and links to a Spotify playlist that you can follow. Writing the pieces for this section has made me feel like a university student writing my blog again.

I don’t even care who reads it, which I think is a good sign — it’s pure vibes and expression. It’s unpredictable, too: my last two posts were about drill (M1llionz) and pop (Spice Girls). I am launching a food section soon, writing about some of my favourite places to eat in London.

Your feature about dub soundsystems and Boiler Room in Southall is a stand-out read, have you had any other recent formative and unique encounters with electronic/dance music?

Thank you, I’m glad it resonated. That piece is the closest thing to my next book, a memoir about growing up as a mixed-race British Punjabi in London, that I’ve published yet. And yep, I went to Kappa Futur in Turin, Italy, this summer. I regret that I never hit the festival circuit hard when I was younger — I was always too busy or broke or dealing with family or relationship stuff, or prioritising work or other holidays. But this summer I committed to going big. Kappa is a hub for electronic and dance music, particularly house and techno, and it did not disappoint.

I went with a group of experienced ravers all in their mid-thirties, we got a nice comfortable hostel in the centre of the city and spent our time outside of the festival wandering cobbled streets eating banging Italian food and drinking wine. Then inside the festival, which is in a huge converted car factory, it was mad. I got an education and created memories I’ll have forever.

Any other newsletters you’re enjoying being subscribed to?

Between Vittles and Brown History, I stay pretty satisfied.

Any producers/writers/artists you want to shout out here?

I saw electric guitarist and composer Mansur Brown perform last week and he was exceptional (I wrote about his song Rise and the gig both on All City). I recently read Aniefiok Ekpoudom’s Where We Come From, about UK rap and grime, which isn’t out in paperback yet but is due to be a classic of British music writing.

And Franklyn Addo just published a book, A Quick Ting On Grime, written from the perspective of someone who grew up around the genre’s golden era in East London, which I am looking forward to reading soon. I rate everything that Eerf Evil and The Silhouettes Project are doing for music, community and young people in London, too.

Photo credit: Nahwand Jaff