OPINION
When‘ high risk’ costs us culture
The REMEL( Race Equality in Music Event Licensing) report found that Black and South Asian-led events are being disproportionately cancelled, restricted or blocked, ultimately leading to a huge loss to the economy and our cultural landscape. Black Lives in Music CEO Dr Charisse Beaumont outlines the changes needed.
Acity can celebrate Black music and still make it extraordinarily difficult for Black music to live there.
It can market Brixton’ s cultural identity while the venues and events that created that identity struggle to survive. It can celebrate Notting Hill Carnival as an emblem of London while discussing it overwhelmingly through the language of policing, security and disorder. It can applaud the international success of
“ BETWEEN £ 127 MILLION AND £ 141 MILLION IN SPENDING IS BEING LOST ANNUALLY.”
Afrobeats, Grime, Drill, Reggae and UK Rap while the promoters trying to put those sounds on stages encounter a vocabulary of‘ high risk’,‘ intelligence’,‘ security’ and
‘ dispersal’ that others rarely experience in quite the same way.
That contradiction sits at the heart of the REMEL( Race Equality in Music Event Licensing) report.
The project began in July 2023, after Black Lives in Music and the Musicians’ Union wrote jointly to Mayor of London Sadiq Khan raising concerns about racial inequality in the licensing and policing of live music. What followed became a major multi-agency project involving the GLA, Metropolitan Police, UK Music, LIVE, the Musicians’ Union and, crucially, the artists, promoters and venue operators living with the consequences of these decisions.
We wanted to know whether experiences we had heard about for years were isolated incidents or something more systematic. The findings are difficult to ignore. REMEL found Black and South Asian-led events being disproportionately cancelled, restricted or blocked. Promoters described events being stopped with little explanation,‘ intelligence’ they could not see or challenge and genres including Afrobeats, Hip Hop, Drill, R & B
Dr Charisse Beaumont
12 accessaa. co. uk