30 years from Brixton

"People aren't that optimistic" - I speak to Cyrus Shahrad aka DJ Hiatus 

Published: Friday, April 8, 2011

How should we feel on the 30th anniversary of the Brixton riots?

Cyrus Shahrad doesn’t know the answer. A long-time resident of the area, Cyrus – aka DJ Hiatus – is a journalist and musician whose preoccupation for the last weeks and months has been disseminating Brixton’s riots with eyes on its uncertain future.

The chiselled 32 year old Iranian joins me in central London, heavy eyes a window to lonesome 12 hour days in a studio and typing up the latest addition to his Brixton portfolio: a piece on the riots for The Guardian.


“As a journalist I was aiming to draw attention to how good things are; how much things had improved in Brixton. It surprised me to find out people aren’t all that happy and people aren’t that optimistic.”

London Riots – We’re missing the point

Normally we can cite race, gender, politics, money or sex. But this riot is explicable only in its confusion.
Published: Wednesday, August 10, 2011

The problem with being a small editorial team is clear on a day like today. All too regularly – acknowledging we haven’t the equipment to keep up with the news outlets – by the time one fullstops a piece of social vommitary, it has ceased to be newsworthy and, written off as a poor use of resource, it is thrown it into the unprofitable/ unjustified pile.

Starting in Tottenham/ Seven Sisters for fathomable reasons owing to the death-by-police of Mark Duggan, phase two was so sporadic, and unflinchingly relentless, it bore little to suggest an organised march of the underclass, the cries of the alienated, or attempts by the disenfranchised to challenge the socio-political status quo.

For Amy: Addiction is a disease, and it is terminal

Addiction is the the most expensive disease around, and the only one that convinces you you don't have it 

Published: Monday, July 25, 2011

Russell Brand put it better than the others could. Camden scenesters together, his moving and honest account of the woman he called Winehouse is – more than the words of the next deskling – a window into the savage crutch of the addiction which propped her celebrity, and likely caused her death.

Brand’s eulogy in The Guardian is being hailed as a beautiful tribute to his comrade, and indeed is a learned contribution to a much-needed addiction debate which Guardian columnist Tanya Gold - along with a spectrum of vacant to insightful opinion columns - introduced yesterday.

In this meta world we live in, Russell Brand’s article has spawned written e-kudos, such as this which you are reading I guess, where writers of varying levels of informedness laud his note-perfect response to what we’re told is a sudden, but not unsurprising end.

But the rhetoric used by secondary commentators, and what I’m starting to find increasingly frustrating, is starting to read like the great discourse of the ill-informed.