Review of the Week: The Music Is Black: A British Story at V&A East

(V&A East, London E20, opens tomorrow)

What’s Stormzy’s most iconic outfit? Either the Adidas tracksuit from his Shut Up video, radiant red against Black skin, or the union jack stab-proof vest he wore to headline Glastonbury. Five were made by Banksy from authentic police body armour. One sold for $1m at Sotheby’s in 2024 and one is caged in glass at London’s brand new V&A East museum as part of The Music Is Black – A British Story, almost apologetically stowed away near the exit. 

Yes, Banksy is a bit heavy-handed at times – graffiti is rarely about subtext – but at its best his work offers a blunt simplicity that’s beyond analysis and is all about goosebumps. Here, the vest is incendiary. It’s weirdly disorienting up close. A bulletproof collage that silently sums up so much about Black life in Britain – its music, violence, protest, patriotism, controversy and ever-present danger. But why is it such a standout at the V&A? Shouldn’t most of the exhibition feel this way? What’s the “British Story” the V&A are trying to tell?

Its new museum is pretty inside and out, a beautifully distended crab shell squatting on the edge of Olympic Park in Hackney Wick, east London. With the new space, the V&A aims to create “a place of dreams and possibilities” that’s open to everyone, and has launched it with this exhibition plus four free music festivals in the park. The show’s curator, Jacqueline Springer, and her team have created something impressively substantial and ambitious out of the V&A’s collections, bulked up with new commissions and loaned materials including original signs from legendary venues 4 Aces and Blue Note; an outfit from the first Black musician to appear on British TV and LR Vandy’s sculptural tribute to rock & roll. There’s smart use of tech, with spatially-aware headsets playing music relevant to each object, and thoughtful discounts: under-18s go free, while 18-25s are less than half-price. 

We’re promised 125 years of music, but we start with slavery and Black history through the lens of music rather than a simple history of Black music. It reminds you that, although music is something we never needed – the first human invention that was purely for pleasure – musical instruments were also always used for practical purposes like warning of the enemy’s approach or to create a soundtrack for military and religious control. It’s a dark but necessary context-setting start.

After the pre-history, The Music Is Black keeps going chronologically, and the surprises keep coming. It’s not just about British acts or Black artists, and while it foregrounds eight UK-born genres like grime and Britfunk, every corner of popular music is represented: Sade and Jamiroquai alongside Bo Diddley and Bob Marley. Artists like much-missed 90s neo-soul prospect Lynden David Hall appear, as do long-lasting veteran bands Osibisa and the Cimarons. Perhaps the first photography section is too cluttered: the thrillingly austere power of punk-era photographer Dennis Morris’s gorgeously lit images demands more space and time to absorb. Any disappointments are temporary, though, with a glorious array of items like Winifred Atwell’s fan-scratched piano, Madness’s union jack saxophone and Jme’s beat-producing Super Nintendo console.

Sometimes the Britishness and the Blackness feel a little diluted. Partly that is the British story, the empire that reached its greedy arms around the world, subsuming cultures, languages, fashions, musics. The exhibition does try to explain this. In the arts, a Black British story has often been one of omission and erasure, minstrelsy and appropriation. 

Springer has said that Black art is about “making you think constantly about issues you don't really want to confront", and that’s true. But perhaps there’s not enough of the sharp, bitter taste of exclusion or confrontation, which is why Stormzy’s stab vest feels so powerful. Especially as it’s adjacent to fancy frocks worn by millionaires such as Shirley Bassey. By concentrating on the creators much more than the communities they came from, the V&A’s story, while well told, becomes more sanitised than it needs to be towards its end. Few of us will be Little Simz on the cover of Dazed, but we all know what it’s like in the club. The exhibition could do with more of the audience, more eyes on Black music dancefloors and all their public intimacies. 

Something else it lacks is a showstopper on the scale of the astonishing 13-foot carnival-queen peacock costume at the British Library’s excellent 2024 exhibition Beyond the Bassline, which also covered centuries of Black music. Here the Notting Hill carnival section comprises a few mostly monochrome items, which does Europe’s greatest festival, at the heart of UK Black music for 60 years, a wild disservice.

Still, the greatest risk is that shows like this take a subject that’s urgent and alive, then memorialise it into inertia. That never happens here. The Music Is Black sets out to educate, inspire and document, and it does so with verve and joy.

Damien Morris is a writer and editor specialising in music