The Virgin Records founder Richard Branson and the Island Records owner Chris Blackwell should financially support a permanent exhibition dedicated to Black British musical history, according to backers of a petition.
The petition, which has been signed by artists and musicians including George the Poet, Jazzie B and Sonia Boyce, calls for a new home that would recognise and celebrate African and Caribbean performances, recordings and “contributions to the evolution of genres that have reshaped British culture, while safeguarding rare artefacts, recordings, memorabilia, and untold stories for future generations”.
The sociologist Prof Paul Gilroy, who also signed the petition, said executives who made significant profits from Black British and Caribbean music should put up money for the venture that would focus on the history of Black music in the UK.
He said: “I don’t understand why the resources are all being squeezed out of the state, when actually there’s private sector resources, people like Richard Branson, people like Chris Blackwell, whose company has made enormous amounts of capital out of Black British music production and Caribbean music production.
“I think the people who’ve done so well out of the corporate side of Black music in this country ought to be paying for a building and a museum and an architect. They should be making a temple.”
Virgin Records was one of the earliest backers of reggae music in Britain and ran a dedicated imprint called Front Line in the 1970s (Branson sold the label for $1bn in 1992), while Island Records was the home of Bob Marley throughout his career until his death in 1981.
The petition was created by Black Music Research Unit, which is run by Mykaell Riley, an academic and co-curator of the Beyond the Bassline exhibition at the British Library, which told 500 years of Black British musical history, from the court of Henry VIII to lovers rock and grime.
It also asks for the integration of Black British music into UK classrooms, and comes as a government review into the national curriculum is under way.
Riley said the success of temporary exhibitions including 2 Tone: Lives & Legacies at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in Coventry; Dub London at the London Museum; Google’s Union Black: Sounds of a Nation project; and Beyond the Bassline show there is an appetite among Britons for something more substantial and permanent.
“The exhibition then ended with the majority of people saying, so you’re going to tour, right?” said Riley. “Or why is it ending so soon? Or what’s happening next? What happens to all the artefacts, what happens to the story?”
Gilroy used the example of the Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen funding the Experience Music Project (EMP), a museum dedicated to Jimi Hendrix in Seattle that later became the Museum of Pop Culture (MoPOP), as the kind of model the UK could follow with private sector money creating a public museum.
Riley and Gilroy said the permanent exhibition would not necessarily have to be housed in a bricks-and-mortar institution and could exist digitally online.
Jazzie B, the founder of Soul II Soul who was this year’s recipient of the lifetime achievement award at the Mobos, said it felt “archaic” to be having a conversation about a permanent exhibition to Black music in 2024.
“The support should come from the community … with people allowed to pledge their support to make this happen,” he said.
V&A East, which will open in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in east London next year, announced that its inaugural exhibition would be a survey of Black British music in the 20th century, titled The Music Is Black: A British Story.
