Mary Rose Cook

I live in London now, but I used to live in Leeds. When I was there, I was heavily involved with a volunteer-run social centre called The Common Place. I helped with a number of things there, and one of the events we did was a club night called Harder Faster Louder. The idea was to have an evening where DJs only played the most brutal music, but from a mix of genres: hard-core, death metal, breakcore, dark d&b, gabba, grind and noise.

I had really high expectations, because brutal music seems one of the few genre-spanning genres. Many people into death metal also like breakcore. Many people into gabba also like hard-core.

Hardly anyone came. And I’ve always hoped that someone else would give it a go and maybe do it better than us and make it work.