Leonie Cooper
Leonie Cooper is a music and culture journalist with over fifteen years experience writing for publications such as The Guardian and NME.
The Unsung: How Wendy O. Williams became the anarchic darling of CBGBs
Since their inception, the unholy trinity of punk, metal and hardcore have been wildly male dominated. But it was in the early days of...
The Unsung: Revisiting Jessie Mae Hemphill’s leopard print-clad country blues, 40 years on
When blues pioneer Jessie Mae Hemphill finally found fame in the 1980s, she wasn’t hard to spot. By then she was almost 60, but...
The country music stars getting stick from the genre’s trad fanbase – and coming...
You’d have hoped that the kind of fierce, reactionary backlash against the Dixie Chicks – now known as The Chicks – when they poured...
Sylvan Esso: “There’s a reason why humanity wants to dance – there are so...
This summer Amelia Meath – the lyric-writing, Buffalo boot wearing, cartwheeling half of Sylvan Esso – turned 32. Of course a party was impossible,...
Farewell Miss Mercy – one of life’s true originals
And so it goes that another magnificent pop cultural presence leaves us. Earlier this week, the woman known as Miss Mercy passed away at...
Succession’s Cousin Greg has just dropped a pop-punk Coronavirus banger
Every single character in Succession is a sinister, nasty piece of work – scumbags one and all. And yet, what you wouldn’t give to...
Bree Runway: “My artistry is edgy. It’s different. It’s out there”
Bree Runway’s mum might just be the unspoken hero of 2020. Though she wasn’t best pleased when her teenage daughter told her she was...
The Chicks – ‘Gaslighter’ review: balancing poppy political polemics alongside big sister belters
The band formerly known as the Dixie Chicks set themselves apart from the Republican sound of mainstream 1990s country when they released the darkly...
1990 was the worst year for music… ever
Skim through the back catalogue of the past 60 years of popular music and it’s easy to find incredible, groundbreaking, oh-my-god-what-is-this-it’s-the-best-thing-I’ve-ever-heard albums at every...
Nu-Country: the musicians bringing back the blues
As Tammy Wynette almost once said, sometimes it’s hard to be a country music fan. Thank goodness then for the likes of Kacey Musgraves,...