DUBWISE
Vivian Zito: Tracing London’s Hidden Soundscapes
If you’ve ever picked up a copy of Dubwise Review in a Camden record shop, or spotted one left behind in a café near King’s Cross with coffee stains on the cover, you’ve probably brushed up against Vivian Zito. Most folks just call her Viv. She slips between roles. She’s a critic. She’s an archivist. She’s a folklorist. Her byline’s quiet, but the writing hums. In a scene that burns through nights and forgets by morning, she’s the one who remembers.
Viv the Connector (The '70s)
The Westway was humming the night Viv saw Hawkwind play. She was sixteen. Lemmy was still in the band. The amps buzzed like they were chewing through concrete. She’d snuck out of her cousin’s flat in Ladbroke Grove with a borrowed tape recorder and a half-dead flashlight. The tape came out warped, full of hiss and traffic noise. She kept it anyway. Called it “London breathing.”
At nineteen, she started cataloguing flyers for International Times. She wasn’t on staff. She just showed up with a scanner and a bag of biscuits, asked if anyone had old gig posters or zines. Mick Farren handed her a stack of papers and told her to “make sense of the mess.” She did. She still has the folder labeled “Farren’s Chaos.”
Viv carried those sense-making instincts into her student years. She studied English with Film Studies at King’s College London, which later sent her to Boston College on an exchange. In 1979 she turned up in Massachusetts, writing for the campus paper, The Heights, and filing small pieces about film and music. Boston College wasn’t built for punks, but she found the cracks where things leaked through — basement rehearsals, late-night radio, records passed hand to hand. Somewhere in that same orbit she met 007's two frontmen, Larry and Dee Rail, who themselves had just met and were just beginning the path that would lead to an era of busted amps, jail cells, and standing ovations in Boston's underground rock scene. She learned to tune her ear in that world, then brought it back with her to London.
Holloway Overflow (The '80s)
When punk began filling Camden basements and reggae poured out of Westbourne Park, her Holloway flat started to catch the overflow. By 1980, the place had turned into a waystation. DJs dropped off cassettes. Old punks mailed her scraps. One day, a guy from Camden handed her a torn ticket stub from The Clash at the Electric Ballroom. She scanned it, logged it, and wrote a short piece called “Stub as Proof.” It ran in Dubwise Review and got passed around like gospel.
“Accidental curation,” Viv called it. She’d traced a bootleg soundtrack to a squat in Kentish Town, where someone had layered it with Hawkwind’s “Urban Guerrilla” and Clash demos. The mix felt like a city talking to itself. She’s obsessed with Performance, not just as a film but as something that leaks into corners—flyers, sound systems, half-remembered screenings. London leaves things behind, and Viv’s good at finding them.
Unsentimental, but tuned to warmth, she keeps things that still hum. A flyer folded in a coat pocket. A cassette with someone coughing between tracks. She’ll tell you where the ashtray sat, what the carpet smelled like, who leaned against the door. The collection drifts and overlaps. It’s full of pauses, half-labels, and the kind of detail that doesn’t ask to be explained.
She knows the guy who ran lights for Hawkwind later sold bootleg Clash shirts outside Dingwalls. She remembers that International Times printed a poem about the Westway the same week Performance screened in Notting Hill.
From Archives to Basement Floors (The '90s)
Viv got her professional training at University College London, where she picked up her Master of Archives and Records Management. That meant long hours digitizing reel-to-reels, cataloguing zines, protecting fragile scraps most people would toss. She dragged those skills into the basements and backrooms of the underground. Damp flyers. Warped cassettes. Posters curling off the walls. Those became her archive. She still hauls around a battered scanner and treats tape hiss like treasure.
At Dubwise Review, her writing comes out like ghost maps. She rebuilds whole nights from fragments. Smoke-filled basements. Pirate transmitters buzzing in flats. Squat collectives that lived fast and vanished. Her piece “Echoes from the Holloway Basement” is a classic. Snatches of interviews. Half-lost setlists. A photocopied flyer pulled from an attic. The story shows how a scene grows through the people who gather and stay. (If you want to see her long-form work, check out her chronicle Lives in Dub on the Boston band 007. View the timeline.)
She’s written for Billboard and Trouser Press. Dubwise Review is home. The magazine cares about the margins, and so does she. She writes about the small details that carry memory forward. A warped cassette that reshapes a track. A venue closing that scatters a whole community. Listening itself as resistance. Her work shows how underground cultures keep going, shifting, finding new routes when old ones collapse. She writes about London in its entirety, from kids swapping tapes on buses to DJs hauling gear up stairwells. Every thread matters, and she treats it that way.
Her London is youth clubs with sticky floors. Labels printed on kitchen tables. Vinyl pressed in backrooms off Holloway Road. A cigarette burn on a flyer with the same weight as a chart single. People who work with her say she can build a whole cultural map out of scraps. A doodled logo. A torn ticket stub. Younger archivists and DJs follow her lead, piecing stories together from whatever’s left behind.
The Work of Holding Memory
Vivian Zito gives Dubwise Review its steady heartbeat. Her training gave her the tools, and years of patient work sharpened her instincts. She keeps the pulse of scenes alive when they’d otherwise fade out. She’s an archivist and a bridge between past and present. She connects the sound of old London with the echoes that still shake the city’s walls. In a place that keeps tearing things down and building over them, her work stays put. It lingers. It haunts, in the best way.