Happy birthday to us...

5 years on, 600 articles, book to come

By Simon Warner, Founding Editor, R&BG

IT FEELS LIKE we have been celebrating quite a rush of big anniversaries this year in the digital pages of Rock and the Beat Generation. Barely a. week has gone by without a timely commemoration of some description, literary or musical.

It was, you will remember, Neal Cassady’s centenary in February, John Coltrane and Miles Davis’ hundredth year cropped up in recent weeks and Allen Ginsberg’s own centennial this very month has been attracting our attention.

But, you might excuse us, when we refer to one or two numbers we are trumpeting in relation to R&BG itself: we are turning five years old today, June 24th, 2026, and, in the last couple of weeks, have added our 600th article to the site’s always expanding archive.

We are paid tens of thousands of visits each month by you our loyal readership and we are delighted that you seem to be interested in the subjects we cover, the people we profile and the issues we raise, around that creative whirlpool where novels and poetry, short stories and spoken word, cohabit with rock and folk, jazz and country.

Pictured above: High five? Simon Warner, editor, Rock and the Beat Generation

Just as we have covered Kerouac and Ginsberg, Burroughs, Cassady and Corso, so we have chased down stories on Bob Dylan and the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, David Bowie and the Grateful Dead, Van Morrison and Jim Morrison, Joni Mitchell, Patti Smith and the Smiths, the Velvet Underground and Sonic Youth, Zach Bryan, Pulp and the 1975, not to mention Bird and Trane, Prez and Miles. And we should also flag up that a new print edition, The Best of Rock and the Beat Generation, is currently in preparation.

Although content has been free to all for the first five years of our existence, some of you have still supported our work as paid subscribers, a very welcome gesture. We would, at this juncture, ask, if you enjoy what we do, whether you might consider taking out a premium subscription, for just £7 a month – and even less if you sign up for a whole 12 months.

Help us to keep this unique resource running and covering stories from fresh angles, providing news, reviews and interviews and maintaining a special focus on words and sound, rhymes and recordings, Beats and beats, in that ever-fascinating terrain ‘where hip writers meet hot rockers’. Those typewriter ribbons, I can confirm, do not pay for themselves!