Jordan Bassett

Jordan Bassett connects contemporary music coverage with deep, historically informed criticism across music, film and pop culture. He is a music journalist, editor and broadcaster whose work for NME and other outlets spans festival news, artist interviews, long-form profiles and album and screen reviews, with a consistent focus on how performers, scenes and audiences intersect. He has more than a decade of experience covering arts and culture with a focus on music, and has served as commissioning editor for music at NME before moving into freelance work.

Festival coverage and live music reporting

Bassett’s news reporting includes coverage of major live events, using specific incidents on stage to illuminate the relationship between artists and their crowds. In his piece on Cypress Hill at the Rock In Rio Lisbon festival, he reports how the group stopped their set to ensure an unwell audience member received help, highlighting both the band’s focus on crowd safety and the reaction from fans who applauded the intervention. The article sits within his broader music beat at NME, where live reports and news items track what happens around performances as closely as the music itself.

This approach to festival coverage positions live shows as shared experiences rather than isolated performances. By centring the interaction between performers, security teams and the audience in the Cypress Hill story, he underlines how the dynamics of care and responsibility are part of the narrative of modern festivals. That emphasis on what unfolds in real time complements his work elsewhere on artists’ reputations and the environments in which they play.

Artist interviews and broadcast conversations

Bassett’s body of work features extensive interviewing of high-profile musicians and performers, often framed around new releases and major projects. He has written and broadcast interviews with some of the world’s best-known music figures, for outlets including NME and other arts and culture titles. His broadcast work for NME includes video conversations such as a discussion with actor Damson Idris about his “feel-good” summer motorsport blockbuster F1 The Movie, which explores how the film sits within wider pop culture. He has also spoken with Robbie Williams about new music and the way Oasis are depicted in the biographical project Better Man, drawing out how established artists revisit their own histories on screen and record.

Alongside these, Bassett’s interviews with acts like Confidence Man reflect an interest in contemporary performers who blend genre and performance art. His profiles of emerging singer-songwriters for NME, including coverage of a British-born, US-raised artist whose album Horror pulls in eclectic influences and high-profile friendships, show a recurring focus on how new acts build identities across different scenes and audiences. This combination of marquee names and rising artists, approached through detailed conversations, marks his interviewing style as wide-ranging but consistently grounded in the cultural context of the work.

Album and screen criticism

Criticism is a central part of Bassett’s output, and he writes with a clear, declarative style on both music and filmed entertainment. As commissioning editor for music at NME, he oversaw coverage while contributing his own reviews, bringing a critical voice to major releases. His review of Morrissey’s album Low In High School for NME, where he assigns a two-star rating out of five, exemplifies how he balances description of the record with firm judgement on its themes and execution. This kind of album review sits alongside assessments of other artists across rock and pop, reinforcing his role as a critic as well as a reporter.

Bassett also writes movie and TV reviews, with work appearing on Rotten Tomatoes and in publications that cover film and culture. His critic profile there lists a range of screen reviews, indicating that he applies the same evaluative approach to genre films and mainstream releases as he does to albums. Covering music, film and lifestyle within arts and culture allows him to chart how soundtracks, biopics and artist documentaries feed back into the way musicians are perceived. For communications teams, this breadth means any music-led story that touches cinema or television can fall within his interest.

Rock history and legacy artists

A distinguishing thread in Bassett’s work is his sustained attention to rock history and legacy performers. He is the author of Little Richard’s Here’s Little Richard, a volume in the 33 1/3 series that examines the pioneering album and the life around it. The book explores Little Richard’s roots in the queer underground of the American South and situates his work within a scene that was remarkably progressive for its time, showing Bassett’s interest in how questions of sexuality, identity and geography shape the foundations of rock’n’roll. His role as a longtime contributor to NME and as a music journalist for outlets such as the BBC, Esquire and Grazia is repeatedly linked to this expertise in classic records and their influence.

Beyond the page, Bassett participates in events that celebrate and contextualise historic artists. He has taken part in multi-day programming in Macon honouring Little Richard, including Q&A sessions, library talks and screenings of documentaries about the singer, reflecting a commitment to presenting music history to varied audiences. His writing for specialist titles such as Record Collector, Vintage Rock and Classic Pop further reinforces this focus on archival material, reissues and the legacies of established acts. Across these projects, Bassett treats heritage artists not as static icons but as figures whose stories continue to shape contemporary music culture, linking mid-century rock to modern scenes and fans.

In combination, Bassett’s festival reporting, interview work, criticism and historical writing distinguish him from a generic music reporter on the same beat. He covers immediate news from stages, but also traces how artists’ pasts, on record and on screen, inform their present narratives in music and broader culture.