Maddy Mussen
Maddy Mussen reports at the junction of music, nightlife and youth culture, using live events, festivals and the social lives of fans as her primary lens. At The Standard she is a lifestyle and fashion writer whose brief covers trends, celebrities, style, nightlife, travel and beauty, and she approaches those subjects with a clear Generation Z perspective. Her beat combines award-winning longform features, regular artist interviews and detailed festival reports, giving her coverage a broader cultural sweep than a purely reviews-focused music specialist.
Nightlife and live music
Mussen is responsible for The Standard’s nightlife section, identifying the most notable gigs and club nights in the city each week and treating the live circuit as a core part of her reporting, not just a listings add-on. Her reviews of events such as Harry Styles’s night at Meltdown Festival focus on the experience shared between artist and audience, emphasising atmosphere, staging and fan dynamics as much as setlists and performance details.
She extends that live focus to festivals, filing pieces on Houghton, a phone-free event she describes in terms of 24-hour electronic programming, sculpture and enforced digital detox, and on Down the Rabbit Hole, a Dutch festival framed around barbecues, bonfires, lake swims and tightly curated line-ups.
A trend feature on alcohol-free festivals shows her interest in how promoters are reshaping the parameters of the live experience, treating sobriety and wellness as part of the story rather than a side note. Coverage of Apple Music’s first concert venue at Battersea Power Station reflects the same instinct to treat new spaces for performance as significant cultural developments, with detail on intimacy, technology and launch strategy.
Interviews with rising pop and indie artists
Mussen’s music coverage leans heavily on interviews with artists who sit at the intersection of mainstream attention and emerging status.
Her conversation with Jorja Smith focuses on the singer’s relationship with fame, the difficulty of negotiating success and the significance of returning to London to mark a new album with a major outdoor party. In a profile of Heartstopper actor Bash Croft, she tracks his pivot into pop music and fashion, setting his ambitions against the benchmark of performers such as Freddie Mercury and positioning him as a multi-hyphenate rather than a traditional recording artist. Features on America’s “new queen of indie-pop” Bella Kay and on Holly Humberstone’s pursuit of excellence over commercial fortune both use songwriting, vulnerability and career choices as entry points, connecting the artists’ personal narratives to the expectations of young audiences.
Across these pieces, she writes less about technical craft and more about identity, aspiration and how musicians inhabit their public roles, which distinguishes her interviews from more conventional album-cycle Q&As.
Generation Z, social media and internet culture
A defining thread in Mussen’s work is her sustained focus on what it means to grow up and live online as part of Generation Z.
In her column about surviving social media as a teenager today, she draws on her own experience of growing up with the internet to analyse how platform dynamics and cultural pressures have intensified for younger users. Her longform journalism has tackled themes such as Russian bots, incel communities and cocaine use among football fans, indicating a willingness to follow youth experiences into darker or more complicated territory where technology, gender and behaviour intersect.
This context feeds back into her music and nightlife reporting, where she frequently treats festivals, gigs and club scenes as spaces where online identities and offline communities meet.
Lifestyle features and cultural commentary
Beyond music, Mussen writes lifestyle and commentary pieces that treat public figures and trends as expressions of broader cultural mood. In her article arguing that Britain should welcome Prince Harry back because he is “the only fun royal left”, she uses humour and pop-cultural references to frame questions of monarchy and public perception as matters of entertainment and national character.
Her feature on alcohol-free festivals approaches sobriety as a growing movement, combining field reporting with interviews and observation to show how audience expectations of partying and wellness are changing. More broadly, her remit at The Standard includes coverage of fashion, celebrity and travel, and she treats these subjects as part of the same ecosystem as her music writing, with style, nightlife and self-presentation all linked.
Outside The Standard she works as an award-winning freelance features writer whose work has appeared in national newspapers and digital publications including The Guardian, Vice and The Times, adding a wider platform to the youth-culture focus that runs through her reporting.
4 more music journalists.
Abigail Kellett
Abigail Kellett is a news reporter at the Halifax Courier who stands out for visually led coverage that shows how culture, nightlife and local life play out on the ground. She documents gigs, festivals and major live shows at venues such as The Piece Hall through curated photo sets that capture atmosphere, crowd and setting as much as performers, and she uses extensive image galleries to tap reader nostalgia for nights out in Halifax town centre. Her beat spans arts, entertainment, going out, heritage, books and literary events, along with community life, people stories, local challenges, milestones, transport, regeneration, lifestyle and food. She reports through photographs, checklist-style features, reader-driven lists and roundups of most-read stories, turning announcements, programmes, author events, festivals, shop lists and everyday characters into stories about place, shared memory and how people spend their time.
Adam Lyon
Adam Lyon is a digital audience and content editor whose news beat sits at the intersection of Ayrshire’s cultural life, business environment and public affairs. He works for the Ayr Advertiser and as Digital Audience & Content Editor for Newsquest in the west of Scotland across multiple weekly titles. He covers Ayrshire news with a strong thread of music and local culture alongside business, courts and public affairs. He reports on music when it has a clear community or national hook, treating songs as news events rather than reviews. His business work explains how local firms and retail policy shape town centres. His court coverage uses round-ups of sheriff court cases to show patterns and outcomes. He also fronts video previews and is active in a football supporters trust community.
Adam Maidment
Adam Maidment is a senior What’s On and LGBTQ+ reporter whose work links big-name gigs, new venues and cultural flashpoints to everyday fan culture and inclusion. He covers music, nightlife and the wider cultural scene for the Manchester Evening News, focusing on how concerts, openings and immersive events land with real people and communities. His beat spans live music, arenas and stadiums, new restaurant and bar openings, food reviews, exhibitions, street art and nightlife infrastructure, with a particular focus on LGBTQ+ audiences and neighbourhoods. He reports on venue ambitions and problems, cultural institutions and equality issues, and franchise-led experiences, using straightforward, on-the-ground reporting and clear description. Drawing on a background in community reporting, he looks for underrepresented perspectives and uses social media, analytics and local sourcing to find stories where culture, identity and place meet.
Alex Rigotti
Alex Rigotti is a freelance music and culture editor and journalist who joins fast-turnaround music news with detailed reporting on artists, fandom and politics. They report breaking stories and live music updates for NME and Paste Magazine, covering pop, rock, club music, underground scenes and cultural debates around art and identity. Their live-music beat includes setlists, tours, festival appearances, cancellations, ticketing, venues and onstage collaborations. They previously served as a contributing editor for NME’s Radar section, supporting coverage of emerging artists and new scenes. Rigotti also writes features on rap lyrics and criminalisation, Eurovision and politics, queer feminist bodybuilding, astrotherapy and contemporary art. Their reporting is direct and specific, using clear quotes, concrete details and artists’ own words to explain what happened and how music fits into wider cultural and industry trends.