“Played to Death”—there’s poetry in the phrase. It’s a nod to the grooves worn deep into vinyl by love and repetition, a tribute to a life spent in music. For Martine Rose, London’s subcultural alchemist, the title isn’t just evocative: it’s personal. Her new book, Played to Death, isn’t a book in the traditional sense but a living archive, a love letter in sound, a mixtape of history. It’s what happens when fashion, music, and memory collide in a way only Rose could orchestrate.
Last year, Rose—celebrated for reshaping menswear with a distinctly London edge—found herself in an unexpected role: curator of an inherited sonic legacy. “We just sold the family house in Tooting after 70 years,” she recalls. “My aunt, knowing my love of music, gave me about 200 of my granddad’s seven-inches.” Clifford Rose, her grandfather, was a tailor, a pillar of London’s Jamaican community, and an unintentional archivist of a golden era in sound. His collection—ska, rocksteady, rhythm and blues—wasn’t preserved with a collector’s meticulousness, but with the wear of life itself. “They weren’t stored badly,” an audio engineer told her. “They were played to death.”
It was this phrase that stuck. And when Rose shared the story with Jonny Gent, the founder of Sessions Arts Club, it set something in motion. What began as a playlist for the restaurant turned into a full-scale excavation of sound, a journey through time via Clifford’s crackling vinyl. “We didn’t curate an order,” she says. “We played them in the order they were found. The way my granddad would have listened to them.”
The Sessions Arts Club, where the book and playlist launch, is the perfect backdrop. It’s an ever-evolving creative sanctuary, a space where art, food, and music intermingle in a way that feels effortless yet intentional. Much like Rose’s collections, it blurs the lines between underground and establishment, high and low, personal and universal.
The music itself? It’s a map of migration, a testament to resilience. The Vikings’ early track It’s You I Love—a precursor to Toots and the Maytals—was a revelation to Rose. So was a haunting Roberta Flack recording of “Uh-Uh Ooh-Ooh Look Out (Here It Comes)”. And there was the moment at Peckings, London’s legendary reggae record shop, when owner Chris Peckings recognised the collection immediately: “Your family would have had to come here to buy these.” He wasn’t speaking in metaphor.
For Rose, the project is as much about lineage as it is about sound. “My granddad and nan’s house was the nucleus of everything,” she says. “It was open-door, always people coming and going, always music playing.” That warmth, that chaos, that constant movement—it’s all in the grooves. And now, through Played to Death, it lives on, not just in a book, but in the speakers of anyone who presses play.
The playlist is both a passport and a love letter, a way to time-travel through sound. Rose’s instinct—to preserve not just the music, but the context, the sequence, the way sound exists as memory—is quintessentially Martine Rose. Her approach to fashion is rooted in similar principles: an appreciation for provenance, an interrogation of masculinity, an understanding that style, like sound, is cyclical and deeply personal.
Rose’s work is a conversation between past and present, much like Played to Death. It stands as a reminder that like fashion, music is never just about aesthetics—it’s about identity, community, and inheritance. In Martine Rose’s world, nothing is ever just what it seems— a sexy, snatched waist here, an awkward, boxy shoulder there. And that’s precisely what makes it so, so good.