Readers gain a curated case for optimism as Femi Koleoso guest-edits this week’s Saturday magazine culture features.
Koleoso frames that case from experience. Born to Nigerian parents and raised in Enfield, he learned drums in church, sharpened his craft through state schooling and youth clubs, and now tours with Ezra Collective while also producing, DJing and broadcasting on BBC Radio 6 Music. He told close friends and mentors he had been invited to guest-edit, and noted he once achieved an A in GCSE English, a small confirmation of being put in charge.
Hope, he writes, matters because it marks a route from pain to renewal. “There’s power in a happy story; it brings hope,” he says, and he lifts a spoken-word line from a friend on the band’s new album, Here Because of Hope, that “on the other side of pain there can be renewal.” For Koleoso, music makes that movement tangible: songs born of loss and struggle can become conduits to joy.
He cites wide-ranging examples to make the point. A song Fela Kuti wrote about his mother’s execution became a dance-floor bassline, grime emerged from the hardships of council estates and calypso has roots in the transatlantic slave trade. Those histories, Koleoso argues, show creativity often converts suffering into communal celebration.
The guest edit mixes his essay with picks from bandmates and collaborators, underscoring the cultural terrain he wants readers to explore. Selections include the film The Secret Agent featuring Wagner Moura, Rosa Passos’s album Recriação, a Southbank Centre season celebrating the steelpan that one contributor described as a “best of London” moment, and Akinola Davies Jr’s 2025 coming-of-age film My Father’s Shadow, which another contributor found raw and culturally deep.
Koleoso closes by foregrounding joy as intentional and communal. His takeover aims to lift stories that move people from mourning toward celebration, and to show how art can be a practical source of hope. Readers can find the full set of features and recommendations in this week’s Saturday magazine culture section.
