Diva Harris

Editor and freelance writer

United Kingdom

London born, bred and based, I am a writer with a degree in English from the University of Liverpool.

Since I graduated in 2015, I have worked by day as commissioning editor, copyeditor and staff writer for Caught by the River, an arts/nature/culture clash posting regularly at caughtbytheriver.net.

By moonlight and probably sheer madness, I am also a writer-for-hire, mainly covering music; I write regular reviews and features for The Quietus and DIY, as well as album and artist biogs for the likes of Cate Le Bon, Bradford Cox and Working Men's Club.

Adjacently: I DJ, co-host a monthly show on Soho Radio, and occasionally co-host the Heavenly Jukebox radio show too.

Say hello/commission me: [email protected]

Portfolio

Biogs

Group Listening - Walks

Heeding the call of the electric clarinet, the crooning song of a frog, you crunch across the forest floor, open the door, and step into the vigorous green, your edges shimmering as you ascend.

Revival Season - Golden Age of Self Snitching

Revival Season tell straight-shooting tales of our golden age — chop, cops, badass bitches, self-snitches; drug-dealing and revolution — chronicling and critiquing the culture over baselines and beats that kick squarely in the teeth with a platform boot.

Devendra Banhart - Flying Wig

Devendra Banhart is suddenly freer than a bird. He is as free as a wig that transcends the body, transcends the head, and makes for the clouds.

Halo Maud - Catch the Wave single copy

Press your ear to the conch, and if you’re lucky, you may just catch a missive from the unknowable depths — a song from a mythology in which Homer’s Sirens honed their craft in the French psychedelic rock/alt-pop scene of the 2010s.

H. Hawkline - Milk for Flowers

Beauty flourishes in the corners of grief's desecrated church; jewelling the cobwebs, gilding the dust, and making a relic of its creator's arrow-shot heart.

Sweet Baboo - The Wreckage

A man in trousers of artful proportion pours tender tales into your ear; my ear; the tubes-and-funnels ear of a retrofuturistc listening device.

Confidence Man - TILT

Life’s sublime push and pull poured into hotpants, primping, pumping and bumping their way (and yours) to a god damn good time.

Mattiel - Georgia Gothic

Mattiel Brown and Jonah Swilley proffer songs which ponder the American everyday of the 2020s, teeth to the flesh of a tender Georgia peach as they serve up an album tasting more like home than ever before.

Connan Mockasin - Jassbusters Two

As a solitary janitor buffs the floor of a tired high school building, a furtively jazzy bassline slips under a door and down the hallway. After-hours in the teachers’ lounge, perhaps someone’s smoked a little confiscated weed.

Ade - It's Just Wind

A few years in the not-so-distant past, a clairvoyant delivered an indelible message to Connan Mockasin. Inferring a project involving his father that had not yet been started, a woman he’d met only by chance told him: “You need to make it your priority, or you’ll regret it for the rest of your life”.

Katy J Pearson - Return

A sublime voice — stardust and moonshine, perhaps pressed into the wax five decades ago, or perhaps only last week — wafts from a jukebox grille, regaling you with tales of tight hearts, needles in haystacks, cloudy night skies, minor miracles, rodeo kings and bolted horses.

Working Men's Club - Working Men's Club

Gritted teeth, nuclear fizz and fissured rock. A dab of pill dust from a linty pocket before it hits: the atom split, pool table overturned, pint glass smashed — valley fever breaking with the clouds as the inertia of small town life is well and truly disrupted.

Cate Le Bon & Bradford Cox - Myths 004

As sure as if it had been mapped in the stars, or written in a prophecy buried deep beneath the sands of the Marfa desert, a collaboration between Cate Le Bon and Bradford Cox was always something of an inevitability.

Cate Le Bon - Reward

By day, ever the polymath, Le Bon painstakingly learnt to make solid wood tables, stools and chairs from scratch; by night she looked to a second-hand Meers — the first piano she had ever owned — for company, “windows closed to absolutely everyone”, and accidentally poured her heart out.

Features

Caught by the River
01/18/2024
Shadows & Reflections: Diva Harris

Caught by the River editor Diva Harris brings Shadows & Reflections season to a close, looking back over a year of gorse, grasshoppers, and plentiful sausages.

The Quietus
05/28/2020
The Quietus | Features | Quietus Writers On Why BBC4 Is Worth Saving

On John Cooper Clarke and BBC Four: The 2012 BBC4 documentary 'Evidently... John Cooper Clarke' was the first time I became properly aware of The Bard in all his stick-legged, perma-sunglassed, rapid-fire, big-haired, fag-on-the-go, Salfordian-lilted, no-fucks-given glory.

Caught by the River
01/22/2020
Shadows and Reflections: Diva Harris

Here endeth the annual series of postings we like to call Shadows and Reflections, in which our contributors and friends look back on the past twelve months. The final piece of the season comes from CBTR editor and staff writer Diva Harris

The Quietus
11/29/2019
The Quietus | Reviews | Girl Ray

The course of true love never did run smooth declares Lysander 135 lines into A Midsummer Night's Dream; and so too sings Poppy Hankin 1 minute 16 seconds into Girl.

DIY
09/06/2019
Jerkcurb 'Air Con Eden' album review

Seven years after Jerkcurb emerged comes first full-length, 'Air Con Eden': a Lynchian prom night woozy with eclipses, chicken bone wishes, slow-motion love affairs and punch-drunk riffs.

The Quietus
07/16/2019
The Quietus | Reviews | Mega Bog

It is ten years and five albums late - and on the promise that I will be met at the door by 'a Pacific Northwestern rodeo child with an unmistakable laugh, who was allegedly cursed upon conception'- that I arrive at the Mega Bog party.

The Quietus
05/01/2019
The Quietus | Reviews | Aldous Harding

Ever since I first heard 'The Barrel', the first song to be released from Aldous Harding's Designer, some two months ago, I haven't stopped thinking about the peaches and ferrets and eggs of its lyrics.

The Quietus
02/05/2019
The Quietus | Reviews | Jessica Pratt

It is radical, in a world of constant sensory overload, to use quietness to make yourself heard: something I realise as I attempt to listen to the new Jessica Pratt album over roaring central London roads, office babble, the racket of the Victoria Line.

The Quietus
01/15/2019
The Quietus | Reviews | Deerhunter

"Come on down from that cloud / And cast your fears aside," urges Bradford Cox in the opening bars of the new album from indie beloveds Deerhunter. Gently, dreamily, and with a slight baroque flourish (he is singing over harpsichord - played by fellow winner of alternative hearts Cate Le Bon, no less) we are coaxed into Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared?, the band's eighth album.

The Quietus
11/13/2018
The Quietus | News | Live Report: Crack Cloud at Moth Club

Photo by Naomi Yates Some context before I ramble on about how blisteringly good Crack Cloud were on Friday: it's well-documented that the Canadian 'multimedia collective' functions as a form of rehabilitation for its seven members.

The Quietus
11/08/2018
The Quietus | News | Live Report: Drinks at Oslo

I don't know if it's the manic pre-gig jazz that was just playing or something in the air, but when Drinks (and their fellow low-key-indie-celeb-studded backing band - hiya Euan from Younghusband) take to the stage and fire up their multitude of instruments (guitar guitar bass keys drums cowbell cowbell miscellaneous percussion) at Hackney's Oslo on Tuesday night, everyone seems to be making out.

The Quietus
10/24/2018
The Quietus | News | Live Report: Mauskovic Dance Band at the Shacklewell Arms

Ordinarily, it would take some convincing to get people to haul their arses down to a tiny, oddly painted room on a drizzly night to watch a band's first ever London gig. But not last Sunday, when rhythmic-space-disco-hungry hordes squished into the Shacklewell Arms for a sweaty slice of The Mauskovic Dance Band.

The Quietus
10/10/2018
The Quietus | Reviews | Connan Mockasin

Connan Mockasin, with his seedy spoof-sultry riffs, his croony vocals and his unsettling pillow-talk lyrics, makes me uncomfortable in the way that using somebody else's toothbrush or being stared at by a cat while I'm having a wee makes me uncomfortable.

The Quietus
10/02/2018
The Quietus | Reviews | Cat Power

"In the press there's always been an exploitation of my vulnerability that has demeaned my professionalism, has demeaned my stature," said Chan Marshall - aka Cat Power - in a recent radio interview with Mary Anne Hobbs.

The Quietus
07/24/2018
The Quietus | Features | Rays Of Light: Madonna, Beyond The Hits

On Madonna's 'Amazing': Let's get one thing straight: cowgirl Madonna is the best Madonna. Not only is that blue satin shirt a certified Look, but a country slash French club banger album just should not, on any level, work - should it? And yet it does, doesn't it?

The Quietus
05/31/2018
The Quietus | Reviews | Kadhja Bonet

Legend has it that Kadhja Bonet was born in 1784, in the back seat of an intergalactic seafoam-green Ford Pinto. Her glittering, celestial debut The Visitor - an eight-song album of baroque and stardust-smattered R&B/soul/jazz beamed down for earthly consumption back in 2016 - can certainly be taken as evidence for this claim.

The Quietus
04/17/2018
The Quietus | Reviews | Drinks

From behind a slowly drawn pair of velvet curtains, flecked with motes of dust and moth wings, appears a cobbled town square in the south of France. Haphazardly handpainted scenery drops into place: a crumbling stone mill set against a green, rock-lined river.

Radio/audio

Mixcloud
Token Girl Dj's (28/02/2024)

Listen to Token Girl DJ's (28/02/2024) by Soho Radio for free. Follow Soho Radio to never miss another show.

Mixcloud
Token Girl Djs (31/01/2024)

Chickens, sheep and frogs wander through Daisy and Diva's latest show - which features brand new music from the likes of Tapir!, Group Listening and Vanishing Twin.

Mixcloud
Token Girl Djs (06/12/2023)

Diva and Daisy's final show of 2023 bids goodbye to the year in twinkles, jingles, harps and angelic voices. Featuring tracks from the likes of Mary Lattimore, Ernest Hood, Daphne Oram & Kelsey Lu.

Mixcloud
Token Girl Djs (11/10/2023)

Diva and Daisy play two hours of spook-adjacent tunes - featuring off-kilter chords, seven-headed beasts and organs played by mice.

Mixcloud
Token Girl Dj's (13/09/2023)

Diva and Daisy provide a laid back soundtrack to the turning of the seasons, with music from the likes of Mildred Maude, Baba Stiltz, Fievel Is Glaque and Tara Clerkin Trio.

Mixcloud
Token Girl Djs (16/08/2023)

Diva and Daisy fill your ears with 2 hours of sunflowers, angelic bugs and starry night skies - with tracks from the likes of Mitski, Laura Groves, JIM & Huw Marc Bennett