Ella Sinclair’s cultural highlights

The writer and researcher on the soothing album Tuff Times Never Last by Kokoroko, the brilliance of the novel Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson, the Taylor Wessing Photo Portrait Prize, candid discussions of the If I Speak podcast and being captivated by the Chineke! Orchestra.

by Ella Sinclair

20th March 2026

Ella Sinclair

Ella Sinclair is a writer and researcher based in London. She has written for publications including The Guardian, gal-dem, Cosmopolitan, The Lead and more.

Album: Tuff Times Never Last by Kokoroko

When summer rolled on through last year, it felt unexpected and untimely: an ill-suited period of light and warmth in sharp contrast with the devastating suffering taking place across the globe. Lazy hot days and garden parties felt distant – a marker of summers belonging firmly in the haze of the past. Tuff Times Never Last, released in July 2025 by London jazz collective Kokoroko, was a heart-lifting tonic of an album. Kokoroko does not demand too much of the listener with this release, which is perhaps why the album has been unfairly described as placid. Rather, I find the sound swimming with a sorely needed softness. This is an album which soothes: gently lifting you up, as if taking you by the hand, asking you to dance a little.

https://kokoroko.bandcamp.com/album/tuff-times-never-last

Book: Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson

After reading only the first few pages, I shut this book and sent a flurry of texts – have you read this book??? If you haven’t, you need to! I didn’t quite know how to express it, but I knew that I was reading something special; something possessing a brilliance – as if it was guiding me to something, showing me something I needed to know. I’m sure that part of my enjoyment came from reading about places I was getting to know – having only moved to south-east London (where the novel is set) a year before its publication – through the eyes of someone who knows and loves them so well. Azumah Nelson’s choice to write in the second person imbues the story with an emotional immediacy which makes me devour the novel again and again. It is a book full of insight – reflections sketched by Azumah Nelson on the surface of open waters – floating windows into romantic relationships, into suffering, into Black trauma, and into joy.

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/317654/open-water-by-nelson-caleb-azumah/9780241448786

Photography: The Taylor Wessing Photo Portrait Prize

For the past six years, without fail, I have made the pilgrimage from my little enclave of south-east London to visit this exhibition. I savour the experience – always going alone, so no one else can draw my attention away from the photographs, even for a moment. I tend to walk into the National Portrait Gallery holding my breath in anticipation of what I’m about to see. The prize showcases the work of both professional and amateur photographers, and this year I found myself returning to hover in front of Charli Baker’s self-portrait, ‘Masked Warrior’. As is the marker of all good art, Baker’s photograph revealed something of me to myself. We all perform in some way or another, but Baker’s work tugged at some kind of memory of the cost of the masks we all tend to wear.

https://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/exhibitions/2026/taylor-wessing-photo-portrait-prize-2026

Podcast: If I Speak

I never tire of hearing the candid discussions of Ash Sarkar and Moya Lothian-McLean every Tuesday. I’m a true ‘Special One’ (if you know, you know). Their conversations are expansive – from identity politics, explorations of grief and PTSD, to the dating scene in London – and often genuinely insightful. In my previous work as a freelance journalist, I avidly followed the work of Lothian-McLean in her gal-dem days, which is where she wrote the iconic headline ‘Keir Starmer is a wet wipe’ (an inkling of the passion that comes through on the pod), while Sarkar is an established name in any left-wing household. Their chummy (and sometimes argumentative) tones liven up the monotony of the week, providing great fodder for juicy conversations in the group chat.

https://novaramedia.com/category/audio/if-i-speak/

Music: Chineke! Orchestra

Newly interested in classical music, I bought a ticket to the Chineke! Orchestra’s tenth anniversary European tour performance at London’s Southbank Centre in September, unsure of what to expect. I was particularly in awe of their performance of ‘Ballade’, by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a Black British Victorian composer. The piece is dramatic, wild, and full of an energy Chineke! gave life to. Chineke! perform other pieces of Coleridge-Taylor’s music, ensuring that the work of this Black composer is not lost to history – as it almost was. Chineke! is Europe’s first majority Black and ethnically diverse orchestra, and they will be performing Coleridge-Taylor’s Violin Concerto in G Minor in London this summer: a surreal, captivating piece that Chineke! capture effortlessly.