Johny Pitts’s otherness isn’t straightforward. The son of Richie Pitts, a notable African-American performer who arrived in Britain to join the Northern Soul movement, graduated to the West End stage and ended up making his life in Britain, Johny grew up in Sheffield’s Firth Park. As a black northerner, he expresses frustration at what he describes as the ‘Brixtonization of black Britain – that is, the reduction of the black British experience into a single, neat London-oriented narrative’.

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