WE DONT NEED NO EDUCATION
Out February 26, 2026
We Don’t Need No Education is Kev Nixon’s uncompromising account of how modern music education lost its way - and how it could still be saved.
Told in two parts, the book charts a transatlantic rethink of what learning music should actually look like. Part One begins in the UK, with Nixon’s experiences inside the British music industry, and the founding of BIMM - the Brighton Institute of Modern Music.
Created as a direct response to the failure of universities to take modern music seriously, and the music industry's failure to train its future leaders, BIMM was designed to function more like an a 1960's art school than an academic institution. It BIMM prioritised live performance, songwriting, real-world experience, and was taught by successful working musicians rather than career academics.
Drawing on decades of first-hand experience, We Don’t Need No Education expertly exposes how universities sidelined modern music, misunderstood popular culture, and treated contemporary musicians as an academic inconvenience. Nixon argues that education became obsessed with theory, hierarchy and qualifications, while ignoring how quickly the music world was evolving.
Part Two moves to Detroit, where the story widens into a risky brave and pioneering experiment in rebuilding music education from the ground up. Against the backdrop of a city shaped by Motown, soul, rock and economic collapse, Nixon and his wife Sarah Clayman created DIME, the Detroit Institute of Music Education. It’s in this section that the book explores what happens when music education reconnects with place, heritage, live performance and community. Detroit becomes both a classroom and a case study, showing how modern music can be taught seriously without being stripped of its cultural roots.
Across both continents, We Don’t Need No Education is ultimately about worthwhile learning rather than fame, long careers rather than throwaway chart toppers, and knowledge rather than nostalgia. It challenges the idea that music education belongs in orchestra halls, questions who music careers are really for, and makes the case for education rooted in experience, history and human connection.
Blunt, personal and informed, this is a book for anyone who believes education should prepare people for an actual career, not an imaginary one, and that music education needs to get in the real world before we lose it forever.
BRILLIANT SOUNDING RUBBISH
Out August 8, 2025
A sharp, thoughtful and ultimately hopeful look at the past, present and future of the music industry - from one of the people who helped shape it.
In Brilliant Sounding Rubbish, Kev Nixon - artist manager, music educator and music industry insider - charts the fall of British music’s global dominance with unflinching honesty, deep affection, and biting wit.
Drawing on four decades in the business, Nixon reveals how the UK’s once world-leading musical culture has become obsessed with the past, addicted to nostalgia, and increasingly disconnected from artistic substance.
What began as a phrase Nixon coined while helping students make polished recordings using GarageBand, “brilliant sounding rubbish”, evolved into a damning metaphor for an entire industry. Part memoir, part manifesto, and part behind-the-scenes exposé, the book journeys from Nixon’s childhood musical awakenings in 1960s Yorkshire to the chaos of modern streaming culture, tracing the roots of the crisis in everything from the collapse of artist development to the rise of corporate ownership and the devaluation of music education.
Nixon expertly details class prejudice in genre hierarchies, the myth of the self-made artist, and the digital structures that now control what the world hears - and what it doesn’t.
But this is not simply a story of decline. Through personal stories, case studies and bold provocations, Brilliant Sounding Rubbish offers a clear-eyed vision for rebuilding an industry with heart, integrity, and risk at its core.
Nixon believes there’s still time to turn things around. If we bring back risk, nurture real talent, and stop chasing trends, the music business might just get its soul back. The future, he says, could still sound brilliant – this time for the right reasons.
