Loraine Alterman was for a period the New York bureau chief of Rolling Stone, as well as the US correspondent for Melody Maker. She has also written for the New York Times and many other publications. She lives in New York City.
Colman Andrews wrote extensively for Phonograph Record in the early-to-mid-’70s, as well as for Creem and other publications. Today, he is an internationally-known food writer and editor, and the vice-president and editorial director of TheDailyMeal.com, a food and drink mega-site.
Jacoba Atlas wrote for Melody Maker in the UK and also for Circus, the Los Angeles Free Press and KRLA Beat in the US. She is an Emmy and Peabody award-winning writer and producer, with extensive experience as a broadcast executive at NBC News, Turner Broadcasting, CNN and PBS.
Johnny Black is a frequent contributor to Q, MOJO and other magazines and a leading scholar of rock history and minutiae. Drawing on his vast archives, he has helped to compile numerous ‘Time Machine’ and ‘Eyewitness‘features for those magazines. Based in Wiltshire, he also hosts his own local radio show.
Caroline Boucher left Disc and Music Echo in the early ’70s to work as an in-house PR for Elton John at Rocket Records (replacing Penny Valentine, who became head of A&R). She is married to music business lawyer Robert Lee and writes about food for the Guardian.
Stephen M. H. Braitman is a former writer for the Los Angeles Times and other publications, and a music appraiser who works with companies such as Gracenote.
Mick Brown is a freelance writer and broadcaster who has written on music and other cultural affairs for a wide variety of publications including the Sunday Times, Rolling Stone and Crawdaddy! He is a regular contributor to the Telegraph magazine and the Daily Telegraph in London.
Geoffrey Cannon was the first ever regular rock critic for a UK daily national newspaper, the Guardian, between 1968 and 1972. Subsequently he wrote for New Society, The Listener, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Sun-Times, Creem, Rock et Folk, Melody Maker, Time Out and many other publications. He has lived in Brazil since 2000.
Barbara Charone wrote for Sounds, NME and Creem among other publications before becoming one of the most respected publicists in the music industry.
Martin Colyer is a co-founder of Rock’s Backpages, and the site’s design director. He is a freelance designer, living in London.
J. D. Considine has written for many US magazines and newspapers. From 1979 to 1996, he wrote for Rolling Stone and then wrote for Musician. He was on the staff of the Baltimore Sun from 1986 to the end of 2000, leaving to become managing editor of Revolver magazine. He later became jazz critic at The Globe and Mail in Toronto.
Karl Dallas was a contributor to Melody Maker from the 1950s to the 1970s. He also wrote for Musical Opinion, the Daily Worker (later, the Morning Star), The Times, the Independent, Sounds, Kerrang!, Schlager (Germany) and other international magazines. He passed away in 2016.
Dave DiMartino is a former editor of Creem. He has worked for launch.com in Los Angeles, and is the author of Singer-Songwriters: Pop Music’s Performer-Composers, from A to Zevon (Billboard Books, 1994).
Ian Dove is a former contributor to New Musical Express who has spent most of his career in the US. He has written for Billboard, the New York Times and other publications.
Robin Eggar has been the Daily Mirror’s rock and pop writer and has freelanced for national and international newspapers and magazines including the Sunday Times, Esquire, You magazine, Marie Claire, The Times, the Daily Mail, Us magazine, Cosmopolitan, The Face, Time Out, the NME, the Observer, The Word, the Sunday Mirror magazine and Rolling Stone.
Todd Everett has written for Daily Variety, The Hollywood Reporter and Cash Box, edited magazines (Record Review, KIIS – The Newspaper and Ampersand) and for several years was the entire pop music staff of Los Angeles’s second-largest circulation newspaper.
Helen FitzGerald wrote about Dublin’s punk scene for VOX fanzine, then moved to London in the early ’80s to freelance for Sounds and MasterBAG. In 1983 she joined Melody Maker as a staff journalist, writing for MM from 1983 until 1989.
Ben Fong-Torres is one of the legendary names of rock writing. One of the first writers and editors at Rolling Stone, Ben worked for the magazine for many years, writing seminal profiles of the leading rock figures of the late ’60s and ’70s. He is the author of the Gram Parsons’ biography, Hickory Wind (Atria, 1991), The Hits Just Keep On Coming: The History of Top 40 Radio in America (Backbeat Books, 1998) and the Little Feat biography Willin’ (Da Capo Press, 2013).
Jerry Gilbert wrote for Melody Maker, Sounds and ZigZag in the ’70s, also producing regular bylined columns for the Daily Mirror and Midweek. He still writes widely on folk and other genres.
Fred Goodman is the author of numerous books including The Mansion on the Hill (Crown, 1997) and Allen Klein: The Man Who Bailed Out the Beatles, Made the Stones and Transformed Rock & Roll (Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015). He lives in White Plains, New York.
Michael Gross, who began his career contributing to Circus, Rock and other music publications, is the author of the new Genuine Authentic: The Real Life of Ralph Lauren (Harper, 2003) and the New York Times bestseller Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (William Morrow & Co, 1995). He is also a contributing writer at Radar and a contributing editor at Travel & Leisure and has written for the New York Times, Talk, George, New York, GQ, Esquire and Vanity Fair.
Nicholas Jennings is one of Canada’s leading music journalists. As the long-time critic for Maclean’s magazine, Jennings has interviewed and written about Joni Mitchell numerous times. His acclaimed book Before the Gold Rush (Viking Canada, 1997) is the definitive account of Toronto’s fertile music scene in the ’60s.
Mark Kemp has written features, columns, essays and reviews since the late ’80s for Option, Rolling Stone, the New York Times, the Charlotte Observer, Harp, Paste, Business North Carolina and many other publications. He has served as music editor of Rolling Stone and vice president of music editorial for MTV Networks.
Larry LeBlanc is a Canadian music journalist and recipient of the Walt Grealis special achievement award. He has written for numerous publications including Rolling Stone, Guitar Player, The Globe & Mail and Maclean’s. He is currently a senior writer at the weekly US entertainment trade Celebrity Access.
Gerrie Lim has written for numerous publications, including Billboard, LA Weekly, LA Style, Playboy, Details, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, the Wall Street Journal and the San Diego Union-Tribune. He is currently the international correspondent for the adult internet trade magazine AVN Online.
Kristine McKenna is a Los Angeles writer whose work has appeared in publications including the Los Angeles Times and NME. Along with two volumes of collected interviews, she’s published books on various aspects of alternative culture including first generation LA punk, radical hippie group the Diggers’ and the West Coast beat community of the ’50s.
Stuart Maconie is a journalist, broadcaster and author who has written for Q, The Word, Elle, The Times, the Guardian, the Evening Standard, Daily Express, Select, Mojo, Country Walking, Deluxe and was an assistant editor for the NME. He hosts a daily radio show on BBC6 music and is the author of several books including Cider with Roadies (Ebury Press, 2004) and Pies and Prejudice (Ebury Press, 2007).
John Milward has written about music and popular culture for more than thirty-five years, contributing to such publications as Rolling Stone, the New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, USA Today and No Depression, among many others. He is the author of Crossroads: How the Blues Shaped Rock’n’Roll (and Rock Saved the Blues) (Northeastern, 2013).
Tom Nolan wrote for Cheetah, the LA Times and Rolling Stone in the ’60s. He has subsequently written for the Wall Street Journal and been a contributing editor to California and Los Angeles magazines. Nolan’s acclaimed biography of crime writer Ross MacDonald was published by Scribner in 1999 and Three Chords for Beauty’s Sake: The Life of Artie Shaw by Norton in 2010. He lives in Glendale, Los Angeles.
Betty Page, real name Beverley Glick, first started writing for Sounds in 1979 and went on to make her name as the music journalist who championed the New Romantic movement, conducting the first major interviews with Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran and others in the early ’80s. She subsequently became editor of Record Mirror. In 2011 she qualified as a life coach and is now freelancing at the Telegraph while building her coaching practice.
Ian Penman wrote for NME in the late ’70s and early ’80s and has subsequently written for The Wire, the London Review of Books and other publications. A collection of his best pieces, Vital Signs, was published by Serpent’s Tail in 1998.
Sandy Robertson was features editor of Sounds and subsequently associate editor of Penthouse in the UK. He was the first UK writer to interview/pick up on Madonna, REM, Meat Loaf, Kirsty MacColl and Aimee Mann.
Wayne Robins has been writing about rock since 1969. In the 1970s he wrote for the Village Voice and Rolling Stone, but especially Creem. He subsequently wrote for Newsday and New York Newsday. He lives with his wife and two of his three daughters in Queens, NY.
Steven Rosen has written for dozens of publications, including Guitar Player, Guitar World, Rolling Stone, Playboy, Creem, Circus and Musician. He is the author of such books as Wheels of Confusion: The Story of Black Sabbath (Music Sales, 1996), currently in its third printing, and acts as West Coast editor for the Japanese magazine Player.
Ellen Sander was Saturday Review’s rock critic in the mid–late ’60s and also wrote on rock for Vogue, The Realist, Cavalier, The LA Free Press, the Sunday New York Times arts and leisure section and others.
Joel Selvin was chief music critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and author of landmark books such as Summer of Love (Dutton Adult, 1994), about the Haight-Ashbury scene. Selvin also contributes to MOJO and other publications.
Paul Sexton has been writing about music and avoiding a proper job since he started with the – now occasionally lamented – pop weekly Record Mirror while still at school in 1977.
Ben Sidran has recorded more than thirty solo albums and produced recordings for such noted artists as Van Morrison, Diana Ross and Mose Allison. Sidran has authored two books on the subject of jazz, Black Talk, a cultural history of the music, and Talking Jazz, a series of conversations with inspirational musicians. His latest works include the memoir, A Life in the Music (Taylor Trade, 2003), and the groundbreaking text, There Was a Fire: Jews, Music and the American Dream (Unlimited Media Ltd., 2012).
Dave Simpson has written regularly for the Guardian, as well as for Melody Maker, i-D, Uncut and many other publications. He is the author of The Fallen: In and Out of Britain’s Most Insane Group (Canongate, 2008).
Wesley Strick began his writing career as a rock critic and journalist, contributing articles and reviews in the late ’70s to Circus, Creem and Rolling Stone. He has also written award-winning screenplays as well as a wide variety of Hollywood films and has served as an advisor at the Sundance Screenwriters Lab since 1995.
Adam Sweeting is a former features editor for Melody Maker and wrote for Q in its early days. Currently he writes regularly for the Guardian, Uncut and other magazines.
Frank Tortorici is a corporate communications director for a major business research organisation who has moonlighted periodically as a music writer. He was a contributing editor to Sonicnet/VH1.com for more than four years and was a contributing editor to Addicted to Noise. He has written for Preamp.com and Katrillion.com.
Jaan Uhelszki was one of the illustrious gang of writers who made Creem magazine a household name in the ’70s. She has subsequently written for Rolling Stone, Uncut, and many other publications.
Michael Watts was Melody Maker’s US editor in the early 1970s. He’s since been an editor at the Financial Times, the Independent, the Evening Standard and Esquire. He now writes for Wired and anyone else who’ll have him.
Susan Whitall has been writing about music since she joined Creem in 1975. She became editor of that magazine in 1978 and left in 1983 to become a feature writer for the Detroit News. She is the author of Fever: Little Willie John’s Fast Life, Mysterious Death and the Birth of Soul (Titan, 2011).
Paul Williams’ ’60s magazine Crawdaddy! marked the birth of rock criticism as we know it. He subsequently wrote many acclaimed books from Outlaw Blues (Entwhistle Books, 2000) to The Twentieth Century’s Greatest Hits (Forge Books, 2000). He passed away in 2013.
Richard Williams is the former editor of Melody Maker and formerchief sports writer for the Guardian. His books include Out of his Head (Outerbridge and Lazard, 1972), about Phil Spector and The Man in the Green Shirt (Bloomsbury, 1993), about Miles Davis. Long Distance Call (Aurum Press, 2000) collected some of his best music pieces.
Dave Zimmer has been a music journalist and rock historian since the late ’70s. He is the author of Crosby, Stills & Nash: The Authorized Biography (St Martin’s Press, 1984). Since 1990 he has worked as a communications director for MCA Records, Universal Studios, Seagram, Vivendi and, most recently, the Penguin Group. A native Californian, he currently lives in West Orange, New Jersey, with his wife and son.