Contributors

Nick Coleman wrote for NME for a year during the mid-’80s before becoming music editor of the London listings magazine, Time Out, in 1987. From 1994 until 2006 he was arts and then features editor at the Independent and the Independent on Sunday before leaving to go freelance. His memoir The Train in the Night was published in 2012, while his novel Pillow Man appeared in 2015.

Richard Cromelin has covered the pop music world since the early 1970s, primarily on the staff of the Los Angeles Times for more than 30 years. As a freelancer, he wrote for a range of music publications, including Rolling Stone, Creem, Circus, Phonograph Record and New Musical Express.

Daryl Easlea worked in music retail between 1979 and 1997, leaving to take his degree in American History and International History at Keele. He began writing professionally in 1999, becoming deputy editor at Record Collector. His work has also appeared in MOJO, the Guardian, Uncut, Dazed & Confused and the Independent. His books include Everybody Dance: Chic & The Politics of Disco (2004) and Without Frontiers: The Life and Music of Peter Gabriel (2013).

Andy Gill has written for NME, Q, MOJO and numerous other publications. He is a regular album reviewer for the Independent and author of Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right: Bob Dylan, the Early Years.

Mick Gold photographed musicians and wrote about music from 1968 to 1978. His work appeared in Let It Rock, Melody Maker, Sounds, Creem and Street Life, but he threw it all away to produce and direct documentary films for TV. He lives in London with his wife and two daughters. His hobbies include spending too much money on books about rock music.

Geoffrey Himes has written about pop music on a weekly basis in the Washington Post since 1977 and has been a contributing editor to No Depression magazine since 1998. He has also written about pop music for Rolling Stone, the Oxford American, Musician, Crawdaddy and many other outlets. He has been honoured for music feature writing by the Deems Taylor/ASCAP Awards and by the Music Journalism Awards.

Barney Hoskyns is co-founder and editorial director of Rock’s Backpages, the online library of pop writing and journalism. He is a former contributing editor at British Vogue and US correspondent for MOJO. He is the author of the bestselling Hotel California (2006), the Tom Waits biography Lowside of the Road (2009) and Small Town Talk (2016), a history of the music scene in and around Woodstock, New York. His most recent book is Never Enough: A Way Through Addiction.

Chris Ingham wrote for MOJO and Uncut until there was nothing left to say, authored Rough Guides to The Beatles (2003) and Frank Sinatra (2005) and fed his family by producing/composing, lecturing in jazz and pop at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge and gigging as a freelance jazz pianist.

Jonh Ingham was born in Australia to English parents and grew up in Australia, Canada and the USA. While still at college his work appeared in Rolling Stone, Creem and other contemporary magazines. Moving to London in 1972, he was a freelance writer for NME and other UK music magazines. As a Sounds staff writer from 1975 to 1977 he wrote high-profile interviews with major rock artists and was one of the first journalists to champion punk, subsequently managing Generation X and the Go-Go’s.

Dylan Jones has written twenty books on subjects as diverse as music and politics and fashion and photography. He has been an editor at the Observer, the Sunday Times, i-D, The Face and Arena, a columnist for the Guardian and the Independent and is currently the editor-in-chief of GQ. He has won magazine editor of the year eleven times and been awarded the prestigious Mark Boxer Award. His book on the former British prime minister, David Cameron, was shortlisted for the Channel 4 Political Book of the Year. He was awarded an OBE in the Queen’s Honours List in 2013.

Mark Leviton had his first review published in Rolling Stone while still in high school and has written on music, film and books for over three decades, with hundreds of credits in Fusion, Phonograph Record magazine, UCLA Daily Bruin, LA Weekly, BAM magazine, Music Connection, the Los Angeles Times and many other publications. From 1979–2004 he was with the Warner Music Group in Burbank, overseeing the release of over a thousand compilation albums and box sets. He currently divides his time between Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area and Nevada City, where he can be heard broadcasting his ’60s-themed radio show Pet Sounds on KVMR-FM.

Ian MacDonald was the author of the acclaimed Beatles book Revolution in the Head and of the collection The People’s Music. He was assistant editor of NME in the early ’70s and contributed regularly to Uncut. Ian died in August 2003.

Gavin Martin published Alternative Ulster in Ireland’s punk rock summer of 1977, joined NME as a freelancer the following year and has written about music and movies ever since. He now freelances for a wide range of publications and was the music critic for the Daily Mirror.

Charles Shaar Murray is the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award-winning author of Crosstown Traffic: Jimi Hendrix and Post-war Pop and Boogie Man: The Adventures of John Lee Hooker in the American Twentieth Century, short-listed for the same award. The first two decades of his journalism, criticism and vulgar abuse were collected in Shots from the Hip.A founding contributor to Q and MOJO magazines, he made his print debut in 1970 in the notorious ‘Schoolkids Issue’ of underground magazine OZ, becoming a frequent contributor to IT and Cream magazines before joining NME in 1972. His first novel, The Hellhound Sample, was published in 2011.

Robert Palmer was the chief pop music critic for the New York Times and also wrote for such publications as Rolling Stone. His books included Deep Blues and Rock’n’Roll: An Unruly History. He died in 1997. 2009 saw the publication of Blues And Chaos, an anthology of Palmer pieces edited by Anthony DeCurtis.

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.

Bruce Pollock has written for such publications as the New York Times, Saturday Review, TV Guide, Entertainment Weekly, Musician, Family Weekly, USA Today, Playboy, the Gannett Westchester Newspapers and the Village Voice. He is the author of seven books on music, including Working Musicians, The Rock Song Index, Hipper Than Our Kids and In Their Own Words, as well as three novels.

Ira Robbins discovered rock music when his big sister made him listen to the Beatles on WABC-AM in 1963. Robbins’ first published piece of music criticism was a Doug Sahm record review in Good Times in 1972. He continued by writing album and concert reviews for Zoo World, then Circus, Creem and – laterstill – Spin, Entertainment Weekly and the New York Times. He co-founded Trouser Press magazine and kept it going for a decade, drifting from a writing/editing role to a writing/publishing role. Since 1997, he has been employed in syndicated radio.

Wayne Robins has been writing about rock since 1969. In the ’70s 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, currently in its third printing, and acts as West Coast editor for the Japanese magazine Player.

Bud Scoppa’s multifaceted, four-decade career has encompassed writing about pop music, editing music mags and working in the music business, primarily in an A&R capacity. He has contributed to virtually every major music publication, including Rolling Stone, Creem, Rock, Fusion, Crawdaddy! and Phonograph Record. When not writing about music, he was helping to create it at the Mercury, A&M, Arista, Zoo, Discovery and Sire labels. His outlets include Uncut and Paste.

Fred Schruers’ writing has appeared in Rolling Stone, Circus, Premiere and Entertainment Weekly. He wrote a business blog about the entertainment industry at Portfolio.com, in addition to being one of Premiere magazine’s most loved-and-feared figures (he wrote the annual power list).

Sylvie Simmons writes for MOJO magazine and is a contributor to the Guardian. Since she first started writing about music in 1977, her features and reviews have appeared in countless publications and books worldwide. Like her 2001 study of Serge Gainsbourg, A Fistful Of Gitanes, Sylvie’s 2012 biography of Leonard Cohen – I’m Your Man – was widely acclaimed.

Rob Steen’s first flirtation with music writing came in a Kentish Town tower block as editor of Ikon-UK, a fanzine fuelled by a slavish devotion to Todd Rundgren. He began reviewing gigs and records: first for a Watford freesheet, then Record Mirror, No.1, The Hit, Mix, City Limits and any other long-forgotten publication prepared to publish his quirky offerings. As editor of The New Ball, cricket’s Granta, he contented himself with providing the planet’s finest forum for sporting agitprop.

Adam Sweeting is a former features editor for Melody Maker and wrote for Q in its early days. Currently he writes regularly for The Arts Desk, the Guardian and Uncut and other magazines.

Andrew Tyler wrote for Disc & Music Echo in the early ’70s and then for NME from 1973 to 1980. He was subsequently news features editor with Time Out. As a freelance writer, hecontributed regularly to the Observer, the Independent, the Guardian and others. He was the author of Street Drugs. From 1995 until September 2016, Andrew was the director of Animal Aid, Europe’s largest animal rights organisation and one of the first in the world. Andrew died in April 2017.

Penny Valentine was one of the first UK pop writers of note, writing in the ’60s for Disc & Music Echo and then later for Sounds, City Limits and many other publications. She was also the first female pop writer in the British press. She co-wrote (with Vicki Wickham) Dancing with Demons: The Authorised Biography of Dusty Springfield. Penny died in January 2003.

Chris Van Ness was a music journalist based at the Los Angeles Free Press (where he also served as editor), making regular contributions to the NME and to CBC Radio in Canada. Most active from 1967 to 1975, he profiled artists from Billy Eckstine to Yoko Ono – plus two guys named Becker and Fagen. He is currently completing Orange Marmalade, a book-length essay on his years trying to make sense out of what was loosely known as ‘the counter-culture’. Van Ness is retired in the wilds of Connecticut.

Richard C. Walls contributed extensively to Creem magazine in its ’70s heyday and subsequently reviewed for Spin, Rolling Stone and other publications. Based in Detroit, Walls reviewed movies for the city’s Metro-Times. He died in May 2017.

Michael Watts was Melody Maker’s US editor for much of the 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.

Chris Welch joined Melody Maker in 1964 as reporter and features writer and became features editor in 1970. He stayed with the MM until 1979 and became assistant editor of Musicians Only. During the 1980s he was a reviews editor and feature writer for Kerrang!, writing about Iron Maiden, Judas Priest and Megadeth et al. He has written thirty or more books including Hendrix: The Biography and Ginger Geezer: The Life of Vivian Stanshall (co-written with Lucian Randall).

Richard Williams is the former editor of Melody Maker and chief sportswriter for the Guardian. His books include Out Of His Head, about Phil Spector and The Man in the Green Shirt, about Miles Davis. Long Distance Call collected some of his best music pieces.