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Barney Hoskyns (born 5 May 1959) is a British music critic and editorial director of the online music journalism archive Rock's Backpages.
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Barney Hoskyns (born 5 May 1959) is a British music critic and editorial director of the online music journalism archive Rock's Backpages.
Hoskyns graduated from Oxford with a first class degree in English. He began writing about music for Melody Maker and New Musical Express , quitting his job as staff writer at NME to research a book about soul music. The result was Say It One Time For The Brokenhearted (1987). He went on to write more than fifteen books on musicians and music history.
Hoskyns has written regularly on pop culture and the arts for British Vogue , where for five years he was a Contributing Editor, and for The Times , The Guardian , The Independent , The Observer and Arena magazine . He has also contributed to Harper's Bazaar , Interview magazine , Spin magazine and Rolling Stone , as well as to Amazon.com and CDNOW. Between 1993 and 1999, Hoskyns worked as Associate Editor and then U.S. Editor of Mojo magazine .
Hoskyns' book Glam! Bowie, Bolan & The Glitter Rock Revolution was published in 1998, tying in with Todd Haynes’ Velvet Goldmine. Haynes provided an introduction.
In 2000, Hoskyns became Senior Editor of CDNOW in London. He left to co-found Rock's Backpages, an online library of classic rock journalism that launched in September 2001. [1]
Hoskyns has been a regular broadcaster and pundit on both radio and television in the UK, appearing on the Top Ten series (CHANNEL 4), the I Love The 80s/90s series (BBC 2), Walk On By (BBC 2), Behind The Music (VH1) and Classic Albums (BBC2). He was the consultant on the acclaimed 2005 series Soul Deep (BBC 2). A BBC documentary based on his 2005 book Hotel California: Singer-Songwriters & Cocaine Cowboys In The L.A. Canyons was broadcast in 2007.
Hoskyns is married to interior designer and former actor Natalie Forbes. He has three sons from his first marriage to Victoria Sandler and two stepsons from his marriage to Forbes.
Hoskyns' 1996 book Waiting For The Sun was nominated for a Ralph J. Gleason award in the US. Kirkus Reviews called it "a caustic, gossipy, refreshingly idiosyncratic history of the music business in Los Angeles." [2]
MOJO reviewer Jim Farber gave Hoyskyns' Small Town Talk (spring 2016) four stars and described it as "a pitch-perfect East Coast corollary to his Laurel Canyon classic Hotel California".
In 2017, Hoskyns published Never Enough: A Way Through Addiction, an autobiographical account of how he became a heroin addict a few days after graduating from Oxford University, and how he finally overcame his addiction at the age of 23. The Guardian wrote: "It’s an ambitious, intelligent book that seeks to explain the appeal of drugs and drug culture, as well as the existential angst that drove Hoskyns to find oblivion at the end of a needle." [3]
Glam rock is a style of rock music that developed in the United Kingdom in the early 1970s and was performed by male musicians who wore flamboyant and feminine clothing, makeup, and hairstyles, particularly platform shoes and glitter, and female musicians who wore masculine clothing. Glam artists drew on diverse sources across music and throwaway pop culture, ranging from bubblegum pop and 1950s rock and roll to cabaret, science fiction, and complex art rock. The flamboyant clothing and visual styles of performers were often camp or androgynous, and have been described as playing with other gender roles. Glitter rock was a more extreme version of glam rock.
The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars is the fifth studio album by the English musician David Bowie, released on 16 June 1972 in the United Kingdom through RCA Records. It was co-produced by Bowie and Ken Scott and features Bowie's backing band the Spiders from Mars — the guitarist Mick Ronson, the bassist Trevor Bolder and the drummer Mick Woodmansey. It was recorded from November 1971 to February 1972 at Trident Studios in London.
Marc Bolan was an English guitarist, singer-songwriter and poet. He was a pioneer of the glam rock movement in the early 1970s with his band T. Rex. Bolan strongly influenced artists of many genres, including glam rock, punk, post-punk, new wave, indie rock, Britpop and alternative rock. He was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2020 as a member of T. Rex.
Popular music of the United Kingdom in the 1970s built upon the new forms of music developed from blues rock towards the end of the 1960s, including folk rock and psychedelic rock movements. Several important and influential subgenres were created in Britain in this period, by pursuing the limitations of rock music, including British folk rock and glam rock, a process that reached its apogee in the development of progressive rock and one of the most enduring subgenres in heavy metal music. Britain also began to be increasingly influenced by third world music, including Jamaican and Indian music, resulting in new music scenes and subgenres. In the middle years of the decade the influence of the pub rock and American punk rock movements led to the British intensification of punk, which swept away much of the existing landscape of popular music, replacing it with much more diverse new wave and post punk bands who mixed different forms of music and influences to dominate rock and pop music into the 1980s.
Electric Warrior is the second studio album by English rock band T. Rex, released on 24 September 1971 and their sixth since their 1968 debut as Tyrannosaurus Rex. The album marked a turning point in the band's style, moving away from the folk-oriented sound of the group's previous albums and pioneering a more flamboyant, pop-friendly glam rock style.
The Slider is the seventh studio album by English rock band T. Rex, and the third since abbreviating their name from Tyrannosaurus Rex. It was released on 21 July 1972 by record labels EMI and Reprise. Two number-one singles, "Telegram Sam" and "Metal Guru", were released to promote the album. Issued at the height of the band's popularity, The Slider received acclaim from critics, reaching number 4 in the UK Albums Chart and number 17 in the US.
John's Children were a 1960s rock band from Leatherhead, England that briefly featured future T. Rex frontman Marc Bolan. John's Children were known for their outrageous live performances and were booted off a tour with the Who in Germany in 1967 when they upstaged the headliners. Their 1967 single "Desdemona", a Bolan composition, was banned by the BBC because of the controversial lyric, "Lift up your skirt and fly." Their US record label delayed the release of their debut album, Orgasm, for four years from its recording date due to objections from Daughters of the American Revolution.
"Get It On" is a song by the English rock band T. Rex, featured on their 1971 album Electric Warrior. Written by frontman Marc Bolan, "Get It On" was the second chart-topper for T. Rex on the UK Singles Chart. In the United States, it was retitled "Bang a Gong (Get It On)" to avoid confusion with a song of the same name by the group Chase.
Rock's Backpages is an online archive of music journalism, sourced from contributions to the music and mainstream press from the 1950s to the present day. The articles are full text and searchable, and all are reproduced with the permission of the copyright holders. The database was founded in 2000 by British music journalist Barney Hoskyns. As of November 2018, its database contains over 37,000 articles, including interviews, features and reviews, which covered popular music from blues and soul up to the present date. Rock's Backpages also features over 600 audio interviews with musicians from Jimi Hendrix and Johnny Cash to Kate Bush and Kurt Cobain.
Tiger Feet is a popular song by the English glam rock band Mud, released in January 1974. Written and produced by the songwriting team of Mike Chapman and Nicky Chinn, it was the first of three number No. 1 singles for the band, in the UK Singles Chart. followed later that year by "Lonely This Christmas", and then in 1975 by "Oh Boy!"
Paul Gorman is a British-Irish writer and curator.
Zolar X is an American glam rock band founded in 1973. Zolar X became known in the Los Angeles club scene for dressing and acting like space-aliens. They spoke an 'alien language' of their own invention. They are referred to as "Los Angeles' first glam rock band" in the 1998 book Glam! Bowie, Bolan and the Glitter Rock Revolution by Barney Hoskyns.
Simon Reynolds is an English music journalist and author who began his career at Melody Maker in the mid-1980s. He subsequently worked as a freelancer and published a number of books on music and popular culture.
Rodney Bingenheimer is an American radio disc jockey who is best known as the host of Rodney on the ROQ, a radio program that ran on the Los Angeles rock station KROQ-FM from 1976 to 2017. In the early 1970s, he also managed a Los Angeles nightclub called Rodney Bingenheimer's English Disco.
T. Rex were an English rock band, formed in 1967 by singer-songwriter and guitarist Marc Bolan, who was their leader, frontman and only consistent member. Though initially associated with the psychedelic folk genre, Bolan began to change the band's style towards electric rock in 1969, and shortened their name to T. Rex the following year. This development culminated in 1970 with their first hit single "Ride a White Swan", and the group soon became pioneers of the glam rock movement.
Jaan Uhelszki is an American music journalist and co-founder of the music magazine Creem where she became one of the first women to work in rock journalism. She is a founding editor of Addicted to Noise and writer-at-large for print and online music and news publications. She writes, produces and is featured in music documentaries and is editor-at-large for Creem, relaunched in 2022.
Simon Price is a British music journalist and author. He is known for his weekly review section in The Independent on Sunday and his book Everything .
"Little Willy" is a song written by songwriters Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman and performed by the British glam rock band The Sweet, released in 1972 as a non-album single in the UK, peaking at number 4 in the UK Singles Chart. It was released in the US in January 1973 and also appeared on their US debut album The Sweet and became their biggest hit in the US, reaching number 3 on the Billboard Hot 100. Billboard ranked it as the number 18 song for 1973.
Mat Snow is an English music journalist, magazine editor, and author. From 1995 to 1999, he was the editor of Mojo magazine; he subsequently served in the same role on the football magazine FourFourTwo.
Lori Mattix, sometimes known as Lori Maddox or Lori Lightning, is an American former child model and "baby" groupie of the 1970s. As of November 2015, she is a partner and buyer for the Glam Boutique in West Hollywood. She is perhaps best known for an interview with Thrillist in 2015 in which she made allegations of being involved in sexual relationships with David Bowie, Jimmy Page, and Mick Jagger; these are relationships which would have occurred while she was underage and while the musicians were in their twenties, although her connections to Bowie and Jagger are disputed.
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