Ian Penman

Last updated

Ian Penman
Born1959 (age 6465)
Wiltshire, England
Occupation Music journalist, critic
NationalityBritish
Period1977–present
Website
apawboy.blogspot.com

Ian Penman (born 1959) is a British writer, music journalist and critic. He began his career as a writer for the NME in 1977, later contributing to various publications including Uncut , Sight & Sound , The Wire , The Face , and The Guardian . He is the author of Vital Signs: Music, Movies, and Other Manias (1998, Serpent's Tail).

Contents

Biography

Penman was born in Wiltshire, UK, in 1959. [1] [2] He spent much of his childhood abroad in the Middle East and Africa, returning to Norfolk in 1970. [1] Skipping higher education, [3] Penman began writing for prominent British music magazine the New Musical Express in the autumn of 1977. [4] Much of Penman's writing reflected his involvement in the nascent post-punk scene developing in London in the late 1970s.

Along with fellow NME writers such as Paul Morley and Barney Hoskyns, Penman developed a style of music criticism influenced by critical theory, philosophy and other art mediums that was often experimental in its prose. [3] With their increasingly esoteric writing standing in contrast to the magazine's more accessible competitors, such as Melody Maker , the NME began to alienate its readership; it is estimated that within several years, the magazine suffered the loss of half its circulation, in large part due to the new direction of Penman and his colleagues. [3]

Penman continued writing intermittently for the NME until 1985, when the magazine began moving in an increasingly commercial direction. He began freelance work for various outlets, including The Face , Arena , the Sunday Times , The Independent , and the New Statesman . In the 1990s, he contributed to The Wire . In 1998, Penman published a compilation of his work entitled Vital Signs: Music, Movies, and Other Mania on Serpent's Tail to positive reviews. Julia Kenna reviewed the book for Rolling Stone , commenting,

Full of contradictions and witty one-liners, Penman uses language as an art form, playing with puns, synonyms, repetition, and punctuation for added effect... Two decades of politics, music and pop culture with a whip-smart wit and wisdom that draws you in and doesn’t let go.

Penman contributed the text to the catalogue of photographer Robert Frank's exhibition Storylines (Tate Modern. 2004). In recent years, Penman has continued contributing to various publications, such as The Wire, City Journal and the London Review of Books , and is working on a book about Britain in the 1970s. [4]

Influence

Penman has been cited as an influence by range of writers and theorists, including Simon Reynolds, Kodwo Eshun, [5] and Mark Fisher. [6] In addition, artists such as Simon Raymonde of Cocteau Twins have cited Penman's writing as an inspiration. [7]

Books

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joy Division</span> English rock band

Joy Division were an English rock band formed in Salford in 1976. The group consisted of vocalist, guitarist and lyricist Ian Curtis, guitarist/keyboardist Bernard Sumner, bassist Peter Hook and drummer Stephen Morris.

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.

Post-rock is a form of experimental rock characterized by a focus on exploring textures and timbres, as well as non-rock styles, with less emphasis on conventional song structures or riffs. Post-rock artists typically combine rock instrumentation with electronics. The genre emerged within the indie and underground music scene of the 1980s and early 1990s. However, due to its abandonment of rock conventions, it began to increasingly show little resemblance musically to conventional indie rock at the time, borrowing instead from diverse sources including ambient, electronica, jazz, krautrock, dub, and minimalist classical, with these influences also being pivotal for the style of ambient pop.

<i>Melody Maker</i> Historical British weekly pop/rock music newspaper (1926–2000)

Melody Maker was a British weekly music magazine, one of the world's earliest music weeklies; according to its publisher, IPC Media, the earliest. It was founded in 1926, largely as a magazine for dance band musicians, by Leicester-born composer, publisher Lawrence Wright; the first editor was Edgar Jackson. In January 2001, it was merged into "long-standing rival" New Musical Express.

<i>The Wire</i> (magazine) British experimental music magazine

The Wire is a British music magazine publishing out of London, which has been issued monthly in print since 1982. Its website launched in 1997, and an online archive of its entire back catalog became available to subscribers in 2013. Since 1985, the magazine's annual year-in-review issue, Rewind, has named an album or release of the year based on critics' ballots.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Erik Davis</span> American writer

Erik Davis is an American writer, scholar, journalist and public speaker whose writings have ranged from rock criticism to cultural analysis to creative explorations of esoteric mysticism. He is perhaps best known for his book Techgnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information, as well as his work on California counterculture, including Burning Man, the human potential movement, and the writings of Philip K. Dick.

<i>Sounds</i> (magazine) Defunct UK weekly music magazine

Sounds was a UK weekly pop/rock music newspaper, published from 10 October 1970 to 6 April 1991. It was known for giving away posters in the centre of the paper and later for covering heavy metal and punk and Oi! music in its late 1970s–early 1980s heyday.

Record Mirror was a British weekly music newspaper between 1954 and 1991 for pop fans and record collectors. Launched two years after the NME, it never attained the circulation of its rival. The first UK album chart was published in Record Mirror in 1956, and during the 1980s it was the only consumer music paper to carry the official UK singles and UK albums charts used by the BBC for Radio 1 and Top of the Pops, as well as the US Billboard charts.

<i>Rock Bottom</i> (album) 1974 studio album by Robert Wyatt

Rock Bottom is the second solo album by former Soft Machine drummer Robert Wyatt. It was released on 26 July 1974 by Virgin Records. The album was produced by Pink Floyd's drummer Nick Mason, and was recorded following a 1973 accident which left Wyatt a paraplegic. He enlisted musicians including Ivor Cutler, Hugh Hopper, Richard Sinclair, Laurie Allan, Mike Oldfield and Fred Frith in the recording.

Joy Press is an American writer and editor. In the 1980s she was a music critic for American magazines and for the English weekly music paper Melody Maker. In 1996 she became the editor of the Village Voice literary supplement, VLS. Press later became the chief book critic and TV critic for the Village Voice. She edited the paper's 50th anniversary issue. By 2006 she was the culture editor for the Voice. Press worked for several years as culture editor for Salon.com before taking a job at The Los Angeles Times in 2010, where she worked as a TV editor and Books editor. She has contributed to the Village Voice, New York Times, and Slate.com. In 2003, the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies awarded her second place for Arts Criticism. Press has written extensively on the topic of gender. In 2018, Press published a book detailing the history of female showrunners, titled Stealing the Show: How Women Are Revolutionizing Television; the book received critical acclaim. Later in 2018, Press joined Vanity Fair as a television correspondent. She is married to the British rock critic Simon Reynolds.

Ian Penman was a British radio broadcaster, television producer, director, actor and scriptwriter who also worked as a print and online journalist under the byline Ian Ravendale.

Barney Hoskyns is a British music critic and editorial director of the online music journalism archive Rock's Backpages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Simon Reynolds</span> English music critic (born 1963)

Simon Reynolds is an English music journalist and author who began his career at the Melody Maker in the mid-1980s. He subsequently worked as a freelancer and published a number of books on music and popular culture.

Post-punk is a broad genre of music that emerged in 1977 in the wake of punk rock. Post-punk musicians departed from punk's traditional elements and raw simplicity, instead adopting a broader, more experimental approach that encompassed a variety of avant-garde sensibilities and non-rock influences. Inspired by punk's energy and do it yourself ethic but determined to break from rock cliches, artists experimented with styles like funk, electronic music, jazz, and dance music; the production techniques of dub and disco; and ideas from art and politics, including critical theory, modernist art, cinema and literature. These communities produced independent record labels, visual art, multimedia performances and fanzines.

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.

Marcus O'Dair is an English writer, musician/manager, broadcaster and lecturer. He is most notable for his work as part of the band Grasscut, described by Clash magazine as "genuinely daring electronica artists". He is also notable for his 2015 biography of musician Robert Wyatt, a book described in the London Review of Books as "fascinating".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mark Fisher</span> 21st-century English cultural theorist

Mark Fisher, also known under his blogging alias k-punk, was an English writer, music critic, political and cultural theorist, philosopher, and teacher based in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. He initially achieved acclaim for his blogging as k-punk in the early 2000s, and was known for his writing on radical politics, music, and popular culture.

<i>Theatre Royal Drury Lane 8th September 1974</i> 2005 live album by Robert Wyatt & Friends

Theatre Royal Drury Lane 8th September 1974 is a 2005 live album by English progressive rock musician Robert Wyatt, documenting a concert on that date at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in London. The concert took place the year after Wyatt had fallen from a fourth-storey window and become paralysed from the waist down. Since the accident, Wyatt has used a wheelchair. The concert remains Wyatt's first and only live performance as a headlining solo artist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hauntology (music)</span> Musical genre

Hauntology is a music genre or a loosely defined stylistic feature that evokes cultural memory and aesthetics of the past. It developed in the 2000s primarily among British electronic musicians, and typically draws on British cultural sources from the 1940s to the 1970s, including library music, film and TV soundtracks, psychedelia, and public information films, often through the use of sampling.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dele Fadele</span> English musician and music journalist

Ayodele Fadele was an English musician and music journalist who was active from the mid-1980s. He wrote for the NME in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and was one of the first music critics to introduce then emerging US rap artists such as Public Enemy, De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest to mainstream British music fans.

References

  1. 1 2 "Articles, interviews and reviews from Ian Penman: Rock's Backpages". Rocksbackpages.com. Retrieved 3 September 2020.
  2. Bhob Stewart, Publishers Weekly.
  3. 1 2 3 "Music & Theory | Blog | Frieze Publishing". 4 March 2016. Archived from the original on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 3 September 2020.
  4. 1 2 "Ian Penman · LRB". Lrb.co.uk. Retrieved 3 September 2020.
  5. Reynolds, Simon. "ReynoldsRetro". Reynoldsretro.blogspot.com. Retrieved 3 September 2020.
  6. Fisher, Mark. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Zero Books, May 30, 2014. ISBN   978-1-78099-226-6
  7. "Archive". Archived from the original on 22 June 2013. Retrieved 16 August 2015.