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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.
Hoyskyns' 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 musicians who wore outrageous costumes, makeup, and hairstyles, particularly platform shoes and glitter. 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.
Marc Bolan was an English guitarist, singer and songwriter. He was a pioneer of the glam rock movement in the early 1970s with his band T. Rex. Bolan 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. 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, their sixth since their debut as Tyrannosaurus Rex. The album marked a turning point in the band's sound, 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 a 1972 album by Marc Bolan's band T. Rex, the seventh since their debut as Tyrannosaurus Rex in 1968, and the third under the name T. Rex. It was released on 21 July by record labels EMI and Reprise. Two singles, "Telegram Sam" and "Metal Guru", were released to promote the album.
"Communication Breakdown" is a song by the English rock band Led Zeppelin, from their 1969 self-titled debut album. It was also used as the B-side of the group's first single in the US, "Good Times Bad Times". A promotional video was released, with the group miming to the recording, which is included on the Led Zeppelin DVD (2003).
John's Children were a 1960s mod 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 " 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 "Oh Boy!" and "Lonely This Christmas".
Paul Gorman is a writer whose journalism has appeared in many of the world's leading publications. He has also published several books on art, design, fashion, media and music and curated exhibitions in Europe and the US.
Zolar X is an American glam rock band, founded in 1973. Zolar X became known on 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 professional career on the staff of Melody Maker in the mid-1980s. He has since gone on to freelance and publish a number of full-length books on music and popular culture, ranging from historical tomes on rave music, glam rock, and the post-punk era to critical works such as Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past (2011).
Paul Francis Gadd, known professionally as Gary Glitter, is an English former glam rock singer who achieved success in the 1970s and 1980s. His career ended after he was imprisoned for downloading child pornography in 1999, and was subsequently convicted of child sexual abuse and attempted rape, in 2006 and 2015, respectively.
T. Rex were an English rock band, formed in 1967 by singer-songwriter and guitarist Marc Bolan. The band was initially called Tyrannosaurus Rex, and released four albums under this name—three psychedelic folk and one mellow psychedelic rock. In 1969, while developing the style for the fourth album, Bolan began to change the band's style towards electric rock, and shortened their name to T. Rex the following year. This development culminated in 1970 with the song "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. She is one of the first women to work in rock journalism.
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 #4 in the best seller charts. It was released in the US in September 1972 and also appeared on their US debut album The Sweet and became their biggest hit in the US, reaching #3 on the Billboard Hot 100. Billboard ranked it as the #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.
"H.E.L.P. Is On the Way" is a song by American rock band the Beach Boys that was recorded during the making of their 1971 album Surf's Up. It was written by Brian Wilson about H.E.L.P., a Los Angeles restaurant that the band had frequented. The song also references Wilson's health food shop, the Radiant Radish.
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