Biography

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 the University of 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 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 (BBC 2). 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.