Barney Hoskyns
Barney Hoskyns (born 5 May 1959) is a British music critic and editorial director of the online music journalism archive Rock's Backpages. Biography. 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. 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. Bibliography. 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." 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."