About
Thank you for visiting this site. Like many writers I’m not a natural showman and I prefer the sanctity of my desk to the rough and tumble of social media. Your presence here is therefore very much appreciated!
I've been a professional music journalist for over thirty years, specialising in reggae music and its various offshoots. During that time, I've interviewed many of the genre's best-known and most influential figures and made frequent trips to Jamaica. The truth is I was lucky enough to join a widely respected, but little-heralded UK black music paper as their reggae writer and make a career out of it by freelancing for record companies, meeting every deadline as if my life depended on it and making sacrifices whilst doing something I would still advise anyone to do, despite the risks, which is to follow their hearts.
When I started out it was the era of electric typewriters, free vinyl and face-to-face interviews held in rundown magazine offices shrouded in ganja smoke and smelling of damp. Few people had mobile phones and dancehall had yet to become the global phenomenon it is today. Dancehall was the music that first inspired me to write but then my career took a very different turn after members of the Wailers invited me to tell their story. Endless adventures and sad tales and glad tales later resulted in Wailing Blues. I was then commissioned to write the first-ever biography of Peter Tosh, Steppin' Razor, again published by Omnibus Press.
I’m still a regular contributor to magazines in the UK (Echoes), Germany (Riddim) and France (Reggae Vibes) - see links below - but writing books, either as a biographer or ghost-writer, is my major passion. You’ll find examples of books I've written in the section marked The Library, together with extracts from album liner notes and information about Jook Joint Press, which is my own imprint.
I am currently working on Marcia Griffiths' forthcoming autobiography - tentatively entitled I Shall Sing - and another book for Omnibus Press about 70s' reggae called Pressure Drop, which takes a rollercoaster ride through reggae music's most famous decade.
