From 1980, an approximately monthly slot in Sounds (a now defunct but then influential London-based music weekly) called Cassette Pets and covering the emerging indie tape scene was the accidental beginning of my writing career. By 1981, my byline was appearing in Sounds with increasingly frequency as I wrote major features, live and record reviews, many of which can be found on this site.

By 1984, I was no longer writing for Sounds but for numerous other publications, the best-known of which were NME and The Face, and a lot of other stuff for smaller magazines such as Zigzag, as well as a few pieces for national daily newspapers. Again, much of this stuff can now be found on the site.

around and around

In 1986, I was commissioned by Rough Guides, then a very small organisation that had published six travel guides, to co-author Scandinavia: The Rough Guide. This book was published in 1988. Subsequent Rough Guides that I wrote or co-wrote were California (1989) and Florida (1991).

I wrote many more travel guides for larger publishers such as the AA (the British Automobile Association) and Thomas Cook, and smaller ones such as Duncan Petersen and New Holland (part of the much larger Struik, based in South Africa).

In 2003, my book on San Francisco for Signal Book's Cities of the Imagination series was published. This was followed in 2007 by The Thames: a cultural history for the same company's Landscapes of the Imagination series.

Detours at various times in various directions have included the Funboy Five, Concerto for Voice and Machinery II and stock photography.

site specific

There is only around 50 percent of my 1980s journalism on the site. More will follow but because most of work pre-dates word processing (much originated on a thing called a typewriter), it has to be laboriously scanned and the results even more laboriously corrected.

viewing figures

For best viewing (though not necessarily best browsing) I suggest IE5+. To those who use with Opera, I can only apologise for the (few, I hope) pages that look totally disgusting. A screen res of 1280 x 1024 and 32bpp color is desirable but only because that's what I have.

The objective is for the text to be readable and quick to download. Astounding graphics, animations, MP3s, avi files, live streaming video, flash (and anything else flash) are intentionally absent.