Andrew's Journalism

Andrew began his writing career at the British music paper Melody Maker, then one of a half-dozen weekly UK music publications serving millions of readers, whose influence was felt around the world. From there he moved rapidly to the David Carson-designed Raygun magazine, to The Face, The Guardian, The Sunday Times and The Observer’s storied LIFE magazine.

Along the way there were features on crop circle hoaxers (through a moonless night he made one in a field that turned out to belong to Andrew Lloyd Webber); the Safehouse ecstasy testers of Amsterdam; the secret world under London. There was a stay with the Merry Pranksters on One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest author Ken Kesey’s Oregon farm and a human rights road trip with Bianca Jagger, not to mention interviews with everyone from Madonna and Janet Jackson to the architect Richard Rogers, artist Damien Hirst and Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos.

He has sailed deep into the North Atlantic on an Icelandic trawler, enacted war games aboard a nuclear hunter-killer submarine in the South Atlantic, flown aerobatics with the RAF’s Red Arrows display team and hurtled to the edge of space at Mach 2.5 in a Russian MiG-25. He may be the only person ever to have shaken Fidel Castro’s hand by accident. He still writes occasional journalism for publications such as The Guardian US, The Financial Times and The Economist’s 1843 magazine.

Music Writing

Andrew started out writing about music and pop culture at Melody Maker, and later spent three years as Chief Music Critic at the The Sunday Times in London, interviewing, reviewing and writing features about everyone from Aphex Twin, Massive Attack, PJ Harvey and Thom Yorke to Motown, Acid House and the London Jungle scene. A larger selection is available at Rocksbackpages.com.