Journalism

Here is a selection of pieces I’ve written that are available online. Among the people I have interviewed for print publications are Paul McCartney, George Michael, Coldplay, Noel Gallagher, Kate Bush, Jay-Z, Beyoncé, Lorde, Kylie Minogue, Led Zeppelin, Jack White, Brian Eno, Bryan Ferry, Elvis Costello, Lily Allen, Depeche Mode, Blur, Vampire Weekend, Arcade Fire, the Beastie Boys, Katy Perry, Grimes, Snoop Dogg, Green Day, Run DMC, P Diddy, Ozzy Osbourne, Slipknot, Foo Fighters, My Chemical Romance, Chris Cornell, the Specials, Dizzee Rascal, Girls Aloud, Steve Carell, Tilda Swinton, Adam Driver, Chadwick Boseman, Kirsten Dunst, Ben Affleck, Daniel Radcliffe, Benedict Cumberbatch, Matt Smith, Peter Capaldi, Ricky Gervais, Viggo Mortensen, Wes Anderson, Richard Curtis, Danny Boyle, Oliver Stone, Darren Aronofsky, and the cast of Veep.

INTERVIEWS

Fatboy Slim at the World Cup (The Guardian, 2002)

The Libertines (The Guardian, 2003)

Morrissey (The Guardian, 2004)

Arctic Monkeys (The Guardian, 2005)

Kanye West (The Guardian, 2005)

50 Cent (The Guardian, 2006)

Nick Cave (The Guardian, 2006)

Nicolas Cage (The Guardian, 2007)

Michael Stipe (The Guardian, 2007)

Robyn (The Guardian, 2007)

James Murphy and John Cale (The Guardian, 2007)

Randy Newman (The Guardian, 2008)

Rihanna (The Guardian, 2008)

John Lydon (The Guardian, 2009)

Prince (The Guardian, 2011)

PJ Harvey (The Observer, 2011)

Trent Reznor (The Guardian, 2011)

Leonard Cohen (The Guardian, 2012)

Muse (The Observer, 2012)

Peter Gabriel (The Guardian, 2012)

Pet Shop Boys (The Guardian, 2012)

New Order (The Guardian, 2012)

Daft Punk (The Observer, 2013)

John Grant (The Observer, 2013)

Manic Street Preachers (New Statesman, 2014)

Underworld on Dubnobasswithmyheadman at 20 (The Guardian, 2014)

The Jesus and Mary Chain on Psychocandy (The Observer, 2014)

U2 (The Observer, 2014)

Kendrick Lamar (The Observer, 2015)

Chuck D (The Guardian, 2015)

Phil Collins (The Guardian, 2016)

Pharrell Williams (GQ, 2016)

Chris Claremont on the X-Men (Empire, 2016)

Berry Gordy and Smokey Robinson (The Guardian, 2016)

A Tribe Called Quest (The Guardian, 2016)

Alan Sugar (The Guardian, 2017)

James O’Brien (New Statesman, 2017)

Father John Misty (The Guardian, 2017)

The Cure (The Guardian, 2018)

David Byrne (The Observer, 2018)

The 1975 (Billboard, 2018)

Ian McEwan (i Paper, 2019)

Salman Rushdie (i Paper, 2019)

Billy Joel (Billboard, 2019)

Michael Heseltine (The Observer, 2019)

Ken Loach (i Paper, 2019)

Charlie Brooker (The Guardian, 2020)

Kazuo Ishiguro (i Paper, 2021)

Adam Curtis (i Paper, 2021)

Gilbert and George (i Paper, 2021)

Armando Iannucci (i Paper, 2021)

James Graham (The Guardian, 2021)

Diane Warren (The Guardian, 2021)

Marianne Faithfull and Courtney Love (LA Times, 2021)

George Saunders (The Bunker Daily, 2021)

Ed Miliband (The Bunker Daily, 2021)

Elif Shafak (The Bunker Daily, 2021)

Rebecca Solnit (The Bunker Daily, 2021)

Geoff Dyer (The Bunker Daily, 2022)

Lisa Nandy (The Bunker Daily, 2022)

Aaron Sorkin (The Observer, 2022)

Regina Spektor (The Observer, 2022)

Ken Burns (The Daily Telegraph, 2022)

Zack Snyder (The i, 2023)

Jeffrey Wright (The i, 2024)

Timothy Spall (The i, 2024)

Wim Wenders (The i, 2024)

MUSIC WRITING

No more heroes: the state of protest songs (The Guardian, 2002)

The great divide: hip hop in Israel (The Guardian, 2005)

Eurovision in Ukraine (The Guardian, 2005)

Going underground: the history of music as the London Underground map (The Guardian, 2006)

When Christina met the Strokes: the song that defines the decade (The Guardian, 2009)

Don’t Stop Believin’: the power ballad that refused to die (The Guardian, 2010)

The rage of Pulp’s Common People (33 Revolutions Per Minute blogpost, 2010)

The Monkees on Head (The Guardian, 2011)

Why pop music loves TS Eliot (The Guardian, 2012)

Long live disco (The Guardian, 2012)

Fairytale of New York: The story behind the Pogues’ classic Christmas anthem (The Guardian, 2012)

The story of music television from Ready Steady Go to Glastonbury (GQ, 2013)

Beatlemania at 50 (The Observer, 2013)

Sam Lee and the art of song collecting (Aeon, 2013)

The life of Amy Winehouse (Billboard, 2015)

The stagnation blues (The Long and Short, 2015)

How the compact disc lost its shine (The Guardian, 2015)

David Bowie obituary (GQ, 2016)

Prince obituary (New Statesman, 2016)

Leonard Cohen obituary (The Guardian, 2016)

Leonard Cohen’s I’m Your Man (Pitchfork, 2016)

The future of Ibiza (Billboard, 2016)

The toxic legacy of Oasis’s Be Here Now (The Guardian, 2016)

The life and death of DJ Derek, an unlikely reggae legend (The Guardian, 2016)

OK Computer at 20 (BBC Culture, 2017)

Aretha Franklin obituary (The Guardian, 2018)

Why the White Album is the Beatles’ greatest (BBC Culture, 2018)

Scott Walker obituary (New Statesman, 2019)

Yesterday: What if the Beatles never existed? (GQ, 2019)

How Eminem’s Stan shaped online fandom (GQ, 2020)

The forgotten political roots of Bridge Over Troubled Water (BBC Culture, 2020)

An oral history of War Child’s Help album 25 years on (Q, 2020)

Merck Mercuriadis and Hipgnosis profile (Guardian Weekend, 2020)

Why U2’s One is the ultimate anthem (BBC Culture, 2021)

Why we love to hate Imagine (UnHerd, 2021)

Bob Dylan doesn’t like you (UnHerd, 2021)

The Ramones didn’t want to grow up (UnHerd, 2021)

Smells Like Teen Spirit at 30 (Unherd, 2021)

Nick Cave’s divine rebirth (UnHerd, 2022)

How we forgot Elvis (UnHerd, 2022)

How Wet Leg conquered Britain (UnHerd, 2022)

How Eminem became a role model (UnHerd, 2022)

Inside Kate Bush’s alternative universe (BBC Culture, 2022)

The Beatles at their peak: the making of Revolver (Los Angeles Times, 2022)

All the young, noisy people: A brief history of Camden Town (Air Mail, 2023)

The data-spew about Bob Dylan never ends (The Spectator, 2023)

When it comes to Krautrock, it’s impossible not to mention the war (The Spectator, 2024)

Hip-Hop Is History by Questlove (The Observer, 2024)

The age of Swiftonomics (The Guardian Saturday, 2024)

The reason Coldplay are the 21st century’s defining band (BBC, 2024)

The songs that sum up 14 years of Tory government (The Guardian, 2024)

ESSAYS AND BOOK REVIEWS

Private schools and privilege (New Statesman, 2012)

The Gate of Ivory: Why Inside Llewyn Davis is a masterpiece (New Statesman, 2014)

My friend Jo Cox: She was the best of us (The Guardian, 2016)

Orson Welles’s The War of the Worlds at 80 (New Statesman, 2018)

How dangerous is Jordan B Peterson? (The Guardian, 2018)

Is the political novel dead? (The Guardian Review, 2019)

The 2019 election (GQ, 2019)

Why vaccine hesitancy is the conspiracy theory of our times (New Statesman, 2019)

The apocalyptic appeal of WB Yeats’s The Second Coming (The Guardian Review, 2020)

The future of work (The Guardian Review, 2020)

The war against the BBC (The Guardian Review, 2020)

Assessing the Corbyn era (politics.co.uk, 2020)

The historical amnesia of culture warriors (UnHerd, 2020)

Culture wars (GQ, 2021)

The life of Stan Lee and Marvel Comics (The Spectator, 2021)

The dying art of the hatchet job (UnHerd, 2021)

Pop psychology has killed the villain (UnHerd, 2021)

Oliver Stone’s seductive conspiracies: JFK at 30 (UnHerd, 2021)

Why Wes Anderson loves the New Yorker (UnHerd, 2021)

The 100-year-old fiction that predicted today (BBC Culture, 2021)

Don’t Look Up: The stories that reflect our oldest fear (BBC Culture, 2021)

Why comedians stopped being funny (UnHerd, 2022)

Why the left is split over Ukraine (UnHerd, 2022)

Batman won’t save us (UnHerd, 2022)

Dr Strange and the perils of the multiverse (UnHerd, 2022)

Come to This Court and Cry by Linda Kinstler (The Guardian, 2022)

Endless Flight: The life of Joseph Roth by Kieron Pym (The Guardian, 2022)

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: hacking for beginners by Scott J. Shapiro (The Guardian, 2022)

Something changed: histories of the 1990s (The Literary Review, 2022)

How Withnail and I became a cult classic (The Spectator, 2023)

Rewriting Orwell (BBC Culture, 2023)

Bicycle Sharers of the World Unite! (The Literary Review, 2023)

From Dylan to Ishiguro: Can song lyrics ever be literature? (The Guardian Saturday, 2024)

REPORTED FEATURES

Can mega-gigs ever truly be safe? (The Guardian, 2011)

Did a rapper’s murder bring down Greece’s neo-Nazi party? (Buzzfeed, 2014)

David Icke at Wembley Arena (New Statesman, 2014)

Attack of the feminist superheroes (The Guardian, 2015)

Inside the battle to stop Brexit (Guardian Weekend, 2018)

The Wire, 10 years on (The Guardian, 2018)

Alexa, are you invading my privacy? (The Guardian, 2019)

How a Welsh journalist exposed the horror of Stalin’s Ukraine famines (New Statesman, 2020)

The incredible story behind the Covid memorial wall (The Observer, 2021)

Just stop oil: Behind the scenes with the activists (The Observer, 2022)

City mayors on how they’re reshaping British politics (The Guardian Saturday, 2022)

The Criminal Justice Bill protests 30 years on (The Guardian Saturday, 2024)