Education
Hoskyns graduated from Oxford with a First Class degree in English.
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Barney Hoskyns
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Career
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 lieutenant One Time Foreign The Brokenhearted: Country Soul In The American South (United Kingdom: Fontana, 1987. Bloomsbury reissue 1998).
Hoskyns has written regularly on popular 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 United States. Editor of Mojo magazine. Faber (United Kingdom) and Simon & Schuster (United States) published his Glam! Bowie, Bolan & The Glitter Rock Revolution in 1998, tying in with Todd Haynes’ Velvet Goldmine.
Haynes provided an introduction. 1999 saw the publication of the bestselling The Mullet: Hairstyle Of The Gods, written with Mark Larson and published by Bloomsbury.
In 2000, Hoskyns became Senior Editor of CDNOW in London, leaving to co-found Rock"s Backpages, an online library of classic rock journalism.
Hoskyns edited The Sound and the Fury: A Rock’s Backpages Reader (Bloomsbury, 2003) and Ozzy Osbourne: A Rock’s Backpages Reader (Omnibus, 2004). Hoskyns’ Hotel California: Singer-Songwriters & Cocaine Cowboys In The Los Angeles Canyons (United Kingdom: 4th Estate/Harper Collins. United States: Wiley), was published in 2005.
A British Broadcasting Corporation documentary based on the book was broadcast in 2007.
In 2006, Hoskyns published his study of Led Zeppelin IV in Rodale’s Rock Of Ages series, together with a United States reissue of Across The Great Divide (Hal Leonard Books). His next book on American music, Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits, was published in March 2009 by Faber and Faber.
Hoskyns" oral history of Led Zeppelin was published in 2012 as Trampled Under Foot: The Power and Excess of Led Zeppelin in the United Kingdom (Faber) and as Led Zeppelin: The Oral History of the World"s Greatest Rock Band in the United States (Wiley). Hoskyns has been a regular broadcaster and pundit on both radio and television in the United Kingdom, appearing on the Top Ten series (CHANNEL 4), the I Love The 80s/90s series (British Broadcasting Corporation 2), Walk On By (British Broadcasting Corporation 2), Behind The Music (Video Hits One) and Classic Albums (BBC2).
He was the consultant on the acclaimed 2005 series Soul Deep (British Broadcasting Corporation 2).
Hoskyns’ other books include Montgomery Clift: Beautiful Loser (United Kingdom: Bloomsbury/ United States: Grove, 1992), Across The Great Divide: The Band & America (United Kingdom: Viking. United States: Hyperion, 1993) and the novel The Lonely Planet Boy: A People’s Romance (United Kingdom/United States: Serpent’s Tail, 1995). Waiting Foreign The Sun: Strange Days, Weird Scenes & The Sound Of Los Angeles (United Kingdom: Viking/United States: Street Martin’s Press, 1996) was nominated for a Ralph J. Gleason award in the United States. In 1997 he published Beneath the Diamond Sky: Haight-Ashbury 1965-1970.
MOJO reviewer Jim Farber gave it four stars and described it as "a pitch-perfect East Coast corollary to his Laurel Canyon classic Hotel California".
