John McKie

I fell in love with music journalism when devouring fortnightly issues of Smash Hits with Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet on the cover before moving into NME and Q as well as US magazines like SPIN, Details, Entertainment Weekly and Rolling Stone. After being lucky enough to edit the music section of the student newspaper at Glasgow, there were reporting jobs in Scottish then English newspapers, which eventually led back into editing Smash Hits which by then had Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys, Westlife and Five on the cover, and Q magazine. After magazines, I have worked in the charity sector for the past two decades (this has included travel in Sierra Leone, Bolivia, Nicaragua, India, the Thai-Burmese border and the Democratic Republic of Congo) but I never stopped writing and reading about music. This included a 2017 BBC feature about how one of my favourite musicians Prince created his masterpiece Sign O' The Times, which after three years wrestling with impostor syndrome and a global pandemic, became five and a half years of research for a book with 220 new interviews and loads of new stories. Still writing and reading and listening. Long-suffering member of the Tartan Army.