Rob Chapman

Rob Chapman is an author of fiction and non-fiction, an occasional hackademic and has a PhD. His lecturing experience has encompassed everything from doctoral supervision to teaching remedial English in a psychiatric borstal. He has also been a music journalist, predominantly for The Times and Mojo, a radio broadcaster with the BBC national network, and singer-lyricist with the Bristol based avant-punk band Glaxo Babies. His most recently published book Psychedelia and Other Colours (Faber and Faber 2015) is a labyrinthine account of the prehistory, cultural antecedents and creative manifestations of LSD-inspired music. Previous to that he wrote a critically acclaimed biography Syd Barrett: a very irregular head (Faber and Faber 2010). His debut novel Dusk Music was published by Flambard Press in 2008. His history of offshore radio, Selling The Sixties: the pirates and pop music radio was published by Routledge in 1992 and is still in print. Rob runs an experimental writing workshop called ‘Stream of Conscious Mess’ as an antidote to the somewhat fallacious proposition that writing has to be about self-expression. Having spent a lifetime pondering which self he wishes to express he retains an unimpeachable faith in the tricks and tropes of high modernism. He lives in Todmorden, Lancashire with his wife, TV producer Caroline Julyan, and his daughter Alice. His hard drive contains numerous unpublished or unfinished novels, screenplays and songs, and an abundance of marginalia. His next book is probably going to be ‘memoir-ish’ but, in a way, they all are.