Since 1993, MOJO Magazine has been the home of the world’s finest music writing. Our team of writers are experts in their fields, with a passion for music of myriad genres from across the decades.
Whether writing about jazz, electronica, folk, soul, blues, Americana or world music, what unites every MOJO contributor is their unrivalled love for, and deep knowledge of, the music that matters. It’s that passion and knowledge that makes MOJO the most respected voice in music.
Our writers have sat down with some of the greatest names in music to reveal the stories and the people behind the records that have shaped the world we live in, including David Bowie, Paul McCartney, Kate Bush, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Prince, Joni Mitchell, Pink Floyd and countless others.
Of course, they’re far too modest to blow their own trumpets too much though…
John Aizlewood
In the past John Aizlewood contributed to Sounds, Melody Maker, Blender, Q, Select and a smorgasbord of other publications which, possibly unconnected to his writing, no longer exist. His books include widely acclaimed biographies of Joy Division/New Order and Radiohead. These days, apart from MOJO, amongst other things he writes about sport for The Times and The Daily/Sunday Telegraph, he writes about television for The Radio Times and he writes about books for the i newspaper. He’s on television and radio from time to time.
Martin Aston
Martin Aston has ratcheted up 39 years writing about music and other subjects without beats or melody, including contributing to MOJO since its inception in 1994. After starting at Melody Maker, he’s written for other specialist music mags (including Q, NME and Music Week), newspapers (The Guardian, Independent and Times), overseas titles (the UK correspondent for Dutch monthly OOR, the New Zealand Herald, the College Music Journal in the US, and for Spin and Details), the broadcast bible Radio Times and the odd website (BBC Online, The Vinyl Factory). His detours into books comprise biographies of Pulp, Björk, the record label 4AD and a hundred-year history of the LGBTQ+ pioneers of popular music. They say don’t meet your heroes, but interviewing the likes of David Bowie, Tom Verlaine, Patti Smith, John Waters, Little Richard, Dame Judi Dench, Rik Mayall and Pavlov’s Dog has brought considerable joy, and only one interviewee (hi, Evan Dando) has walked out, so he thinks journalism could be a career worth pursuing.
Mike Barnes
A MOJO contributor since the ‘90s, Mike Barnes also writes for The Wire, Record Collector, Prog, Hi-Fi News, and more. His first book, Captain Beefheart, was published in 2000 and A New Day Yesterday: UK Progressive Rock & The 1970s won an ARSC award for Best History book in 2021, and was also shortlisted for the Penderyn Prize. As a drummer Mike is, as the old joke goes, “someone who hangs around with musicians”, and has played with Damo Suzuki’s Network and “Multimedia Armageddon” Towering Inferno. He also plays keyboards with cosmic drone ensemble, Himmel: Music For Massed Fuzz Organs.
David Buckley
David Buckley completed his Ph.D. at Liverpool University’s Institute of Popular Music in 1994 leading to an embarrassing and mercifully short-lived period in which his friends called him Dr Pop. His book, loosely based on his doctoral thesis, David Bowie: Strange Fascination (Virgin Books, 1999) has been in print ever since and is very long and full of words like ‘iconic’ and ‘seminal.’ Alongside Strange Fascination, David has written a consumer guide, The Complete Guide To The Music of David Bowie (now retitled David Bowie: The Music and the Changes – Omnibus Press 2014), the official biography of the The Stranglers, No Mercy (Hodder and Stoughton, 1997), biographies of R.E.M., Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music (2004), Elton John (2007), and Kraftwerk (2012). David also edited the English-language version of Karl Bartos’s autobiography, The Sound Of The Machine (Omnibus, 2022). He has been working on a biography of the Human League and Heaven 17 since the late 18th Century. It is (over)due to be published in autumn 2024. He has written for Mojo since 2002 and his favourite moment was when Peter Gabriel told him he bought David Bowie’s bath at Sotheby’s.
Jenny Bulley
MOJO’s reviews editor, Jenny Bulley’s proudest achievements in that time include successfully banning the word ‘seminal’ and backing the case for a hyphen in hip-hop. Jenny’s favourite interviewees for MOJO include Viv Albertine, Wayne Coyne, Patti Smith and Oumou Sangare. She also cherishes the two-minute exchange she once had with James Brown about coats (his was purple). Jenny has also written for Q, Kerrang!, yahoo.com and regularly appears on the MOJO podcast.
Keith Cameron
Keith Cameron is a Contributing Editor for MOJO, having joined the magazine as Reviews Editor in 2001. In a previous century he was Reviews Editor at Sounds and NME, and his writing has also appeared in The Guardian, The Times, Scotland On Sunday, Kerrang!, Q, and Espress, the short-lived magazine of reassuringly expensive catering outlet Benugo. Author of Mudhoney: The Sound And The Fury From Seattle, described by the late Mark Lanegan as “the definitive book on ’90s Seattle music”, his MOJO career highlight arrived when Bruce Springsteen sent him a crate of Chartreuse Verte liqueur with the accompanying message: “Approach with caution.”
Chris Catchpole
Chris Catchpole is MOJO’s Digital Editor and has been part of the MOJO extended universte ever since he wandered into the office as a work experience with a headful of dreams and a satchel-ful of Smile bootlegs. Chris was previously the Reviews Editor at MOJO’s fallen sister title Q and has contributed reviews, interviews and cover features to a number of titles, including The Guardian, Rolling Stone, Esquire, Record Collector and Apple Music. Over the past 25 years, Chris has been luckily enough to interview pretty much all of his musical heroes. None of which quite compete in terms of surprise/shock value to being forced into an impromptu yoga session by an irate Goldie while wearing skin-tight jeans.
Stevie Chick
Stevie Chick’s adventures with MOJO have seen him tour Brazil’s grand opera houses with Jack and Meg White, ride out an earthquake with the surviving members of Prince’s Revolution and scour the more remote pockets of Texas in search of elusive troubadour Josh T Pearson. Author of biographies of Black Flag, Sonic Youth and Foo Fighters, contributor to titles including The Guardian, The Independent and The Quietus and co-editor (with photographer Steve Gullick) of irregular zine Loose Lips Sink Ships, he’s eager to discover where his next mission will take him. You can flip through his back pages at steviechick.com.
Andy Cowan
Andy Cowan has written for MOJO since 2009. Former editor (and publisher) of the world’s first monthly rap magazine Hip-Hop Connection, he has written for Blag, The Gavin Report, The Guardian, The Independent and Match, among others. In 2023 Headpress published his first book B-Side: A Flipsided History of Pop (see more on X/Instagram at @vinylslam). An inveterate gourmand, in 2013 he baked 52 different loaves of bread for his Original Doughboy blog.
Grayson Haver Currin
Grayson Haver Currin has written for MOJO since 2020, including cover stories on Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, and The Rolling Stones. In that time, he has also written for The New York Times, NPR, Pitchfork, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Bandcamp Daily, and others. A former music-festival founder and record-label runner, he produced the 2023 box set, Epoch, by DeYarmond Edison for Jagjaguwar. During the last five years, he has hiked 10,000 miles, completing the United States’ Triple Crown of Hiking in November 2023. (He is the hiking columnist for Outside Magazine.) Once, for a MOJO cover story, he helped Jack White make a music video.
Dave DiMartino
Dave DiMartino is a past editor of CREEM, former West Coast Bureau Chief of Billboard, a senior writer at Entertainment Weekly, and later executive editor of LAUNCH and Yahoo! Music. He is the author of Singer Songwriters: Pop Music's Performer-Composers, from A to Zevon and Do It Again: The Steely Dan Years, consultant editor of Moonlight Drive: The Stories Behind Every Doors Song, and U.S. editor of Music In The 20th Century. His writing has appeared in MOJO, Musician, Rolling Stone, Spin and the Village Voice, among other publications. He currently lives in Los Angeles.
Tom Doyle
Tom Doyle has written for MOJO since 1996 and contributed to Sound On Sound, Q, Billboard and – a long, long time ago – Smash Hits. His books include Man On The Run: Paul McCartney In The 1970s (Polygon, 2013) and Running Up That Hill: 50 Visions Of Kate Bush (Nine Eight, 2022) and he’s also one half of production duo White Label, who’ve worked with Paul Weller and Linda Lewis. Possibly his favourite MOJO memory is Keith Richards “showing him” his knife. He tweets at @Tom_Doyle_
Danny Eccleston
Danny Eccleston is a professional music writer. He has had no other job and is useless at most other things – like, for instance, driving. A former Editor of Q Magazine and currently Senior Editor at MOJO magazine, he has contributed to publications including Rhythm, Guitarist, The Guitar Magazine, NME, Blender, The Guardian, The Times, The Financial Times and Hip-Hop Connection, many of which still exist. He once gave Madonna a Christmas pudding and escaped from an underwater helicopter crash simulator with Blur’s Dave Rowntree. He always tries to remember his own advice when interviewing pop stars: “Ask A Stupid Question.”
Pat Gilbert
Pat Gilbert has worked at MOJO since 1998 and currently edits their special editions. He’s the author of several books, including the definitive biography of The Clash, Passion Is A Fashion (2004), and Shut It! (2010), the inside story of The Sweeney TV series. He also co-owns Olaf’s Record Store in Sevenoaks, Kent and appears each Sunday afternoon on Simon Mayo’s Greatest Hits Radio show talking about rare vinyl. As a musician, he’s appeared on-stage with Mick Jones, Billy Bragg, Wayne Kramer and more, and makes records solo as ‘Dirk Munro’ and with punk-rude boys Night Of Treason. His greatest coup was getting the late, great Joe Strummer to buy the entire MOJO team a round of tequila slammers. Salud!
Ian Harrison
Ian Harrison is MOJO’s News Editor. He first contributed in 2000, and since then has interviewed many of his musical heroes for the magazine, including Scott Walker, Mark E Smith, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, Can, The Go-Betweens, Kraftwerk, New Order and Lawrence from Felt. He’s also contributed to magazines including Select, Mixmag, Q and The Word. A frustrated cartoonist, among his proudest achievements in rock journalism is getting into Private Eye’s Pseuds Corner when writing about the Cocteau Twins.
Will Hodgkinson
Will Hodgkinson has been writing for MOJO for two decades, with a special interest in 60s and 70s mellow rock, pastoral folk, Brazilian psych and other styles that go well with the wearing of too much denim. He has contributed to The Guardian, Vogue and The New York Times and since 2011 he has been chief rock and pop critic of The Times. He is the author of the music books Guitar Man, Song Man, The Ballad of Britain and In Perfect Harmony: Singalong Pop In 70s Britain. His memoir on a 1980s childhood, The House Is Full Of Yogis, told the story of how his family went from being boring suburbanites to meditating freaks after his father ate a dodgy coronation chicken at a dinner party and ended up joining a spiritual cult called the Brahma Kumaris. Will lives in Peckham, South East London.
David Hutcheon
A Tottenham-residing Glaswegian, David Hutcheon has been MOJO’s world music correspondent since 1996, reporting from Agadez, Faʻaʻā, Kyzyl, Sana’a, Tegucigalpa and Tessalit. He edited the TV section of The Sunday Times for 25 years, modelling it on the Neil Spencer-era NME, but quit in 2022 to focus on going to gigs (120 in 2023) and travelling the world by train in search of rare Small Faces singles. Tinariwen’s Ibrahim Ag Alhabib says likes him because he never asks difficult questions.
Jim Irvin
Jim Irvin left school at 17 and, somehow, landed a job as DJ at a radio station that broadcast exclusively to biscuit factories, during which Jim found himself interviewing Chic, The Temptations, The Stranglers and The Police. It lit a fire for both music reporting and music making. Soon afterwards he was the singer with indie band Furniture, whose eventual 1986 hit on Stiff Records, Brilliant Mind, is still warmly remembered, certainly by Jim, as it stopped him having to get a proper job for another few years. When that gig came to its natural end, he switched to music journalism, joining Melody Maker in 1991 as reviews editor and then MOJO in 1994 as its founding features editor. He has filed many features himself on acts such as Sandy Denny, Scott Walker, Paul McCartney, Jeff Buckley, Kate Bush, Pink Floyd, Mighty Baby and The Zombies. For a while he oversaw MOJO’s own books imprint and edited the acclaimed MOJO Collection, a book of essential albums. He has contributed the reissues column File Under ever since he left the staff in 2001 to return to the industry frontline as a songwriter for hire. He’s written with dozens of artists, among them Lana Del Rey, Lissie, Unloved, Nothing But Thieves and Yungblud. He once, entirely by accident, co-wrote a Spanish Eurovision entry which came ninth. His podcast, You’re Not On The List, celebrates forgotten albums and the people who love them. His lucky cephalopod is the cuttlefish.
Andrew Male
Andrew Male was MOJO's Deputy Editor from 2000 to 2016. Since then he has worked as a freelance Associate editor. He has interviewed hundreds of people for the magazine, but his favourites were probably Bill Fay, Dion, and Patti Smith. John Lydon made him cry. Andrew tweets about music and culture at @Andr6wMale.
James McNair
James McNair has been writing for MOJO since 1994. His work has also appeared in The Independent, The Telegraph, Q, Planet Rock, Classic Rock, Prog, The Idler, The National (UAE), and celebrated Galashiels, Scotland fanzine Sun Zoom Spark. Writing has taken him to The Falklands with The Stranglers, into the homes of Ennio Morricone, Françoise Hardy and Ray Manzarek, on to tourbuses with Peaches and Iron Maiden, and into the dressing-rooms of James Brown and Keith Richards. This music journalism malarkey has been a blast and James feels very lucky to be doing it, still. He tweets at @hairymcnairy.
Bob Mehr
Bob Mehr has been a US correspondent for MOJO since 2003. The author of the bestselling biography Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements, he is also a two-time GRAMMY winner for Best Album Notes. In addition to his roles as an editor and critic for Village Voice Media and USA Today, his work has appeared in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and Billboard, among others. Over the course of two decades, he’s had the opportunity to interview countless music legends for MOJO, but his most memorable experience is being stood up - not once, but twice - by the late, great Little Richard.
John Mulvey
John Mulvey has been the Editor of MOJO since 2018. His C.V. also includes stints as Deputy Editor of NME and Editor of Uncut, and his writing has appeared in The Wire, The Times, The Independent, The Observer (Twice; once by accident), The Scotsman and, in translation, Le Monde. His professional career probably peaked when Brian Wilson offered him $100 to get his new version of Surfer Girl played on the radio, but he continues to tweet about new music at @JohnRMulvey.
Mark Paytress
Mark Paytress has worked for MOJO in various capacities - news editor, bossing MOJO Collections and above all as a long-standing feature-writer and reviewer. Over four decades he’s shared tea with Yoko Ono at the Dakota, spent a wild week in Morocco with the Master Musicians of Joujouka, 16 ear-blasting days reporting on Tokyo’s underground scene and kept Scott Walker company during The MOJO Awards ceremony. He’s also contributed to many radio and TV programmes, including documentaries for Radio 4; has written for a range of publications including Radio Times, ID, The Times and The Guardian; has published more than a dozen books, including biographies of Bolan, Bowie, Siouxsie & The Banshees and the Rolling Stones; and has been a producer/consultant on numerous reissue projects. His first dip into rock journalism came in as a schoolboy in 1975 with a furtive Captain Beefheart interview backstage at Southampton University. He tweets at @paytress.
Andrew Perry
Andrew Perry debuted for MOJO with a 1997 oral history of Nirvana, eliciting joyful memories from insiders still bruised by Kurt Cobain’s passing. He has since trained his bedside manner on a diverse array of artists on MOJO’s behalf, ranging from Jerry Lee Lewis, The White Stripes and Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, through to Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, Los Bitchos, Devo, and Black Pumas. Elsewhere, he’s written for The Daily Telegraph, Select, Q, Rolling Stone and Japan’s Rockin’ On, had his neck bitten by Dave Gahan, been deemed “the party” by Rihanna, and ghosted bestselling autobiographies with John Lydon, Bez and Tricky. From midday on the first Tuesday of every month, he co-hosts the two-hour Intensive Care show on Totally Wired Radio.
Victoria Segal
Victoria Segal has been writing for MOJO since 2003, beginning with a review of Bonnie 'Prince' Billy's Master And Everyone. She has written for Melody Maker, NME, Q, The Times and The Sunday Times; her most alarming reviewing experience, however, was being asked to weigh in on Blur vs Oasis by Stephen Hawking. Victoria tweets at @VictoriaSegal.
Michael Simmons
As leader of the band Michael Simmons & Slewfoot, Michael was dubbed "The Father Of Country Punk" by Creem Magazine editors in the 1970s. In 1977 he also became a member of Kinky Friedman & The Texas Jewboys for the next decade. He was an editor at the National Lampoon in the '80s where he wrote the popular column "Drinking Tips And Other War Stories." He won an LA Press Club Award in the '90s for investigative journalism, has written for MOJO_,_ LA Weekly_,_ Rolling Stone_,_ Penthouse_,_ High Times_,_ LA Times and The New York Times, and writtne four sets of liner notes for Bob Dylan, as well as liners for Michael Bloomfield, Phil Ochs, Kris Kristofferson, Mose Allison, Arthur Lee and Love, and others.
Mat Snow
Award-winning editor of MOJO (1995-1999) and FourFourTwo (2001-2006), Mat Snow has written for NME, Q, Sounds, The Guardian, Independent, Sunday Times and many more, and written books on the solo Beatles, U2 and The Who. He’s ghosted Ledley King’s memoirs and edited an anthology of interviews with Nick Cave, his former lodger in Brixton, South London, who repaid the favour with his best ever song, Scum, but still owes Mat £15 in back rent.
Lois Wilson
Lois Wilson has been a regular contributor to MOJO since 1999. She was the deputy editor of the late MOJO Collections and her writing has also appeared in The Guardian, The Independent, Record Collector and The Quietus. Her genre specialities are soul, reggae, blues and the Sixties and she collects Motown and Trojan 45s, 60s EPs and Beatles memorabilia.
Jim Wirth
Jim Wirth started out writing for Select and then NME in the 1990s while working behind the counter at a second-hand record shop in London. Wrote for Uncut before joining the MOJO gang. Was once declared Wally of the Week by the Sun for a deeply pretentious review of Wham’s Greatest Hits.
Stephen Worthy
Stephen Worthy has been writing about music for a (sort of) living since 1994, when he became deputy editor of Hip-Hop Connection. Four years later, Public Enemy’s Chuck D proclaimed him one of his top ten hip-hop writers in his book Fight the Power: Rap, Race, and Reality. As a career highlight, it perhaps came dangerously early. Luckily, there were more, including a lengthy stint with dance music bible Mixmag, as well as being a regular contributor for the NME, The Guardian, Muzik and leading electronic music tastemaker, Resident Advisor. For the past 15 years he’s penned the Electronica column for MOJO.