“Explores in fascinating detail the dizzy, competitive, lost world of nineties and noughties “manufactured” pop”
Neil Tennant (!)

Reach For The Stars, my debut book, was released in March 2023. An oral history of UK pop between 1996 and 2006, it features over 100 interviews with the great and good of that vibrant pop period, including popstars, producers, songwriters, video directors, PRs, journalists, etc etc and so forth. People seemed to like it, which is nice…

The Guardian review is here. Here’s a nice one from The Observer. Another from The Times, and one from its weekend sister, The Sunday Times. Classic Pop gave it 5/5, which was lovely. I wrote something about it for the Daily Express, while The Mirror ran this extract. Heat did one too. As did The Guardian. I also wrote this piece for The Guardian about how bonkers some of the pop was.

The lovely Mark Savage interviewed me for this here BBC piece, then later the Irish Independent also interviewed me, which was fun. I also had a chat with TJ Sidhu for a piece with The Face and later appeared on their podcast, as well as this one by Kate Lister. I was also interviewed by the legends Mark Ellen and David Hepworth, which appeared on YouTube of all places. As did this one with journalist James McMahon, for his podcast Spook. There was a lovely event where Peter Robinson and I were interviewed by Laura Snapes, and then later me and Beat of My Drum hitmaker Nicola Roberts had a chat on a small-ish stage in Foyles in London. Peter Robinson then interviewed me for his Popjustice substack thing. I also did some radio interviews, including BBC Radio 5 Live with Nihal, and loads of really fun local radio chats. Big-brainboxes Monocle also invited me to their fancy west London studios and you can hear the results here.

In January 2024, Reach For The Stars was longlisted for the Penderyn Music Book Prize, alongside some absolute classics.

The paperback version of the book is out now.