David Stubbs


David Stubbs is a British music journalist. He grew up in Leeds and in the early Eighties was a student at the University of Oxford where he was a close friend of Simon Reynolds. The two were part of the Oxford-based collective that in 1984 launched the pop journal Monitor and then in 1986 both joined Melody Maker as staff writers. Stubbs remained at Melody Maker for a dozen years. He combined his serious writing career with writing the humorous "Talk Talk Talk" section, which featured the character of Mr Agreeable who would insult sacred cows with barrages of swear words.
Stubbs has written, more seriously, for the now-defunct Vox magazine, for the NME, and as editor of The Wire, Uncut, The Guardian, The Times and the football magazines Goal and When Saturday Comes, where in the guise of the "Wing Commander", Stubbs covered their ill-fated World Cup campaign, followed by their failure to qualify for Euro 2008; the reports were sufficiently popular for Stubbs to augment them with further characters. He has also contributed to many of the themed special editions of Uncut. He has written about musicians such as Jimi Hendrix and Eminem in the Stories Behind Every Song series.
In 2009, his book on 20th century avant-garde music was published, entitled Fear of Music: Why people get Rothko but don't get Stockhausen, which was the subject of an evening of lectures at the Tate Britain. The title may have been taken from the third studio album by Talking Heads, Fear of Music. He was among 42 who contributed essays to the bestselling The Atheist's Guide To Christmas, which also featured Richard Dawkins, Derren Brown, David Baddiel and Charlie Brooker.
In 2014, Stubbs published a comprehensive critical history of German post-psychedelic rock of the 1970s, Future Days: Krautrock and the Building of Modern Germany. This was followed in 2018 by a similarly large-scale study of electronic music, Mars by 1980.

Publications