Nik Cohn grew up in Derry, Northern Ireland, and has been a professional writer from the age of eighteen.Ben Ratliff is the author of books including Run the Song: Writing About Running About Listening and Coltrane: The Story of a Sound. A former music critic for The New York Times, he lives in New York City and teaches at New York University.

'Cohn was the first writer authentically to capture the raucous vitality of pop music. His writing still sizzles and crackles'. Sunday Telegraph'A brilliant, beautiful agitator, vibrant and loud enough to wake the dead'. Salon'Scholars of rock and roll ...revere him.' Observer'The best writer about pop music . . . an inspiration'. Jarvis Cocker, BBC Radio 6 Music'From the time I first read Nik Cohn...to this book...I've almost always had the same response. I believe this, I'd find myself saying, whether it was about Screamin' Jay Hawkins's stage show or his grandmother's life and death in Stalin's jails... get inside it, get behind it, get it down, and pass it on. The world will seem a little bigger than before.' Greil Marcus'One of the finest and most significant post-war journalists . . . The writing is clear and dramatic; it grips from the first sentence and never lets go'. Hanif Kureishi'Of course I'm a Nik Cohn fan. His name is actually kind of a password. If somebody says they know about Nik Cohn, you know that person is literate-and cool'. Jay McInerney'Set the template for a whole new style of rock journalism, informed, irreverent, passionate and polemical'. Choice Magazine