Ian Gittins
Ian Gittins is a veteran music writer for The Guardian whose work centres on live performance and the long arc of an artist’s career. His coverage is distinguished by an ability to fold decades of listening and reporting into vivid gig reviews and carefully framed profiles, making performance, production and backstory feel like a single story. Alongside his Guardian work he continues to review concerts and write about individual songs for other national outlets, and has built an extensive parallel career as an author of music books and a ghostwriter of memoirs.
Live reviews: stages, sound and setlists
Gittins’s most visible work at The Guardian is a long run of live reviews that track artists on stage rather than on record.
His recent Gorillaz piece describes a hi‑tech mini‑festival built around Damon Albarn’s “magpie mind”, focusing on the show’s visual scale, guest cast and technological ambition as much as the songs themselves. He has reviewed arena and theatre shows by The 1975 at the O2 Arena, Craig David at Brixton Academy, Caravan at Queen Elizabeth Hall, Chase & Status at the Roundhouse, Baxter Dury at Barfly and Was (Not Was) at Islington Academy, among many others.
Across these pieces he pays close attention to venue, sound, setlist flow and crowd energy, often anchoring a review in how convincingly an act fills the room it has chosen. He moves easily between pop, rock, dance and heritage acts, treating a chart‑friendly set by Busted or The Bravery with the same structural scrutiny he applies to more established names.
The tone is direct and observational, with detail on musicianship and stagecraft rather than extended critical theory, which makes the reviews read like clear, informed reports from the room.
Interviews and artist profiles across eras
Alongside gig reports, Gittins has produced interviews and comment pieces that frame artists within longer careers. Guardian features such as his profile of Supergrass and his report and interview on Busted track bands at moments of transition, combining access reporting with a sense of where they sit in the wider pop landscape.
A comment piece on Elton John’s resurgence, titled “How Sir Elton Recovered His Cool”, uses one artist’s change in reputation to explore how legacy performers can reconnect with audiences.
Earlier in his career he interviewed and profiled acts including Happy Mondays, Simple Minds, The Cranberries, Moby and D:Ream for music magazines, giving him first‑hand experience of the late‑1980s and 1990s alternative and dance scenes. This long timeline means current pieces can draw on interviews and coverage going back decades, and his profiles often position an artist’s latest move against a well‑defined catalogue of previous work.
Books, song histories and long‑form music writing
Gittins extends his reporting into book‑length projects that dissect catalogues and careers in detail.
He has written song‑by‑song volumes on Björk and Talking Heads, breaking down the stories and creative decisions behind individual tracks. His work on The Cure - including the illustrated retrospective “The Cure: A Perfect Dream” - and a subsequent book on Depeche Mode shows a particular interest in artists whose careers span multiple decades and stylistic phases.
He has also produced a playful but structured taxonomy of heavy rock in “The Periodic Table of Heavy Rock”, reflecting a taste for organising scenes and subgenres as well as narrating them.
More recently, he wrote an official commemorative book for Desert Island Discs’ 80th anniversary, revisiting notable episodes from early radio stars to contemporary political and pop figures. In parallel he continues to write about individual songs in a regular newspaper column, where each instalment focuses on the history, context and emotional weight of a single track. Taken together, these projects show a writer who enjoys close reading of songs and careers and can sustain that focus over hundreds of pages.
Ghost‑writing and memoirs
Beyond journalism and music books, Gittins has built an extensive ghost‑writing practice that runs alongside his reporting. He has co‑written New York Times and Sunday Times bestselling memoirs with musicians and entertainers, working with figures from hard rock to comedy and television. This work demands a granular understanding of how artists and public figures want their stories told, and the ability to render voice and incident cleanly on the page.
It also reinforces a core thread in his music writing: an emphasis on lived experience - on tours, sessions, crises and recoveries - rather than on purely abstract criticism.
4 more music journalists.
Abigail Kellett
Abigail Kellett is a news reporter at the Halifax Courier who stands out for visually led coverage that shows how culture, nightlife and local life play out on the ground. She documents gigs, festivals and major live shows at venues such as The Piece Hall through curated photo sets that capture atmosphere, crowd and setting as much as performers, and she uses extensive image galleries to tap reader nostalgia for nights out in Halifax town centre. Her beat spans arts, entertainment, going out, heritage, books and literary events, along with community life, people stories, local challenges, milestones, transport, regeneration, lifestyle and food. She reports through photographs, checklist-style features, reader-driven lists and roundups of most-read stories, turning announcements, programmes, author events, festivals, shop lists and everyday characters into stories about place, shared memory and how people spend their time.
Adam Lyon
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Adam Maidment
Adam Maidment is a senior What’s On and LGBTQ+ reporter whose work links big-name gigs, new venues and cultural flashpoints to everyday fan culture and inclusion. He covers music, nightlife and the wider cultural scene for the Manchester Evening News, focusing on how concerts, openings and immersive events land with real people and communities. His beat spans live music, arenas and stadiums, new restaurant and bar openings, food reviews, exhibitions, street art and nightlife infrastructure, with a particular focus on LGBTQ+ audiences and neighbourhoods. He reports on venue ambitions and problems, cultural institutions and equality issues, and franchise-led experiences, using straightforward, on-the-ground reporting and clear description. Drawing on a background in community reporting, he looks for underrepresented perspectives and uses social media, analytics and local sourcing to find stories where culture, identity and place meet.
Alex Rigotti
Alex Rigotti is a freelance music and culture editor and journalist who joins fast-turnaround music news with detailed reporting on artists, fandom and politics. They report breaking stories and live music updates for NME and Paste Magazine, covering pop, rock, club music, underground scenes and cultural debates around art and identity. Their live-music beat includes setlists, tours, festival appearances, cancellations, ticketing, venues and onstage collaborations. They previously served as a contributing editor for NME’s Radar section, supporting coverage of emerging artists and new scenes. Rigotti also writes features on rap lyrics and criminalisation, Eurovision and politics, queer feminist bodybuilding, astrotherapy and contemporary art. Their reporting is direct and specific, using clear quotes, concrete details and artists’ own words to explain what happened and how music fits into wider cultural and industry trends.