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Meet the team
Classic Pop launched in 2012 and was the brainchild of music journalist and ZTT Records collaborator Ian Peel and Anthem CEO Jon Bickley. The magazine and website are run by a team who are all passionate about music, together with a roster of experienced music journalists.
Here’s a little bit about us:
Steve Harnell – Senior Editor
Classic Pop is edited by Steve Harnell, a music and entertainment journalist and editor who’s plied his trade with the Bristol Evening Post and Western Daily Press, Future Publishing and Immediate Media, before joining Anthem to run Classic Pop and Vintage Rock. During that time, he’s interviewed an array of major names including Al Green, John Lydon, Massive Attack and Ian Brown. Read about Steve here and find him on X.com. For more information visit www.steveharnell.co.uk
Alex Duce – Senior Art Editor
A magazine designer, devoted husband, father of two, and a passionate Depeche Mode enthusiast, Alex has an extensive background in magazine design, having tackled topics ranging from home cinema and veganism to sci-fi and American wrestling. Currently, he is immersed in collecting vampire and werewolf films and literature from the 70s and 80s, as well as single malt whiskies. He also enjoys sharing his love for typography in TV and movie posters and credits, much to the amusement – or perhaps the boredom – of his family.
Dan Biggane – Digital & Production Editor
Dan Biggane is a writer for Classic Pop and Vintage Rock magazines. A former entertainment editor at the Bath Chronicle newspaper, he’s interviewed countless big names from the world of rock and pop including Robert Plant and John Lydon, as well as members of The Specials, The Selecter, The Cure, The Go-Go’s, Echo & The Bunnymen, Dexys, Deacon Blue, and Suzanne Vega. For Vintage Rock, he has spoken with numerous rock’n’roll legends, such as Dion, Jerry Allison, Slim Jim Phantom and The Shadows, and has contributed several cover features for the magazine including in-depth pieces on Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent, Buddy Holly, Sam Cooke, Chuck Berry, Roy Orbison, the Stray Cats, Billy Fury and Bo Diddley.
Leah Fitz-Henry – Senior Advertising Manager
Leah is an original 80s kid that grew up listening to pop legends like Madonna, Kylie and Prince. Having worked for 15 years in ad sales, Leah helped launch Classic Pop in 2012 and loves the nostalgia of working on this brand. When she’s not enjoying long walks (usually listening to 80s pop), she’s playing netball or doing yoga. She also loves a good festival, singing (very badly) and her go-to classic album is Like A Prayer.
Megan Gibbings – Head of Advertising
Megan has worked at Anthem since 2019. As Head of Advertising, Megan is all about creating campaigns with that feel-good factor. Much like the timeless energy of 80s classics, Megan aims to strike the perfect note with our audiences and deliver advertising that leaves a lasting, positive impact.
Rosie Pankhurst – Direct Marketing Manager
Rosie manages all the marketing campaigns across Classic Pop – from subscription offers to new issues – as well as looking after Classic Pop’s valued subscribers. She has worked on Classic Pop since 2022, and loves discovering more about the classic bands and artists of the 80s with every issue, and adding new finds to her playlists.
Katherine Raderecht – Publisher
Katherine worked at Future plc for 19 years publishing magazines from Cycling Plus to The Simple Things. During that time Katherine was group publisher of the music making and listening brands which included Total Guitar, Guitarist, Future Music, Classic Pop and Metal Hammer. Katherine also launched Musicradar.com. Katherine is now a freelance brand consultant working in publishing and the interiors markets. Katherine is a lifelong Bowie fan and, as a student in 80s London, immersed herself in the music scene dressed in a variety of avant-garde outfits. Sadly, no smart phones were around to capture the evidence!
Jon Bickley – CEO
Ian was working for producer Trevor Horn running ZTT Records when he hit upon the idea of Classic Pop magazine, pitching the idea to Anthem Publishing co-founder Jon Bickley when they met backstage at a Buggles concert at The O2. He was DJ Mag’s digital editor for 11 years and had been writing for music magazines and newspapers since the late 80s, penning books including the first ever about music on the internet.
Ian was editor for our first 19 issues and the first eight editions of Classic Pop Presents. He remains on our editorial team writing each issue’s The A To Z of Classic Pop – our ongoing tangential take on all aspects of the genre.
Outside of Classic Pop, Ian is a catalogue consultant to record labels including Universal, Warners, RT Industries and Stiff, continues his ZTT explorations and has spent the last few years playing live around the world with Art of Noise co-founders JJ Jeczalik, Gary Langan and Paul Morley as part of their the Art of This project.
Our contributors
Classic Pop is the home to some of music’s finest journalists, with regular contributions from the following:
Steve O’Brien
Steve O’Brien is a freelance entertainment journalist. He has written for magazines and websites such as Radio Times, SFX, The Guardian, Yahoo, Esquire, The New Statesman, Digital Spy, Empire, Yours Retro, The New Statesman and MusicRadar. He’s written books about Doctor Who and Buffy The Vampire Slayer and has even featured on a BBC4 documentary about Bergerac. Apart from his work on Classic Pop, he also edits CP’s sister magazine, Vintage Rock Presents, and Anthem Publishing’s Screen Spotlight series of bookazines. For more information click here
Rik Flynn
Rik is editor of both Vintage Rock and Classic Pop Presents magazines and currently also edits for Record Collector. Rik has written for numerous other publications including NME, Arena, Guitar, Long Live Vinyl and Music Tech.
As a musician with his band Captain, who had two Top 40 UK hits, Rik enjoyed travelling and touring the world from Austin to Tokyo and appearing on numerous radio shows including Steve Lamacq’s Roundtable and Dermott O’Leary and Jonathan Ross on Radio 2. He has also hosted radio shows and podcasts on Shoreditch Radio and 1BTN FM and was a talking head on a George Michael documentary.
Pop music, indie music, electronic music, synth-pop, and all music in general, is absolutely everything to Rik. Rik is currently a lead lecturer at BIMM Brighton, teaching on the Music Marketing, Media and Communication, and Music Journalism degree courses and has helped with press and promotion for ground-breaking music organisation, AudioActive, amongst others.
John Earls
Writing for Classic Pop since our first issue and now Reviews Editor, John has been to Adam Ant’s house, sworn at by Bob Geldof, shown around Bryan Ferry’s studio, been told “I can see you’re a pop person” by Neil Tennant and serenaded with Last Christmas by Shirlie Kemp. John first specialised in writing about music as editor of Teletext’s Planet Sound, and now writes about music for a range of national newspapers and magazines. A Luton Town fan, John also writes about football. His bucket list interviews for Classic Pop are Grace Jones, Kylie and Siouxsie Sioux.
Ian Wade
Ian Wade is a freelance writer, author, editor, DJ and musician who has written for Classic Pop and a variety of Classic Pop specials since 2016. He’s also written for the Quietus, Record Collector, MusicOMH, Official Charts Company, Sunday Times Culture, High Life and done time for Smash Hits, The Face, Melody Maker, NME and numerous no-longer-there websites of many moons ago. He’s been a PR for the TV show Later… with Jools Holland, among other things, and has DJed at Duckie, Spiritland, The Eagle, BFLF and Soho Radio. His first book, 1984 The Year Pop Went Queer, was published by Nine Eight Books in 2024 and crowned a Book of the Year in the Guardian and Clash magazine.
Mark Lindores
Raised on a diet of Smash Hits, The Face and Number One mags (literally, he used to save his school lunch money to buy them), Mark Lindores never entertained the idea of doing anything other than writing as a career. In 2012, he chanced upon the launch issue of Classic Pop and, thrilled with the discovery of a magazine that featured his favourite artists, pitched an idea for issue 2 and has written for the magazine (and Classic Pop Presents) ever since. He’s also written music, fashion, film and general pop culture pieces for Vogue (British and Australian), Total Film, Mixmag, Disco Pogo, Clash, Notion, Attitude and Metro. He is currently working on his first foray into fiction. Find him on Instagram
Andy Jones
Andy Jones has been writing about music and music production for 35 years. Focussing on his love for the synthesiser – born after attending a 1981 Kraftwerk gig – he has covered many a synth pop story for Classic Pop, but also rode the wave of DIY dance music during a long stint as editor of Future Music magazine in the 1990s. He pursued the synth in software form while launching and editing Computer Music in the late 90s and continues to bore people senseless about filter shapes and modulation in regular stories and reviews for MusicRadar and Music Tech.
Andrew Dineley
Andrew grew up in a time when pop music didn’t just sound amazing -it looked amazing too. Back then, record sleeves were as iconic as the songs themselves, with pop and art going hand in hand. Luckily for us, many artists of that era cared just as much about the visuals as they did the music. Andrew was endlessly inspired by the design legends of the time – names like Assorted Images, Peter Saville Associates, Neville Brody, The Cloth, Stylorouge, DKB, Ansell Sadgrove, and Da Gama. Their work helped define the look of a generation and lit a spark in Andrew as a young art student dreaming of designing record covers one day.
Fast forward to now, and Andrew writes about those very artists and their design work for Classic Pop in ‘Pop Art’ features, as well as exploring their creative legacy in his podcast, ‘Art on your sleeve’. Andrew says ‘it’s a real joy digging through old archives and rediscovering design gems that still shine today—even as album art becomes something of an esoteric lost art.’
Find him on Instagram, Facebook and softoctopus.co.uk
Felix Rowe
Felix has extensively toured the US, performed with a Chili Pepper, barbequed with a Blues Brother and shared a Mars bar with George Martin. He has written for publications including Classic Pop, Vintage Rock, Long Live Vinyl, Clash, Louder, DIY, and Record Collector.
Jon O’Brien
Jon O’Brien is a freelance entertainment writer from Wigan who has written the Forget Me Not and Top 20 features for Classic Pop since 2019 and had bylines in the likes of Esquire, Billboard, Vulture, New Scientist, i-D, The Guardian, GRAMMY.com and Paste. He’s also a soccer enthusiast, reluctant runner, King Charles Spaniel owner, garage drummer, Icelandophile and carrot cake connoisseur. The first single he ever bought was Starship’s We Built This City, the first album Now That’s What I Call Music 6 and his favourite Classic Pop-friendly acts are Scritti Politti, The Sundays and The Bangles.
Neil Crossley
Neil Crossley is a freelance editor and writer whose work has appeared in publications such as The Guardian, The Times, The Telegraph, The Independent and the FT. His specialisms are music, TV, technology and the arts, although he has written across a diverse range of subjects, from profiling a man who travels the globe licking iconic paintings to interviewing actor Sam Neill about where in the world to get the best cup of tea.
Neil spent ten years working for The Guardian and 15 years working for the Musicians’ Union, editing the quarterly magazine for the MU’s 35,000 UK members. He now writes for the MU about the challenges and opportunities facing musicians in the 21st century. Neil has also edited publications on artists such as The Beatles and Pink Floyd.
Neil is also a singer-songwriter, with a wide range of touring and recording experience. He was a member of International Blue, a Scott Walker-inspired ‘crooning collaboration’ created by Dutch composer Stephen Emmer, produced by Tony Visconti and featuring Glenn Gregory of Heaven 17, Midge Ure of Ultravox and Liam McKahey of Cousteau. Neil co-wrote the song Sleep For England, which was covered by Julian Lennon and released as a single. Neil also fronts the Americana band Furlined, whose latest album Kill Devil Hills was released in early 2025. Read more here
Douglas McPherson
As a boy, Douglas got his love of words from the lyrics of 80s pop songs including Billy Bragg’s New England (that wonderful line about wishing on ‘space hardware’), Baggy Trousers by Madness and Squeeze’s Up The Junction. He grew up to write about music and entertainment in a variety of titles including Classic Pop, Vintage Rock, What’s On in London, The Stage, The Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph, My Weekly, Yours Retroand The People’s Friend.
He also wrote for several specialist musician’s magazines where he memorably asked a famous keyboardist whether the name of his instrument was spelt “Prophet as in Moses or profit as in money?” – which nearly caused the accompanying photographer to choke to death.
Aside from music, Douglas majors in circuses. His book Circus Mania was described by the Mail on Sunday as “A brilliant account of a vanishing art form,” and he continues to tell the inside stories of the big top on his blog of the same name. Douglas also writes fiction for women’s magazines and has authored several romance novels under a variety of pen names that we won’t reveal here.
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.
Mark Elliot
Mark Elliott has spent more than 30 years in a variety of consumer and B2B publishing roles. He was named Publisher of the Year for his work on Empire and ran Time Out London as its Managing Director for more than four years. In 2017, he released his first book – The Ministry Of Pop – which celebrated the career of 80s production titans Stock Aitken Waterman. It was named one of Classic Pop‘s Books Of The Year. He now balances a day job as Chief Operating Officer for Europa Sciences Ltd with continuing freelance commissions for magazines and record labels on a range of 80s artists such as Madonna, Pet Shop Boys and Kylie. All of this helps fund his current obsession – collecting every UK 7″ hit single from 1962 to 1992, with plenty of room for some that failed to chart and others that did big business elsewhere in the world. It’s a good job he lives out in rural Norfolk – there’s plenty of room to store them!
Oliver Hurley
Oliver Hurley has written about pop music in its many guises for, among others, Classic Pop, The Independent, The Big Issue, Total Guitar and BT TV, as a result of which he was once offered a custard cream by Meat Loaf. In between all that, he has also worked on GamesRadar, Homes & Antiques, the English Heritage Members’ Magazine and BBC Wildlife. Visit oliverhurley.co.uk for more.
