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Salewicz, Chris (Music and Musicians)
Author  Chris Salewicz, who lives in London, has documented world popular music and culture for over three decades, both in print and on television. His writing, on subjects from film to foreign affairs as well as music, has appeared in the Sunday Times, The Independent, The Face and in many other publications.
As a senior features writer for NME from 1975 to 1981, he saw service at the frontlines of glam rock, punk rock, reggae music, and the Los Angeles and New York music scenes and their subcultures. As a contributing editor of Time Out, he wrote pieces on glue-sniffing gangs, filming in Nicaragua, and housing estate horrors, amongst many others. For the Sunday Times Magazine during the 1980s, he wrote on subjects as varied as Polish Solidarity, the restoration of Robert Owen's New Lanark model village, and a twenty page cover story on reggae music. After writing many of the early cover stories on The Face, he provided two of the cover stories in issue one of Q. For The Sunday Correspondent he wrote regularly, on such diverse topics as the civil war in El Salvador and healing through dolphins' energy. He also wrote for and syndicated to countless publications worldwide. Part of the team that set up MTV-Europe, Chris Salewicz presented Kino, a weekly film programme, and edited and directed. He has written many books, including biographies of Jimi Hendrix, Paul McCartney, George Lucas, Oliver Stone, Noel Coward, and Bob Marley - the last, which was authorised by Marley’s family, the result of his abiding love of Jamaica. In 1995 at the instigation of Island Records' founder Chris Blackwell, he and director Don Letts went to the island to develop film ideas. Fired by the idea of a film that showed the moral redemption of a Kingston killer cop set in the style of a Hong Kong action movie, and drawing on extensive research, Salewicz embarked on the writing of Third World Cop - the most successful film ever in the Caribbean when it was released in 1999. Following his time living in Jamaica, Chris Salewicz wrote Rude Boy: Once Upon a Time in Jamaica, a critically acclaimed book that was part-thriller, part-travelogue, part subjective history of the island. Reggae Explosion: the Story of Jamaican Music; Mick and Keith, a joint biography of two Dartford schoolboys, followed. Mick and Keith was 'probably' the last book read by Joe Strummer, according to his widow. In October 2006 Salewicz published Redemption Song: the Definitive Biography of Joe Strummer (HarperCollins), an exhaustive, epic biography of the Clash frontman, a best-seller; it was published in the USA by FSG the following May. Chris Salewicz has recently edited Keep On Running: the Story of Island Records, published on June 1 2009; Bob Marley: the Untold Story, his definitive biography of Bob Marley was published in the UK in September 2009, and in the US in June 2010; and he has just completed work on Beats of Freedom, a documentary feature film about how Polish rock'n'roll helped bring down Communism. A frequent speaker at such literary festivals as Hay and Port Eliot, Chris Salewicz specialises in stories of the underbelly of rock'n'roll, including tales of the music press, and assorted cultural areas. |
