Ben Ratliff, son of American and British parents, is the jazz critic of The New York Times and is the author of Jazz: A Critic's Guide to the 100 Most Important Recordings.

David Keenan was born in Glasgow and grew up in Airdrie, in the west of Scotland, in the late-70s and early-1980s. He is the author three novels, the cult classic This Is Memorial Device, which won the Collyer Bristow/London Magazine Award for Debut Fiction 2018 and was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize, For The Good Times, which won the Gordon Burn Prize in 2019, and Xstabeth. He is also the author of England's Hidden Reverse, a history of the UK's post-punk/Industrial underground, as well as To Run Wild In It, an experimental novella, and the co-designer, alongside Sophy Hollington, of his own tarot pack, the Autonomic Tarot.

Mike Barnes is the author of 'Captain Beefheart - The Biography (Omnibus Press, 2011), was a regular contributor to Select magazine and his work regularly appears in Mojo and Wire.

He also plays the drums!

Peter Shapiro writes for The Wire and lives in New York. 

Simon Reynolds is the author of Energy Flash: A Journey through Rave Music and Dance Culture, Blissed Out: The Raptures of Rock, The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellions and Rock and Roll (co-written with Joy Press), Rip it Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978 - 1984, Bring the Noise: Twenty Years of Hip Hop and Hip Rock, Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to its Own Past, and most recently, Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and its Legacy from the Seventies to the Twenty-first Century.