PETER DOGGETT has spent decades chronicling and examining music, popular culture and modern social history. Much of his best-known work focuses on the tumultuous events and cultures of the 1960s and 1970s, which has inspired him to question the ways in which this halcyon era has been portrayed and remembered.
​
His many books include detailed and revelatory studies of major rock artists and their struggle to survive fame and shifting currents of history. You Never Give Me Your Money (2009) charts the break-up and strange afterlife of the Beatles. The Man Who Sold the World (2011) explores how David Bowie's best work reflected the turmoil of the 19070s. CSNY (2019) recounted the tangled story of the supergroup who personified the spirit of the counterculture. Most recently, Surf's Up (2025) explored the sad but still magnificent legacy of Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys.
​
Peter's groundbreaking history of rock's collision with radical politics, There's a Riot Going On (2007), led him to investigate revolutionary rhetoric, black power and the birth of the feminist and gay liberation movements of the 1960s. His pioneering history of popular music, Electric Shock (2015), highlighted 125 years of musical revolution, from ragtime to grime, against an ever-changing technological landscape.
​
Growing Up: Sex in the 1960s (2021) employed a forensic eye for detail and a lifelong feminist sympathy to expose the ways in which sexual liberation led not only to social progress but also, all too often, to exploitation of women, teenagers and children.
​
At the heart of these books is Peter's fascination with the glorious idealism of 1960s counterculture, its inevitable decline and the long-term legacy of its tarnished dreams.
​
Peter has been writing professionally since 1980. After more than two decades as a magazine journalist and editor, interviewing hundreds of musicians, writers and other public figures, he has worked for the past twenty-five years as a full-time author.
​
His other publications include Growing Up in Public (1991), a critical biography of Lou Reed; Are You Ready For the Country (2000), the history of rock's turbulent encounters with country music, from Hank Williams to the Americana movement; and The Art and Music of John Lennon (2007), a chronological catalogue and critique of the late Beatle's lifetime of creative work. His work outside music and modern history includes fiction, memoir and even the libretto for a musical performed by pre-teen schoolchildren.
​
Peter has taken part in many TV documentaries about rock, pop and cultural history, and has been a regular contributor to radio stations around the world. His discussion of grime with John Humphrys on The Today Programme was only one of the highlights of a broadcasting career that has led him to appear on all the BBC's main networks, from 6 Music to Radio 4.
​
He has been a guest on a wide variety of podcasts about music and modern
history. With established podcast favourite Steven Cockcroft, he now hosts
IT ALL COMES BACK, the podcast about music and music
culture that just won't go away.
​
Before his writing career began, Peter studied Literature and Philosophy
at the University of Kent at Canterbury, specialising in 19th and 20th
century fiction and Marxist theory and aesthetics. In the 2010 UK
General Election, Peter was an official Green Party candidate. He has also trained as a humanistic counsellor.
​
He lives in London with the feminist artist and filmmaker, Rachel Baylis, and is a proud father and grandfather.
​
​​
