JOHNNY ROGAN - In Remembrance

Yesterday, at St Declan's cemetery in Tramore on the southeast coast of Ireland, I stood in quiet contemplation by the grave of my great friend Johnny Rogan, the music writer who was my role model for almost 40 years.

        Tramore, a pleasant seaside town with a population 11,000, lies 12 kilometres west of Waterford from where Johnny's parents emigrated to London in the 1940s. Johnny owned a small house on a steep hill in the old part of the town, now unoccupied, in which he liked to write, and a few minutes drive away is the home of his former partner Jackie who tends his grave weekly, trimming the grass that grows around the headstone that bears his name. At its base is a line from a poem by Edmund Spencer, whose Faerie Queene was the subject of Johnny's MA dissertation: "Where, whenas death shall all the world subdue, Our love shall live, and later life renew." It was chosen by Jackie's uncle Sean who gave the eulogy at Johnny's funeral at the Holy Cross RC Church in Tramore shortly after his death in February of 2021. 

        From beginning to end ours was a master-pupil relationship. Johnny was a literary scholar, university trained, with degrees in English. I left school at 17 with five O-levels and, apart from a two-year course in the tradecraft of journalism at Bradford Tech, picked up all I knew on the job. I had much to learn and in Johnny found the perfect teacher, schooled not only in the art of literacy but in how to adapt this skill to writing and editing books about our shared love, rock'n'roll music. In view of how our futures would pan out, it was the ideal match.  

        We met for the first time in Paddington, December 1982, at a Christmas party thrown by Proteus, a publisher for whom we had both written books, Johnny on Neil Young, me on Pete Townshend. It was held in a nondescript church hall just off Praed Street, close to Proteus' offices, and though I cannot remember who introduced us, I can recall quite clearly that after the introduction we didn't much talk to anyone else at the party, and that when it looked like the free booze was running out we headed to the nearest pub together and carried on talking until closing time. It's quite likely I was a bit sloshed when I headed for home that night, thus establishing from the very start a pattern that would become a key aspect of our friendship.

        Proteus Books went bust a couple of years later and Johnny and I sat next to one another at a creditors' meeting in a hotel on The Aldwych. Both of us were owed money by the company and we took pleasure in watching its managing director, on a podium at the front, squirm as a bankruptcy accountant read out a damning indictment of mismanagement. We were highly amused when the Irish photographer Finn Costello, another creditor, stood up and swore loudly at that MD, calling him a "fucking cunt", as I recall. Many in the room, us amongst them, cheered loudly when Finn upped and left the gathering, his parting words, "I have to leave now. There's a nasty smell in this room and its coming from the podium." Johnny and I liked that kind of thing. 

        Soon after this I became the editor at Omnibus Press and acquired the rights to the first of three books by Johnny that Omnibus would publish. Johnny's title was Wham: The Death of a Supergroup but with his approval we opted to retitle it Wham Confidential which we felt had more immediacy. It was, of course, the story of the duo formed by George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley, perhaps not the most obvious subject for an author of Johnny's background, but this was no hagiography aimed at the teenage girls who screamed at George and Andrew, more an investigation into the music industry levers that were pulled to make Wham what they were and the strains that tore them apart. It was only 160 pages, quite short by the standards that Johnny would set in the future, but it was the first indication to me that in him I had found an author of unusual precision who wrote about music and musicians with great clarity and insight. I'd already formed a high opinion of Johnny's skills when I read his Proteus Neil Young book and now, running Omnibus, I was in a position to take full advantage of them.

        Johnny delivered the manuscript for his Wham book in the manner of students submitting a thesis: several sheets of A4 paper typed in double spacing and bound together in a folder with the title and author's name in bold lettering on the front. Although in the 1990s computers would preclude the need for typed manuscripts from which books would be typeset, in 33 years at Omnibus, during which I commissioned and/or edited over 800 rock books, no other author ever delivered his work in such a professional way. 

        The Wham book sold respectably but wasn't what I could call a commercial success. I suppose we should have realised that Wham fans were unlikely to want to read a serious book about them, and those readers who liked serious music books weren't interested in Wham. It slipped between two stools but the lesson we learned, however, was put to good use in Johnny's next book, Morrissey & Marr: The Severed Alliance, which soon became the best-selling book that Omnibus had ever published. It was controversial too, vexing Morrissey who described it as “all lies” and famously commented: “I hope Johnny Rogan ends his days very soon in an M3 pile-up or a hotel fire,” a quote we gleefully included on the cover of future editions. 

        Johnny delivered his manuscript for The Severed Alliance in the same manner as he'd delivered the Wham book, but he was a few weeks late. When it became clear to him that he wouldn't deliver on time he asked for a meeting with me and our sales director Frank Warren. At that meeting he offered to return the advance, producing from his pocket a signed cheque made out to Music Sales, Omnibus' parent company, for the amount. Frank tore it up. I was astonished. In all those 33 years I helmed Omnibus' editorial department, no other author ever volunteered to return their advance when they were late delivering, as almost all invariably were. This cemented my admiration for Johnny. Not only was he immensely skilled in his chosen field, he was an honourable chap too. 

        It's no exaggeration to say that the success of The Severed Alliance changed the editorial agenda at Omnibus. Before its arrival we had concentrated largely on large format illustrated books with less concern paid to the text but from now on we would gradually publish more and more text-led titles and fewer books dominated by photography. (The only book Omnibus ever published on my watch whose sales matched Johnny's Smiths book was Dear Boy: The Life of Keith Moon by Tony Fletcher, another author who became, and still is, a close friend. Johnny indexed Tony's book and, as it happened, Tony would write a Smiths book himself, A Light That Never Goes Out. Far from being displeased by the competition, at a lunch I organised for the three of us, Johnny offered to help Tony in any way he could.)

        By this time Johnny and I had become drinking buddies, working hard - we indexed several books together, he and I devised an Omnibus style guide and I often consulted him on editorial issues - and playing hard. We usually caroused around Soho and though most of these pub crawls are lost to memory, I can vividly recall the evening I introduced him to the US music writer Timothy White, another friend of mine now also sadly passed. The three of us wound up in a nightclub owned by David Arden, son of Don, brother of Sharon, whom Johnny had befriended as a result of his investigations into rock band management. The waitresses - I think they were referred to as hostesses in this establishment - were very beautiful and unusually friendly towards us but we were all far too drunk - David kept bringing us free bottles of champagne - to take advantage of the situation.

        Omnibus Press was a big fish in a small pond as far as rock books were concerned, but a small fish in a big pond when it came to publishing at large. As Johnny's reputation grew following the success of his Smiths book, it was inevitable that he would seek out mainstream publishers that could pay far bigger advances than Omnibus could offer. We only did one more book together, on Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, but whenever I went on holiday Johnny deputised for me, enjoying a spell at my desk, and he invariably attended our quarterly editorial meetings at which decisions were made on which books to publish and which to pass on. He became my staunchest ally.

        When Johnny launched his own publishing company, Rogan House, it was to Omnibus Press and its parent company Music Sales that he turned for marketing, warehousing and distribution, or fulfilment as it is known in the trade. This strengthened our ties and friendship even more. Along the way I had, of course, became aware of Johnny's reputation as a rather mysterious, even remote, figure in the world of rock books, a trait he encouraged as his renown grew. In truth, he was amongst the most sociable men I ever knew and I came to suspect that this was a mischievous ploy on his part, a way of ensuring his privacy while at the same time creating an enigmatic persona that suited his way of life.

        Details of all the many other books that Johnny wrote can be found in the more formal obituary I wrote for the Guardian newspaper, a longer version of which appears on this blog here: https://justbackdated.blogspot.com/2021/02/johnny-rogan-1953-2021.html

        Johnny's unexpected and sudden death from a brain haemorrhage came as a great shock to me, as it did to all who knew him, and because it occurred during the Covid travel ban I was unable to attend the funeral in Tramore. I watched the service on my computer by means of a video link up and vowed that when the time was right I'd come to Tramore myself to pay my respects at Johnny's last resting place, as I did yesterday.

        I grew misty eyed as I stood before Johnny's gravestone and felt the need to turn away to face the wind that blew towards me from the sea. I recalled the good times. Then I dried my eyes and my wife Lisa took the photo that appears above. I will miss him always. 

DYLAN, VAN MORRISON & JOHNNY ROGAN: THE LAST EMAIL FROM MY OLD FRIEND

Two days before my friend Johnny Rogan passed on January 21 this year I received an email from him drawing my attention to an article by Niall Brennan in Untold Dylan, a scholarly Bob Dylan fanzine, published in July 2020. In it the author posits the theory that Dylan’s song ‘Goodbye Jimmy Reed’ from Rough And Rowdy Ways was inspired by a passage in No Surrender, Johnny’s Van Morrison biography. 

        In his email to me Johnny wrote: “I’ve just been sent some scholarly articles, one in the Dylan academic zine Isis, and another below. Both make mention of the theory that Dylan’s song ‘Goodbye Jimmy Reed’ on his last album Rough And Rowdy Ways was inspired by my Morrison book No Surrender. Read on. What do you reckon? Anything that connects me with Dylan is just all right by me...”

        “That’s fantastic,” I responded. “Good on you. Hope to get together soon when the Covid restrictions are relaxed.” 

        I never heard back from Johnny. 

In his piece Brennan writes about the song ‘Goodbye Jimmy Reed’, offering a brief biog of Reed before analysing the song and, finally, drawing attention to the passages in Johnny’s Van Morrison book that bear a remarkable resemblance to some of its lines. Below is the relevant passage. 

July 13, 2020

‘GOODBYE JIMMY REED’, HELLO VAN MORRISON

One of [the] new songs is of a quite different nature to Jimmy Reed’s city blues. ‘Key West’, the stately, paced, gorgeous meditation on time, nature, and happiness that closes the first record contains a multitude of beautiful lines and imagery. One in particular struck this listener on first hearing.

I’m searching for love and inspiration

On that pirate radio station

Coming out of Luxembourg and Budapest

        Aside from the fact that Radio Luxembourg was not a pirate radio station, both it and Radio Budapest feature in Dylan’s fellow music expeditionary Van Morrison’s song ‘In the Days Before Rock and Roll’ from his 1990 album Enlightenment. In these lines, narrated rather than sung by Irish poet Paul Durcan, the speaker is on his knees,

At those wireless knobs

Telefunken, Telefunken

And I’m searching for

Luxembourg, Luxembourg 

Athlone, Budapest, AFN

        When Durcan finds the station he and Van need, the song proceeds in a most Morrisonesque manner deep into Proustian reverie, namechecking such heroes as Fats Domino, John Lee Hooker, Elvis Presley, Muddy Waters, Little Richard, Ray Charles and so forth, in a remarkably similar cathartic fashion to Dylan’s invocation of his cultural heroes, via the legendary DJ Wolfman Jack, that closes the majestic ‘Murder Most Foul’ on the second disc of his new album.

        Thus we find Dylan and Morrison, two old soldiers, raised on the old records, paying homage with the help of old radio stations and late DJs to the crackling sounds that first alerted them to the world outside their northern homes. Touching that dial, turning that wireless knob just a little brings us back to those Dylanesque incongruities the listener might skip over on first hearing in his Jimmy Reed homage. But as with much of Dylan’s work, with a little diligence, secrets can be uncovered.

        Considering the first verse of ‘Goodbye Jimmy Reed’, the very Northern Irish derogatory word for Protestant, ‘Proddy’, made this listener think of Belfast soul man Morrison again. This lead to a search through Johnny Rogan’s magnificent 2005 biography Van Morrison: No Surrender, and aside from an entire chapter entitled ‘Are You A Proddy?’, uncovered several further references, some oblique, some quite precise in the lyrics of Dylan’s ‘Jimmy Reed’ song. An initial study revealed the following (page numbers are noted in parentheses). 

        ‘I live on a street named after a Saint’, Dylan begins. Rogan quotes Morrison directly in this childhood memory: "Catholics all went to schools named after saints and Protestants went to schools named after streets" (40). Further down the same page Rogan describes the volatility that existed between young Catholics and Protestants in the Belfast of Morrison’s youth, and the various ways respective faiths could be identified from afar. In the same way 20th century blues musician Reed could never fully escape the societal divide brought about by a century of American history, the struggling musicians of Belfast similarly had to walk a careful line, keeping their distance in a very literal societal divide. ‘I can tell a Proddy from a mile away’, Dylan continues, as later on the same page of his biography Rogan quotes a childhood friend of Morrison’s: ‘you could tell by looking at somebody if they were a Protestant’ (4). The contents page of Rogan’s book tells us of a later chapter’s title: ‘Are you a Proddy?’, referring to an incident years later when comedian Spike Milligan would query the more elderly Morrison on the nature of his tribe. But is this sufficient evidence that Bob Dylan might have shoehorned the word ‘Proddy’ into a tribute to one bluesman as a wink to a second? 

        Reading and listening further, the second verse begins: ‘For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory’, Dylan intoning some of the Lord’s Prayer, and on the same page of his biography, Rogan writes: ‘Protestants add[ed] an extra line “for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory”, omitted from the Roman Catholic version’ (40). Dylan’s verse continues: ‘tell it in that straightforward puritanical tone’ as Rogan refers to Morrison’s ‘puritanical upbringings’ (43). Little is known of Reed’s youth, and the effects, if any, that faith had upon his life and work, but even a casual listener recognises the immense importance of religious belief and writings in both Morrison’s and Dylan’s work.

        In the next verse, Dylan’s accounting of the young Reed’s first attempts at playing to an audience is remarkably similar to Rogan’s account of Morrison’s early band, the Monarchs. ‘You won’t amount to much the people all said, because I didn’t play guitar behind my head’, Dylan sings of Reed, while Rogan tells how ‘the Monarchs enlivened their stage act ...playing guitars behind their heads’ (42). And again, Dylan: ‘never took off my shoes and threw them into the crowd’ and Rogan: ‘the famous Morrison trick of taking his shoes off on stage’ (44). 

        For those who know Belfast, the world-renowned Crown Saloon has been a favourite watering-hole for generations, but given the more complete cliche used by Dylan in ‘I’ll put a jewel in your crown’, reading the opening few pages of Rogan’s book we find, in referring to the boyhood Morrison’s educational opportunities, his area ‘included a number of inner city schools in the scheme with Orangefield [Morrison’s school] regarded as the jewel in the crown’ (25).

        So,did Dylan have Rogan’s book to hand when composing this song for the late Jimmy Reed? Has he at the same time crafted a tribute to his friend and fellow Reed fan, Van Morrison? We could suppose further. Perhaps Reed’s butcher’s hook is not only a reference to his time at the Chicago meat plant, but also a darker reminder of the so-called Shankhill Butchers, a Protestant gang who spent their nights getting high and kidnapping Catholics to torture and kill. Killing floor indeed. 

        But there is one further moment, from late in Rogan’s book, and later in Morrison’s life. He has found love with former model Michelle Rocca, and in the throes of love, Morrison has written and recorded one of his lesser works. The song is called ‘Perfect Fit’, which in Rogan’s opinion is ‘a transparent paean to [Morrison’s girlfriend] Rocca’ (434). Morrison’s love song contains the line ‘see that dress you’re wearing baby suits you right down to the ground’. Dylan’s song, of a different hue, goes: ‘transparent woman in a transparent dress, it suits you well I must confess’. Let the listener and the reader judge for themselves what Dylan might be referring to here.

        Dylan’s song concludes with him meeting a friend, a brother, seeking out the resting place of their mutual ancestor: ‘God be with you, brother, dear’, Dylan invokes once more, and one can’t help but recall the 1989 BBC Arena documentary that brought both of these singers together on the Hill of the Muses in Athens, to sing each other’s songs for a while in the setting sun.

        One hopes that Jimmy Reed might have approved, from down in his metaphorical Virginia.

JOHNNY ROGAN (1953-2021)

Johnny Rogan in 2011. 

(Photo by Alan Betson for The Irish Times)

My good friend Johnny Rogan, who died unexpectedly in January aged 67, was among the most prolific and acclaimed music biographers of his generation. Much admired for his attention to detail and tenacity in pursuing the truth, his work did not always sit well with his subjects and for this reason he cultivated a rather mischievous air of mystery about his activities and whereabouts. Once his confidence had been gained, however, he was the most genial of companions, witty and wise, generous with advice, the perfect drinking buddy, his preferred tipple a full-bodied red wine. 

The first edition to Johnny's Byrds book

        Two of the 26 books he authored deserve special praise. His definitive biography of The Byrds ran to four updated, fully revised editions. First published in 1981 as Timeless Flight and finally in 2011 as Requiem For The Timeless, it matured by stages into a 1,200-page epic. A second volume, in 2017 his last published book, added a further 1,248 pages to the work and told the stories of the six former Byrds who had passed away. Q magazine described it as, “The best biography of a group ever written”, while Record Collector magazine compared its scope to Tolstoy’s War And Peace. Mojo added: “Rogan displays a grasp of material and depth of research that’d be staggering were it not for the advance warning of an already considerable reputation.”

The final edition.

        Until the arrival of Mark Lewisohn’s Tune In, the first in his anticipated multi-volume history of The Beatles, no writer had written more expansively about any popular music group than Johnny did on The Byrds. 

        Shorter but equally well regarded, not to mention deeply controversial, was Morrissey & Marr: The Severed Alliance (1992), the first substantial book about The Smiths, which became a best-seller, at least by rock book standards, for its publisher Omnibus Press. It famously earned the displeasure of Morrissey who described it as “all lies” and commented: “I hope Johnny Rogan ends his days very soon in an M3 pile-up or a hotel fire,” a quote the publishers gleefully included on the cover of future editions. 

The most recent edition of The Severed Alliance, published in 2011.

        Johnny had the last laugh, however, when Morrissey himself quoted from the book during the court case brought by Mike Joyce, the group’s drummer, in a successful bid to increase his share of The Smiths’ earnings. Johnny was present at the hearing – he attended every music-related court trial he could – and was much amused when the judge described Morrissey as “devious, truculent and unreliable”. A New Statesman review of the most recent revised edition, published in 2011, described it as, “the definitive if daunting account of the most romantically mythic band of those times”.

Christened John Rogan, Johnny endured an austere childhood. His parents emigrated from Co. Waterford, Ireland, in 1943 and he was raised in deprived circumstances in a slum in Pimlico, just north of the River Thames in the Borough of Westminster in central London. The rooms, eventually demolished, had no toilet or electricity. The family of five was then re-housed in a tiny council flat in nearby Vincent Square. His father died young after suffering a heart attack, his brother drowned and his sister died following a brain haemorrhage. The impoverishment of their first accommodation was vividly recalled in his introduction to Requiem For The Timeless: “I dreamed not only of The Beatles and Bob Dylan but of the wonders of electricity,” he wrote. “Our rooms were entirely lit by gaslight, just like you see in Victorian melodramas… heating came from burnt wooden fruit crates taken from the greengrocers and chopped up with a hatchet. Removing ashes from the grate and emptying the urine-filled chamber pot were the first tasks of the day. There was no private toilet or bathroom.” 

        Johnny attended St Vincent’s Roman Catholic Church School and Pimlico School before spending the entire 1970s as a student, firstly at Newcastle University, where he obtained firsts in both English Language and English Literature, and later at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, Canada, where he was awarded an MA for a dissertation on Edmund Spencer’s epic poem The Faerie Queene. Post graduate study at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford – the Bodleian Library became a favourite place to write – followed before he opted to turn his scholarship to his second love after literature: popular music. He later recalled nourishing his love of pop and rock on visits to relations in Ireland whose house, wired for electricity, boasted a radiogram. His love of The Byrds was sparked in 1965 when he first heard their electrified reading of Bob Dylan’s ‘Mr Tambourine Man’. “It was almost as powerful as hearing ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ when I was about four years old – a treasured childhood memory,” he would write. 

        Naturally, Johnny longed for a Byrds album but family finances were tight and to avoid parental ire at squandering hard-earned pocket money on something as superfluous to their daily existence as an LP, he bought record tokens which he mailed to himself with a faked note congratulating him on winning a competition sponsored by Radio Luxembourg. “That’s how I came to purchase the first albums I ever owned,” he wrote. “[The Byrds’] Mr Tambourine Man and Turn! Turn! Turn!”

        Most music biographers of his era served an apprenticeship on the UK’s weekly music papers before turning to books but Johnny Rogan’s by-line was absent from the mainstream music press. His first published writing appeared in Dark Star, an idiosyncratic music fanzine issued sporadically between 1975 and 1980. “He was able to use their credentials, such as they were, to procure his original interviews with [Roger] McGuinn, [Chris] Hillman and most of all [David] Crosby,” recalls his friend and fellow music writer Peter Doggett. “He probably loved Crosby’s music more than anyone else’s, but was rewarded by Crosby consistently bad-mouthing him on Twitter and calling him a liar, because he faithfully reported what Croz had said and done.” 

        Another friend, the writer and editor Colin Larkin confirms this. “Crosby once said to me on the phone, ‘What! You know Rogan, Johnny Rogan?’” he recalls. “He’s a fucking ferret man, a fucking ferret.”

        As well as The Byrds and The Smiths, Johnny wrote books on Neil Young, Roxy Music, Van Morrison, The Kinks, Wham! (which forensically dissected their business affairs), Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, John Lennon and Ray Davies. In almost every case he thoroughly revised, updated and expanded these books some years later, often more than once, so much so that they doubled in size. He also wrote a revealing study of pop management, Starmakers & Svengalis: The History of British Pop Management (1988), which was adapted for a six-week BBC TV series and is now a university set text, and a book on football management, The Football Managers (1989).

        His second Van Morrison biography No Surrender (2006) was included in the Sunday Times Top 10 books of the year, and inspired one Irish reviewer to proclaim: “Van Morrison: No Surrender is the best book about popular culture written about any Irishman living or dead, and it’s certainly the best social history of Belfast in the mid-60s ever written.”

         A review of Johnny's Ray Davies biography A Complicated Life, in The Sunday Times stated: “Masterfully teases out the warring impulses wrestling in [Davies’s] psyche … [Rogan is] adept at relating the social history of the 1950s and 1960s to Davies’s brooding character and lyric obsessions ... He uncovers psychological traumas everywhere and is fascinating on the bitchy rivalries between 1960s pop titans … Such tales make this ... oceanically researched biography go with a swing.”

        Unusually, Johnny believed that being a biographer was a lifetime commitment, which explains why – unlike the vast majority of music biographers – he rewrote and enlarged his books as often as he did. “Most biographers, when they’ve finished, they leave it behind and move on,” he told an interviewer. “I keep boxes of material at home, and they keep getting filled up with stuff.”

        Similarly, Johnny took a hands-on approach to his books, reading and correcting proofs, indexing them and following the process closely through from print to publication. This led to his forming his own publishing imprint, Rogan House, through which some of his work, including the last two editions of Requiem For The Timeless, were published, along with books by other authors, among them his friend Pete Frame’s Restless Generation, the definitive account of the emergence of rock ’n’ roll music in Britain during the 1950s. 

The Restless Generation, published by Rogan House

        Once he became conversant with the legalities and mechanics of book publishing, Johnny eschewed the services of a literary agent and became adept at reading the small print in book contracts. He was a keen advocate and member of the Society of Authors, happy to share his expertise with other, less savvy, authors. Similarly, he was scrupulous about the correct use of the English language, always available to advise on matters of grammar and syntax. 

        Between books Johnny worked occasionally as a freelance editor and indexer, and he contributed to many anthologies, most notably The Encyclopedia of Popular Music, conceived and edited, with Johnny's assistance, by Colin Larkin and published most recently in 2006 as a 10-volume edition by Oxford University Press. He also contributed book reviews to The Irish Times. 

Johnny divided his time between the flat in Pimlico in which he was raised, and eventually bought, and a home he shared with his long-term partner, Jackie Taylor, at Tramore, in Co. Waterford in the Irish Republic. To those who did not know him, he might have appeared as a somewhat remote, very private, perhaps even slightly eccentric figure. Realising that a certain amount of promotion would help sell his books, he was not averse to publicity but nevertheless provided publishers with indistinct pictures of himself for use on the inside flaps of his books. He grew untidy, bushy beards that disguised his features and almost always wore sunglasses. He let it be known – perhaps to amuse, perhaps to confound – that while working on The Severed Alliance he spent a whole year in complete isolation, never once speaking to another person. 

This is the photo of Johnny that appears on the inside rear flat of the most recent edition of his Byrds books. Friends referred to it as the 'Turin Shroud' shot. 

        Some of these traits were concocted from a fear that certain individuals about whom he wrote might seek to do him harm, but there is no recorded instance of him being assaulted by a rock star or their agents. Nevertheless, when he vouchsafed his telephone number to me, as his editor at Omnibus Press, I was under strict instructions never to reveal it to anyone, and in all the 40 years that I knew him I never knew his actual address in Pimlico, let alone visited the flat. He used a PO box for mail in all this time. Phone calls, however, were unlikely to be brief. 

“My most enduring memory of Johnny is of regularly spending several hours at a time on the phone with him,” adds Peter Doggett. “In conversation he would dissect the minutiae of pop history with the zeal of a rabbinical scholar examining the Talmud. Anyone who dared to claim that ‘Please Please Me’ wasn’t the Beatles’ first UK number one was going to get their ear bent.”

Stick thin, prematurely bald and impervious to fashion trends – I never once saw him in blue jeans – Johnny walked almost everywhere in well-worn Doc Martin shoes, from Pimlico to the West End and back for meetings with publishers, from one end of London to the other. Only in the severest weather would he take a bus. Although the success of his books enriched him beyond the imagination of his parents, he was frugal by nature, a legacy of his disadvantaged upbringing, and he abhorred waste, always using both sides and every square inch of A4 paper on which to write, most often in neat, legible longhand. He always maintained a discreet distance from the established music industry but his adult life was devoted almost entirely to chronicling conclusively the lives and creativity of those without whom it would not exist. 

        The more I got to know Johnny the more I sensed something in his character, his methods, even his bearing, that brought to mind the popular notion of Sherlock Holmes: that fastidious attention to small details; that cool, sharp, analytical mind; that resolute determination to resolve an issue with absolute precision. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he’d produced from his coat pocket a magnifying glass to inspect the sleeve of a rare LP record before pronouncing it a fake, or turned up for one of our many pub crawls in an Inverness cape and deerstalker hat.

        Of course, Johnny would have taken me to task for writing that last sentence, for straying from the facts, for indulging my imagination, so I will conclude with a self-evident truth. As far as I am aware, Johnny Rogan did not accept promotional records from record companies or review tickets to concerts. This, he believed, was the only way to pursue his calling with his integrity intact. In this respect, this great friend of mine whom I admired so much and now grieve so deeply, was unique in the province we shared, this field he ploughed with such immense distinction.

        Johnny suffered a brain haemorrhage. Jackie survives him. 

John Rogan, music writer, editor and biographer; born February 14, 1953; died January 21, 2021.

(An edited version of this obituary first appeared in The Guardian on 26 February, 2021.)