Mark Sinker

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Mark Sinker (born 7 June 1960) is a British writer (educated at Shrewsbury School and New College, Oxford). While working for the New Musical Express (1983-88) and briefly for Melody Maker (1988-89) he also wrote for The Wire from 1985. He then became its editor from 1992-94 and remained a contributor until around 2003. He is a contributing editor at the film magazine Sight and Sound, and has worked on a critical history of music and technology, The Electric Storm, since the mid-1990s. He has also contributed extensively to I Love Music. Recent projects included a book in the BFI Film Classics series, on Lindsay Anderson's 1968 film If..... [1]

While writing for the NME Sinker was a strong supporter of African music, while criticising what he saw as a sentimentalised treatment of it in the West.

[edit] Writings

A selective list of his writings:

1999: Concrete, so as to Self-Destruct: the Etiquette of Punk, its Habits, Rules, Values and Dilemmas, in Punk Rock: So What - The Cultural Legacy of Punk, ed.Roger Sabin, (Routledge)
1997: shhhhhh!, Musical Quarterly Vol.81 No.2, Summer 1997 (on Cage, musique concrete, and how discs and tape alter the ecologies of music creation and ownership established under written music)
1995: Music as Film, in Celluloid Jukebox: Popular Music and the Movies since the 50s, ed. Jonathan Romney and Adrian Wootton, BFI Publishing

Serial Thrills, Arena March/April 1991 (on why serial killers have become a pop-cult phenomenon)
Animal Magic, The Face June 1990 (on gene-splicing and man-made animals)
Fear of a Black Planet, Arena Summer/Autumn 1990 (on Samuel R. Delany, Octavia Butler and the rise of black science fiction)
Lost in Space, Village Voice 31 July 1990 (covering the Sixth Plantery Congress of the Association of Space Explorers in Groningen, Holland)
Enter the Twilight Zone, New Statesman & Society 6 July 1990 (on science fiction and the new comicbook weeklies)
Free Samples, The Wire #77, July 1990 (on the sampling avant-garde)
Nanotechnology: this Year's Chaos, The Sunday Correspondent 3 June 1990
Enemy of the People: New Statesman & Society 23 February 1990 (on Public Enemy)
Sun Ra: the Brother from Another Planet, The Face September 1989
Eco-Terror, The Face December 1989 (on Green guerrilla action)
Schlock on Wood: How Termites Excretians Are the Future of Energy (And Possibly Children's Entertainment), Omni September 1989
The Planet Talks Back, Arena Summer 1989 (on Jim Lovelock's Gaia theory)
Black Rock Coalition, NME 23 April 1988 (on a New York aesthetico-political movement to reclaim rock as a black cultural voice)
Look Back in Anguish, NME 2 January 1988 (images of England in rock'n'roll)
The Boy in the Boycott, NME 4 April 1987 (analysis of the Paul Simon affair: how his LP Graceland broke the South African Cultural Boycott)
Lovebites and Garlic, NME 17 January 1987 (a brief history of the vampire movie)