David Stubbs

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David Stubbs is a British journalist. He was born on September 13, 1962 in London, but grew up in Barwick-in-Elmet, West Yorkshire, and was educated in part at St Michael's College, Leeds. It was here that he first began to demonstrate his caustic style of music review, in particular a review of Gary Numan's album, Telekon, where he described the opening as "16 consecutive synthesised farts".

As a student at Oxford University he was a close friend of Simon Reynolds; together they worked on an influential fanzine called Monitor before joining Melody Maker in 1986. Stubbs would remain at Melody Maker for 12 years, where he combined his serious writing career with writing the humorous "Talk Talk Talk" section, which featured the character of "Mr Agreeable" who would insult virtually everything with barrages of swear words (asterisked out to fit within IPC Media regulations)

Certain artists and bands were repeatedly parodied in "Talk Talk Talk", especially Morrissey (portrayed as an ultra-conservative stereotypical old-fashioned Northerner, obsessed with boarding houses in wet, down-at-heel seaside resorts and deeply suspicious of the rest of the world and of post-1945 immigrants into Britain), David Gedge of The Wedding Present (portrayed as a deeply boring "trainspotter" stereotype), Henry Rollins (portrayed as the opposite of his tough image), Axl Rose (portrayed as a stereotypically stupid American rocker) and Dumpy's Rusty Nuts (portrayed as the most pathetic band imaginable, jumping unconvincingly on every bandwagon going). The section also featured recurring comic characters created by Stubbs himself, such as Derek Kent (an elderly music journalist and pervert, name based on Nick Kent) and Pepe Le Punk (a stereotypically clueless Belgian rock writer).

Stubbs has also written, more seriously, for the now-defunct Vox magazine, for the NME (late 1990s and early 2000s), and for The Wire, Uncut, The Guardian, The Times and the football magazines Goal and When Saturday Comes. He has also contributed to many of the themed special editions of Uncut. He is the author of books on Jimi Hendrix and Eminem in the Stories Behind Every Song series; a quote from the Hendrix book found its way into Private Eye's Pseuds' Corner. As an Arsenal supporter, he also wrote a book on Charlie Nicholas.

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