I became Emeritus Professor of Music in 2017 on retiring from the Tovey Chair of Music, which I had held since 2006 following quite an unusual academic career. My undergraduate degree (from Oxford) was in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. My Masters and PhD (from the University of California, Berkeley) were in Sociology. (My thesis topic was Education and the Working Class in Leeds, 1780-1870.)  I initially taught in the Sociology Department at the University of Warwick, before moving to Strathclyde University to become Director of the John Logie Baird Centre for Research in Film and Television and Professor of English Studies. In 1999 I moved to the University of Stirling and a chair in Film and Media.

For much of my career, as both an academic and journalist, I was engaged with the problems of taking popular music seriously. As an academic I was a founder member of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music and a founding editor of the journal, Popular Music, and the majority of my scholarly publications have been in this field. As I journalist I started out as an editor of the pioneering British rock magazine, Let It Rock, and became rock critic for both the Sunday Times and the Observer. I was a music columnist for the New York Village Voice from 1980-1995, and chaired the judges of the Mercury Music prize from 1992 (when it was founded) until 2016.  I was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2011 and awarded an OBE for services to higher education and popular music in 2017.