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]
In his earlier career Sinker was a strong supporter of African music (which he frequently wrote about in the NME, also writing a column in The Wire called "The Sound of Africa" from 1986-90), while criticising what he saw as a sentimentalised treatment of it in the West.
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)
