Johnny Rogan – Music biographer Born February 14, 1953; died January 21, 2021 Johnny Rogan, who has died aged 67, was a prodigious and prolific biographer of rock and pop icons, who wrote a plethora of exhaustive tomes on subjects ranging from The Byrds to Van Morrison, Wham! and The Smiths. Rogan’s studies often ran to hundreds of pages, leaving no stone unturned in their forensic and sometimes unflattering portraits of his subjects. While the rabbit holes Rogan jumped down came from his unadulterated passion for music, his extensive portraits of the procession of mavericks that fascinated him were the polar opposite of PR driven cut and paste hagiographies. Nowhere was this more evident than in Morrissey & Marr: The Severed Alliance (1992), Rogan’s unflinching account of the demise of The Smiths. This prompted a slighted Morrissey to declare his disdain for the book in typically melodramatic fashion. “Personally,” he spat, “I hope Johnny Rogan ends his days very soon in an M3
An archive of arts writing by Neil Cooper. Effete No Obstacle.