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When Richard began writing for The Village Voice in the 1960s there was no such thing as a rock critic. Richard explains how the principles of ‘New Journalism’ informed his writing, and considers the value of an instinctive reaction to new albums. ÌýHis memoir, ‘Another Little Piece of My Heart’ is published by Bloomsbury.

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Bob Stanley is both a music writer and a musician – he formed the band Saint Etienne in 1990. He explains how his history of pop ‘Yeah Yeah Yeah’ (Faber) is the book he’s been writing all his life, and how he met the challenge of writing about a band as iconic as The Beatles in just twelve pages.

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Music journalist Jude Rogers helps us interrogate the value of the ‘star rating system’ – whereby a review section will accord a different number of a stars to new albums so that they can be compared with each other. Not only do we ask Jude to critique this system, we also make her rate her own music reviews – one star for bad, five for good. Jude writes for The Guardian and The New Statesman and teaches arts journalism at London Metropolitan University.

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Dale Shaw is the author of a collection of parody letters, ‘Letters of Not’ (The Friday Project). To celebrate Radio 3’s ‘In The Shadow of Kafka’ season we’ve asked Dale to turn Kafka into a music reviewer. Dale lets us into the difficulties of parodying from translations, explaining that there are so many versions of Kafka that even the first line of Metamorphosis differs widely across texts.

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Sasha is a composer and song-writer who has also studied poetry under Anne Carson and Jorie Graham. Sasha’s experience of music and poetry gives her a unique take on the techniques we use to describe sound, and the reverence shown by poets towards musical structure and form. Sasha’s debut album is ‘Most of the Boys’ (Blue Plum).

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