Taylor Parkes

Taylor Parkes (born April 30 1972) is a British journalist. He is best known for his music journalism which appeared in Melody Maker from 1993 to 1998, notable for a style which mixed dark humour, especially in bitterly critical pieces, with an intellectual tone, influenced by the likes of Simon Reynolds and Paul Morley. He took a stand against the more unadventurous Britpop groups of the mid-1990s (which motivated his involvement with the short-lived Romo scene), although somewhat surprisingly, he was for a time largely positive towards Oasis, in stark contrast to his cohort Simon Price. Parkes was most closely associated with bands he described as "unafraid of their own intelligence", including Saint Etienne, Pulp and Manic Street Preachers, and was an occasional champion of the avant-garde, writing favourably about Post-rock.

He also contributed to "Ikon", a pop-cultural magazine published briefly in the mid-1990s, and in the 2000s has written for the football magazine "When Saturday Comes", as well as "Careless Talk Costs Lives" and "Plan B", both edited by his former "Melody Maker" colleague Everett True, and the now-defunct music monthly "Bang". His writing has recently featured on "The Quietus", a new music and pop culture website. His own website "Anal Hospital", a collection of blackly comic parodies of magazine journalism, is currently offline. His livejournal, "Taylor Parkes' Alternatives To Suicide", is at http://taylor-parkes.livejournal.com.