Mat Snow

Mat Snow (born 20 October 1958) is an English music journalist, magazine editor, and author. From 1995 to 1999, he was the editor of Mojo magazine; he subsequently served in the same role on the football magazine FourFourTwo.

During the 1980s, Snow wrote regularly for the NME, as a reviewer and feature writer, in addition to contributing to publications such as Sounds and Q. He has twice been recognised as "Editor of the Year" by the British Society of Magazine Editors, winning for Mojo in 1996 and FourFourTwo in 2002. As an author, his books include Nick Cave: Sinner Saint and The Beatles Solo.

Snow began writing gig reviews for the NME in 1982, covering performances at London venues such as the Lyceum, Brixton's Ace Cinema, the Dominion Theatre and Ronnie Scott's. His reviews included pieces on the post-punk bands the Birthday Party, the Go-Betweens, Depeche Mode and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. Snow was an early champion of the American band R.E.M., about whom he wrote in April 1984: "Reckoning and its predecessor, last year's Murmur, confirm R.E.M. as one of the most beautifully exciting groups on the planet."

In 1986, he was the subject of Nick Cave's anti-journalistic "Scum", a song that the NME's website includes in a list of "Music's Mightiest Diss Tracks". Although the pair had become friendly in 1981, Cave had taken exception when Snow referred to his 1985 album as "disappointing". Snow learnt of the Australian singer's displeasure while interviewing him in August 1986, as Cave told him: "I didn't write ['Scum'] about the press; I wrote it about you." Speaking to The Guardian in December 2006, Snow said of "Scum": "It's a brilliant record … Like Dylan's Mr Jones or Pope's Colley Cibber, I'd rather be memorialised as the spotlit object of a genius's scorn than a dusty discographical footnote."

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