Sylvie Simmons

Sylvie Simmons is a London-born, US-based music journalist, named as a "principal player" in Paul Gorman's book on the history of the rock music press In Their Own Write (Sanctuary Publishing, 2001). A widely regarded writer and rock historian since the late 1970s, she is one of very few women to be included among the predominantly male rock elite. Simmons is the author of a number of books, including biography and cult fiction. She is also a singer-songwriter and ukulele player signed to Light in the Attic Records.

In 1977 Simmons decamped to Los Angeles and became US correspondent for Sounds, one of the three major UK rock music weeklies of the period. She wrote a weekly column, 'Hollywood Highs', and interviewed a wide range of artists, including Rod Stewart, Mick Jagger, Johnny Rotten, Steely Dan, Adam Ant, Black Sabbath, The Clash and Michael Jackson.

During the '80s, when Los Angeles witnessed an upsurge in heavy metal and glam rock, Simmons wrote what are regarded as the definitive features on the movement, being the first journalist to bring then-unknown acts like Guns N' Roses and Mötley Crüe to international attention. (She would go on to co-author the first book on Mötley Crüe with rock writer Malcolm Dome, Lude, Crude And Rude, 1994, out of print).

When Sounds editor Geoff Barton founded UK heavy metal magazine Kerrang!, he asked Simmons to be its L.A correspondent. She did so, under the pseudonym Laura Canyon, while continuing to write under her own name for Sounds (her photograph in Sounds showed her as a brunette, and in Kerrang! as a blonde). At this time she also wrote a weekly music column for the Knight-Ridder newspaper syndicate and a monthly column for the Japanese magazine Music Life, was a co-host of the syndicated US rock radio show London Wavelength, wrote for a number of European publications and was a regular and well-regarded contributor to cult US magazine Creem.

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