Dr Simon Morrison
Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader for Music Journalism
Biography
Simon is a media professional and academic, with 25 years experience as writer, broadcaster and academic. From writing books and travel journalism to screenplays for the BBC; presenting TV and radio to researching his PhD and establishing the Music Journalism degree at Chester, Simon is passionate about creating engaging stories and content, and about passing on that experience and knowledge to the next generation. As a music journalist, he reported on music scenes everywhere from Beijing to Brazil; from Moscow to Marrakech for his column in DJ magazine, ‘Dispatches from the Wrong Side’. The best of these were published in the UK and USA by Headpress in 2010, in his collection 'Discombobulated: Dispatches from the Wrong Side'. He also lived in Ibiza, where he edited the magazine 'Ministry in Ibiza' for music/media company of Ministry of Sound. As a freelance Simon wrote for everyone from The Observer to Red and Marie Claire magazines. He turned a story he wrote for The Guardian into a screenplay, which was sold to the production company Baby Cow and then on to the BBC. In terms of media, he has presented TV for the likes of Rapture TV, hosted radio shows in Ibiza, produced and presented for Kiss Radio and appeared on the couch of BBC Breakfast and regularly for BBC 5 Live. Alongside this work, for many years he also ran a PR agency - Pad Communications - which he founded and operated from central Manchester. He has been involved with the music literary festival Louder Than Words for over a decade, at one time running the PR for the festival, and programming panels on subjects such as the club scene and music journalism. He has been able to involve students from the University of Chester in that festival, as both attendees, and even panellists, which has provided great experience for those students.
Teaching and Supervision
Simon was first employed as External Advisor in establishing the Music Journalism degree, and then as its Programme Leader. He helped design, build and deliver the course from its first cohort in 2014. Simon continues to teach across the Journalism programmes, and lead on the Music Journalism provision. Previously, Simon worked as Associate Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University and Visiting Lecturer at Leeds University. Guest lecturers included: Staffordshire University, Manchester University (Careers Service), Salford University, EF Foreign Language School. Audiences have ranged from primary school children to Masters students. Also delivered “masterclasses” on public relations and journalism for the Manchester City Music Network and was a regular panellist at Chester University’s Inside Creative Industries event. He currently teaches across both all three year of undergraduate, and also post-graduate. At undergraduate level, his current modules include: Introduction to Journalism; Live Journalism; Dancing Abut Architecture: Popular Music Media, Histories and Technologies; The Cultural Politics of Music Journalism; The Politics of Social Media; Magazine Publishing and Music PR and Promotional Writing. He also supervises both dissertation and Negotiated Study production projects, At post-graduate level he has supervised an MRes project to completion and examined PhDs to successful outcomes, one internal and two external, including one Australian PhD by Artefact & Exegesis. He has worked to validate degree courses at both Chester and external institutions, including the University of Derby. In terms of working as an External Examiner, he served in that capacity for Music Journalism at Southampton Solent University from 2016-2019; for Music Journalism at BIMM London, Birmingham and Manchester, from 2016-19, extended to 2020.
Research and Knowledge Exchange
Simon A. Morrison is a writer, academic, and Programme Leader for Music Journalism degree at the University of Chester. Following a career as a music journalist, his research interest continues to be the intersection of words and music. That research has involved contributions to books such as DJ Culture in the Mix and Kerouac on Record and journals including Popular Music. He has also published Dancefloor-Driven Literature: The Rave Scene in Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2020); co-edited the Routledge Handbook to Pink Floyd (Routledge, 2022) and 2025 will see the publication by Reaktion of his co-authored Transatlantic Drift: The Ebb and Flow of Dance Music, from WWII to the Millennium. He has been cited 37 times, according to Google Scholar. Publishing Academic Books Morrison, S. A. & Hart, C., eds. The Routledge Handbook of Pink Floyd (Routledge, 2022) Morrison, S. A., Dancefloor-Driven Literature: The Rave Scene in Fiction (New York, Bloomsbury, 2020) Morrison, S. A., & Milestone, K. Transatlantic Drift: The Ebb and Flow of Global Dance Cultures (London: Reaktion, forthcoming) Peer Reviewed Journal Articles _____ ‘"Surely people who go clubbing don’t read”: Dispatches From The Dancefloor and Clubland in Print”’ in IASPM Journal, ed. C. Jacke, M. James & Ed Montano, 4.2, 2014 _____ ‘“Clubs aren’t like that” Discos, Deviance and Diegetics in Club Culture Cinema’, Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture 4.2 (2012), 48–66 Book Chapters Morrison, S. A., ‘Tramps Like Them: Jack and Bruce and the Myth of the American Road’, in Simon Warner and Jim Sampas eds., Kerouac on Record: A Literary Soundtrack (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018) _____ ‘DJ-Driven Literature: A Linguistic Remix’, in Bernardo Alexander Attias, Anna Gavanas and Hillegonda C. Rietveld eds., DJ Culture in the Mix: Power, Technology and Social Change in Electronic Dance Music (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). pp. 219-314 He has presented this research at conferences in the UK, Portugal, Holland, Germany and Australia: Psychogeography, Hauntology and Cultural Mediations of Ibiza XX Biennial IASPM Conference, Canberra, Australia, June 2019 The dancefloor on page and screen: Cultural re/presentations of the club scene in literature and film IASPM Bi-Annual International Conference: Kassel, Germany, June 2017 Doctors of Dance ADE conference: Amsterdam, October 2014 The Balearic Beat: How the island of Ibiza became metronome to the global dancefloor IASPM conference: University of Salford, September 2012 Horizontal dancefloors and vertical screens: Club culture in the cinema and the diegesis of the dancefloor Avanca conference: Portugal, July 2012 Disco_mbobulation – (Mis)reading the dancefloor through the medium of cinema SPARC conference: Salford, June 2011 His current research interests still lie principally in the intersection of words and music, specifically focussing on Popular Music; Musico-Literary Intermediality; Electronic Dance Music Culture; Literature and Cultural Studies / Subcultures / Countercultures. He has peer reviewed both book proposals for the likes of Bloomsbury and articles for academic journals such as The Journal of Cultural Sociology.