With his latest book, Growing Up: Sex in the Sixties (The Bodley Head), Peter Doggett takes a quizzical and critical look at the decade that has preoccupied much of his life as a professional writer.
His decades of expertise as a chronicler of culture and politics in the 1960s has increasingly led him to question the ways in which this halcyon era has been portrayed and remembered. His groundbreaking history of rock's collision with radical politics, There's a Riot Going On, led him to investigate the birth of the feminist and gay liberation movements of the 1960s. Subsequently, his history of popular music, Electric Shock, highlighted pop's inescapable links with teenage sexuality, and their ambiguous consequences.
Growing Up employs a forensic eye for detail and a lifelong feminist sympathy to expose the ways in which the sexual liberations of the 1960s led not only to social progress but also, all too often, to exploitation of women, teenagers and children.
The book continues a sequence of books which Peter has published over the past two decades, many of which explore the glorious idealism of 1960s counter-culture, its inevitable decline, and the long-term legacy of its tarnished dreams.
Peter has been writing professionally since 1980. After more than two decades as a magazine journalist and editor, interviewing hundreds of musicians, authors and other public figures, he has worked for the past twenty years as a full-time author.
His major books include:
ARE YOU READY FOR THE COUNTRY (2000)
The history of rock's turbulent encounters with country music, from Hank Williams to the Americana movement
THERE'S A RIOT GOING ON (2007)
The definitive history of rock and radical politics - the late 60s/early 70s era when rock stars posed as revolutionaries, and revolutionaries masqueraded as rock stars.
YOU NEVER GIVE ME YOUR MONEY (2009)
The untold story of the Beatles' break-up, and its forty-year aftermath
THE MAN WHO SOLD THE WORLD (2011)
A detailed study of David Bowie's life and work in the 1970s
ELECTRIC SHOCK (2015)
The complete history of popular music and the world it created, from the birth of recorded sound in the 1890s to the era of Spotify and the iPhone
CSNY (2019)
A biography of rock supergroup Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, whose complex and troubled relationships reflected the triumphs and agonies of the 1960s
Peter has taken part in many TV documentaries about rock, pop and cultural history, and has been a regular contributor to BBC Radio. His discussion of grime with John Humphrys on The Today Programme was only one of the highlights of a broadcasting career which has led him to appear on all of the BBC's main networks, from 6 Music to Radio 3.
Before his writing career began, Peter studied Literature and Philosophy at the University of Kent at Canterbury, specialising in American and European fiction and Marxist theories of aesthetics. In the 2010 UK General Election, Peter stood as an official Green Party candidate. He has also trained as a humanistic counsellor. He lives in Sussex with the feminist artist and film-maker, Rachel Baylis.