Lucy O'Brien

Dr Lucy O'Brien is a writer, academic and broadcaster. Her most recent work, the best-selling Lead Sister: The Story of Karen Carpenter, was a Times and Financial Times Music Book of the Year in 2023. It is published in paperback February 2024. Her critically-acclaimed book Dusty: The Classic Biography is soon available in paperback. First published in 1989, and updated with new material in 2019, this biography includes in-depth interviews with Julie Felix, Ivor Raymonde and Atlantic Records legends Jerry Wexler, Arif Mardin and Tom Dowd. Lucy also co-authored The Liverbirds: Our Story of Life in Britain's First Female Rock n Roll Band (2024), and co-authored Skin: It Takes Blood And Guts, working during lockdown with Skin, the lead singer of rock band Skunk Anansie, on her 2020 memoir. Lucy's groundbreaking book She Bop: The Definitive History of Women in Popular Music is currently in its fourth edition - available as a special Silver Jubilee edition (2020). And she is author of Madonna: Like An Icon (translated into 13 languages), plus biography Annie Lennox. As a music writer she has contributed to Q, Mojo, The Guardian, The Sunday Times and The Quietus, and numerous anthologies such as Mute Records: Artists, Business, History (2018) and Voicing Girlhood in Popular Music: Performance, Authority, Authenticity (2016). She played in all-girl band The Catholic Girls, and is working on a memoir about punk and feminism.