Geoff Barton (born July 1955) is a British

journalist A journalist is an individual that collects/gathers information in form of text, audio, or pictures, processes them into a news-worthy form, and disseminates it to the public. The act or process mainly done by the journalist is called journalism ...

who founded the heavy metal magazine ''

Kerrang! ''Kerrang!'' is a British weekly magazine devoted to rock, punk and heavy metal music, currently published by Wasted Talent (the same company that owns electronic music publication ''Mixmag''). It was first published on 6 June 1981 as a one- ...

'' and was an editor of ''

Sounds In physics, sound is a vibration that propagates as an acoustic wave, through a transmission medium such as a gas, liquid or solid. In human physiology and psychology, sound is the ''reception'' of such waves and their ''perception'' by the ...

'' music magazine. He joined ''Sounds'' at the age of 19 after completing a journalism course at the

London College of Printing The London College of Communication is a constituent college of the University of the Arts London. It specialises in media-related subjects including advertising, animation, film, graphic design, photography and sound arts. It has approximately ...

. He specialised in covering rock music and helped popularise the

new wave of British heavy metal The new wave of British heavy metal (commonly abbreviated as NWOBHM) was a nationwide musical movement that started in England in the mid-1970s and achieved international attention by the early 1980s. Journalist Geoff Barton coined the term i ...

(NWOBHM) after using the term for the first time (after editor Alan Lewis coined it) in the May 1979 issue of ''Sounds''. In 1981 he edited the first issue of ''Kerrang!'', which was published as a one off. This was successful so it became a fortnightly magazine. He left the magazine in 1995. Barton's articles for ''Sounds'' which covered the NWOBHM helped to create the sense that an actual movement was taking place, and in a sense helped to create one in the process. Barton recalls: "The phrase New Wave of British Heavy Metal was this slightly tongue-in-cheek thing...I didn't really feel that any of these bands were particularly linked in a musical way, but it was interesting that so many of them should then be emerging at more or less the same time."Mick Wall, Run to the Hills: Iron Maiden, the Authorised Biography (London: Sanctuary, 2000), 88. See also Steve Waksman, ''This Ain't the Summer of Love: Conflict and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk'' (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2009), 330, note 7. He currently works for ''

Classic Rock Classic rock is a US radio format which developed from the album-oriented rock (AOR) format in the early 1980s. In the United States, the classic rock format comprises rock music ranging generally from the mid-1960s through the mid 1990s, primar ...

''.

References

British male journalists Living people British magazine editors 1955 births {{UK-journalist-stub