Phil Hardy
11 April 2014 - NewsPhil Hardy was an English film and music industry journalist, born in Scarborough, Yorkshire in 1945. He studied at the University of Sussex and the University of California, Berkeley, and at Sussex, he founded The Brighton Film Review. He wrote for Time Out, Variety and other publications while acting as a consultant on music business issues for bodies such as the World Bank and the Greater London Enterprise Board. In 1986, he travelled to Eritrea, Ethiopia and Sudan to research, write and film Food, Trucks & Rock 'n' Roll, a documentary about how the money raised by Band Aid was spent in Africa.
In 1992, Phil founded Music & Copyright, a biweekly newsletter published by the Financial Times, offering news and analysis on the international music industry. This publication swiftly acquired a reputation for its thorough, insightful content, and became essential reading in government and cultural circles as well as the front line of the industry. As a result, Phil was increasingly in demand as speaker and moderator at a number of international music business conferences. Later, Music & Copyright was acquired by Informa Media, which continues to publish the title today.
Phil's many books include Samuel Fuller (1970), The Encyclopedia of Horror Movies (1986), The Faber Companion to 20th Century Popular Music (1990), and The British Film Institute Companion to Crime (1997). The three-volume Encyclopedia of Rock (1975), edited by Phil and Dave Laing, remains one of the few such reference works to include the entrepreneurs and record companies behind rock & roll, as well as artists and musicians. Phil was also the chief editor and contributing writer of The Aurum Film Encyclopedia. His Western Encyclopedia won the BFI Book Award in 1984. His most recent book, Download! How Digital Destroyed the Record Industry, was published at the end of 2012.
He died in Norfolk on Tuesday 8th April, 2014. He is survived by a son, Joel, and a daughter, Emily.
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