Geoffrey Cannon

Geoffrey Cannon (born 12 April 1940) is an English author, journalist and former magazine editor, and scholar.

At Oxford in 1960-1961, Cannon was editor and owner, with Stephan Feuchtwang, of Oxford Opinion (OO). Regular contributors included Richard Gott, John Gittings, British historian Timothy Mason, JG Farrell, Ian Hamilton, and Kevin Crossley-Holland.

OO introduced the film commentary allied with Cahiers du Cinéma by Ian Cameron, Mark Shivas, VF Perkins, and others, who later founded Movie magazine.

OO was described in The Times Literary Supplement as "incomparably the best produced of all Oxford magazines".

Along with Tony Palmer of The Observer, a Sunday newspaper, he was one of the leading figures in the emergence of British rock criticism during the late 1960s.

Among these late-1960s projects, he says that the Johnny Cash at San Quentin TV special was his idea, and he "share[s] credit" for the ideas behind the concert films The Doors Are Open and The Stones in the Park.

Cannon's first published writings on popular culture appeared in 1962 in New Society, where he was a founder-member of the editorial staff.

He worked in-house for the magazine, later becoming its design, art, production, and arts editor.

George Melly, who became The Observer's first pop culture commentator in 1965, described the pair as seeking to "establish a critical apparatus" with which to evaluate contemporary popular music.

Helped by his association with The Guardian, Cannon was able to contribute more substantial articles to the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Sun-Times, and to underground magazines such as Creem.

From 1967, he began writing on popular culture for, and redesigned, The Listener, under the editorship of Karl Miller, and in 1968 began writing a weekly column on pop and rock music for The Guardian.

From 1968 to 1972, he was the music critic for The Guardian, a role that made him the first dedicated rock critic at a British daily newspaper.

Having worked as the arts editor for New Society magazine, he became editor of the BBC publication Radio Times from 1969 to 1979.

During that time, he also wrote on music and pop culture for The Listener, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Sun-Times, Creem, Rock et Folk, Melody Maker and Time Out.

In early 1969 Cannon became editor of Radio Times, which had a circulation of 3.8 million.

He wrote the 1970 documentary film London Rock, focusing on the UK's counterculture movement.

He recalls that, together with Rolling Stone journalists David Dalton and Jonathan Cott, he joined Granada Television documentary-makers such as Jo Durden-Smith, John Sheppard and Michael Darlow in devising "prime-time networked shows designed as anthems of the revolution".

He also directed the film of Frank Zappa's performance at the 1970 Palermo Pop Festival, for RAI, Italy's national public broadcaster.

Later in the 1970s, he wrote what he considers some of his "best pieces" for Melody Maker and Time Out, when they were edited by Richard Williams.

Brian Gearing, his successor as editor, wrote: "Cannon arrived, backed by a young and talented staff … the changes he made were the most far-reaching ever to be introduced … At the end of the 1970s, Radio Times … was still Britain’s largest and most successful magazine."

Elkan Allan, then editor of The Sunday Times Guide for Viewers, criticised Radio Times as containing “peripheral and tangential articles, frequently of a trivial nature”.

In July 1971, he was one of four speakers on "Youth and Music" at the inaugural International Music Industry Conference hosted by Billboard magazine.

In his address, he discussed rock music's inspirational role on the lifestyle of contemporary youth and also its ability to provide "the catalyst for styles of death", with regard to the counterculture-related deaths of Sharon Tate in Los Angeles, Meredith Hunter at Altamont, and Weather Underground radical Diana Oughton.

Cannon says he was frustrated by The Guardian's habit of cutting down his submissions and stopped writing for the paper in 1972.

In addition, he cites his lack of interest in contemporary musical trends – a perspective that was reflected in his being awarded "Pseud of the Year" by the satirical magazine Private Eye for two consecutive years.

In 1976, Radio Times and Cannon won Design and Art Direction Gold Awards for editorial design.

Cannon left the magazine in 1979.

Cannon wrote a monthly Fun Runner column for Running magazine from 1979 to 1987.

Since the early 1980s Cannon has worked in public health, mostly food and nutrition policy.

He organised a team, including himself, to run the 1980 New York marathon.

He then created London 1982/50, a group of 50 who trained for and ran the 1982 London marathon.

As a result, four citizen running clubs were formed in different parts of London, including the Serpentine Running Club, which he co-founded.

After his ten-year editorship of Radio Times, Cannon became an assistant editor of The Sunday Times.

He co-authored, with Hetty Einzig, the bestseller Dieting Makes You Fat in 1983, and with Caroline Walker the 1984 bestseller The Food Scandal: What's Wrong with the British Diet and How to Put It Right.

Cannon's other books include The Politics of Food.

He is a former director of science for the World Cancer Research Fund and now lives in Brazil where he is a member of the Centre for Epidemiological Studies in Nutrition and Health (NUPENS), University of São Paulo, Brazil.

Cannon won a scholarship to Christ's Hospital public school in Horsham in the county of Sussex.

He subsequently attended Oxford University as an undergraduate at Balliol College.

He recalls that hearing Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring played loudly on a family friend's state-of-the-art hi-fi, at the age of fourteen, first enlightened him to the power of music.

As further key events, he cites playing "Why Do Fools Fall in Love" in a record-shop listening booth in Horsham, and a year later "when a van came down a street in Essen, Germany, playing the demo of 'Heartbreak Hotel'".