Biography

Philip Dodd was born in Ipswich and brought up in Suffolk and Buckinghamshire. After reading French and Spanish at Jesus College, Oxford, he became an editor and then publisher for the Longman Group before joining the Octopus Group and later Virgin – at both companies he was at the forefront of bringing rock’n’roll books into mainstream publishing.

Philip set up his own publishing consultancy in 1997; his clients have included McLaren Cars, the Goodwood Estate, the Rolling Stones, Genesis and Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason, as well as Virgin, Orion and Macmillan.

His first authorial byline appeared as part of the team compiling The A-Z Of Street Cred (a Corgi paperback) in 1987. Later books included a guide to Musical Instruments for the Collins Gem series, and two brief lives of David Seaman and Robbie Fowler for HarperCollins in 1997. When Sky News rang him following England’s exit from the 2002 World Cup and asked him to appear as ‘David Seaman’s biographer’, he politely declined, not wishing to tell them that he had been asked to research the books in two days and write them in three…

For Pavilion Philip wrote The Book Of Rock in 2001, which he followed up with The Book Of Cities, written with Ben Donald (an idea they dreamt up over a post-tennis pint), published in 2004 and released in a cute small format in August 2006.

Philip’s most recent book, The Reverend Guppy’s Aquarium, a quirky journey to discover the stories behind the people whose names became immortalised as objects, from Roy Jacuzzi to Mercédès Jellinek, was published by Random House Books in the UK in September 2007, with Gotham Books, part of Penguin USA, publishing the US edition in January 2008.

As an editor and amanuensis, Philip has worked with the Rolling Stones on 2003’s According To The Rolling Stones, Nick Mason, whose Inside Out: A Personal History Of Pink Floyd came out in 2004, and Genesis on their autobiography, Genesis: Chapter & Verse (September 2007).

Philip Dodd is a member of the Society of Authors and the Royal Society of Literature, and a founder member of the Groucho Club. He lives in St John’s Wood, London and Rochester, Kent with his wife and two daughters.