Fred Vermorel

Fred Vermorel has dual British/French nationality, (his parents met in wartime London, having enlisted in the Free French Forces). Fred attended Harrow Art College, where, aged 17, he befriended and began a decades long collaboration with Malcolm McLaren, (and introduced McLaren to Vivienne Westwood). Fred then attended the Sorbonne where his studies were interrupted by the events of 1968. He returned to London to study Media and Communication, (University of Westminster), for which he obtained a BA. Subsequently, he was awarded a Masters in Modern History, (University of Sussex).

Fred's first book (1978) looked at the cultural impact of the Sex Pistols and punk, and their links to the European avant-garde. The work has been in print ever since and is translated into many languages. Maurice Achard, Les Nouvelles Litteraires: “Absolutely astonishing… a real work of history… This book shows how much we live in a present continually overtaken by events. A shattered present… The Sex Pistols as expressed in this book illuminate the last quarter of our century.”

A series of experimental music biographies followed. These were dubbed by the rock sociologist Simon Frith, “antibiographies”. These books play with boundaries and biographical conventions associated with celebrity culture. At the same time, Fred worked in music journalism, marketing and audio production, (Warner-Chappell, EMI, Factory Records).

Starlust, (1986, 2011), was a documentary account of the fantasies and lifestyles of popular music fans. The book is today recognised as foundational to fan studies.

In 1990, Fred began teaching at the Royal College of Art, London. In 2000, he took early retirement to devote himself to writing. He published several more books and collaborated on television documentaries and film scripts. He was awarded a Ph.D. by publication from Kingston University in 2011.

His latest book, Dead Fashion Girl, (Strange Attractor/MIT Press, 2019), experiments with the genre of 'true crime'. The work received an excellent critical reception, and was published in French, (La Dernière Balade de Jean Townsend), by Editions Sonatine in August 2021.

In 2022, an annotated and extended French version of his 1983 antibiography, The Secret History of Kate Bush, was published by Le Gospel. The newspaper Liberation reviewed it as “A hallucinatory digression that opens as many doors as possible in the reader's mind... a dada-punk masterpiece.”

Literary Agent: Leslie Gardner, Artellus Ltd