Kev Rowland

From 1990 - 2006 I ran Feedback fanzine in the UK, writing about bands that were rarely covered in the mainstream, many of whom were in the underground. I built close ties with many Progressive artists and reviewed thousands of cassettes and then CDs from bands from throughout the world, both for Feedback and other magazines. In 2006 I moved to NZ and left Feedback having produced more than 80 issues, 11,000 pages of print.

Although I then stopped writing, I was gradually brought back into the scene and started contributing to many different sites and magazines and tried to be as involved as I had been some 20 years previously. I stopped in 2014 to start work on a book containing all of my progressive reviews from Feedback, which ended up at more than half a million words and was published in three volumes. Described by Record Collector and others as "the Bible", this is the essential collection of progressive reviews in book form which focuses on progressive rock material outside the Sixties and Seventies.

In 2017 I started writing new reviews for multiple sites and magazines on music ranging from acoustic and jazz, progressive rock, melodic rock and hard rock, through to the most extreme metal and out there. I kept being asked when the next set of reviews was coming out so released The Progressive Underground Volume 4, which focused on my reviews from 2008-2013 while 2024 saw the release of the fifth book in the series, which covers 2014 to 2018.

Over the last 35 years I have written millions of words on music, yet somehow still manage more than 250,000 words annually. So much music, so little time!