JONATHAN BERNSTEIN

According to the delightful bio on Amazon: "I am Jonathan Bernstein. Not the crisis management expert. Not the guy who writes about helicopters. Or the one who knows about sector trading. Or any of the other ones that come up when you--or,more likely, I--look for Jonathan Bernstein. Not that I'm insulted when any of their names pop up. It gives me a second of feeling like an intelligent accomplished person of experience and ability. And then I look at my own list of published works and that feeling swiftly evaporates.

I am of little help in a crisis. Unless it's a crisis involving obscure 80s teen movies. I wrote a book about that called Pretty In Pink: The Golden Age of Teenage Movies. So my credentials are pretty good in that arena. Or if it's a problem to do with teenage superheroes who shoot fire from their fingers when they're upset. I've written two novels about that very subject. One called Hottie, the other, it's sequel Burning Ambition.

Currently, I'm co-author, along with my friend Lori Majewski, of the book Mad World: An Oral History Of The New Wave Artists And Songs That Defined The 1980s. That's a laborious subtitle. But it's not a laborious book. It features interviews with a whole platoon of the biggest stars of the last great period of pop music: the 1980s.

Mad World features chapters on Adam & The Ants, Duran Duran, Depeche Mode New Order, The Smiths, Echo & The Bunnymen, OMD, ABC, Bow Wow Wow, Thomas Dolby, INXS, Simple Minds, Dexys Midnight Runners, Thompson Twins, Berlin, Modern English, Howard Jones, Heaven 17 and a lot more.

I started writing about music at the end of the eighties for magazines like The Face and Blitz. I went on to work at Spin and have contributed to publications like Entertainment Weekly, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, The Telegraph and Interview.

I also had a hand in writing screenplays for such modern classics as Jackie Chan's The Spy Next Door, Just My Luck starring Lindsay Lohan, Larry The Cable Guy: Health Inspector and Max Keeble's Big Move.

I was born in Glasgow, Scotland, moved to New York and currently reside in Los Angeles."