Lucy O'Brien

Lucy O'Brien, born September 13, 1961, is a British journalist and author renowned for her writing on women in music. Raised in Southampton after her birth in Catford, London, she attended a convent school where, in 1979, she founded a punk group called "the Catholic Girls." She departed in 1980 for university in Leeds, and the band carried on briefly as Almost Cruelty before disbanding.

At university, O'Brien performed with several bands before shifting her focus to writing. She took on the role of music editor for Leeds Student, the University of Leeds magazine, and upon graduating in 1983 began submitting concert reviews to the New Musical Express (NME), the paper that also published Charles Shaar Murray and Nick Kent. She later described the NME office culture of the 1980s as "intimidating," noting how female music journalists were marginalized and dismissed. Her most notable piece for the paper was likely the controversial "Youth Suicide" cover story.

While at NME, she also contributed to the feminist magazine Spare Rib, whose offices she had first visited in 1980. In 1984, she co-wrote a Spare Rib cover feature on women in the music industry, and was struck by how few women held record deals or appeared in the charts relative to men—a realization that shaped her later work, especially She Bop.

By 1990, O'Brien had become a freelancer, writing for The Guardian, The Independent, Q Magazine, MOJO, and others. Her first book, Dusty (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1989), a bestselling biography of Dusty Springfield, cemented her reputation and helped spark renewed interest in Springfield's music. She followed it with Annie Lennox (St Martin's Press, 1993), also published in the US, tracing Lennox's path from The Tourists through Eurythmics to her pop hiatus for homeless advocacy