Philip Hoare

Biography

Philip Hoare spent his teenage years in suburban Southampton idolising David Bowie and Roxy Music. At college in London during 1976, he discovered the Roxy Club. Weekly visits to the Covent Garden dive involved him in the punk movement, producing a number of fanzines, managing groups and designing album sleeves. After working for Virgin Records as independent record buyer for the chain of 22 shops, he worked for Rough Trade Records before setting up his own label, Operation Twilight, releasing a series of eleven records ranging from 23 Skidoo to the Pale Fountains, whom he managed. He subsequently managed Max, the group formed by Kevin Mooney of Adam and the Ants.

In 1990 Philip Hoare published his first book, Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant, an account of the outrageous aristocratic recluse, which appeared on best seller lists on both sides of the Atlantic. Review for the New York Times, film director John Waters called it 'witty and amazing...both scholarly and hilarious at the same time.' In 1995 Hoare published Noel Coward: A Biography, acclaimed by Sheridan Morley as 'the definitive biography' of the dramatist. His most recent book , Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy & the First World War (1997) was reviewed for the Sunday Times by Simon Callow: 'Hoare has identified one of the key moments in the formation of the modern world, and he has documented it with dazzling brilliance.'

Hoare was consultant to the BBC 2 Arena triology on Noel Coward, broadcast at Easter, 1998, and in January on PBS in the US. He has lectured widely, at the Birmingham, Cheltenham and South Bank literature festivals, to the Oscar Wilde Society, and at the National Portrait Gallery with Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys on Noel Coward, and the Tate Gallery with Michael Bracewell on decadence, and at the Festival Hall on punk.

In 1998 he and Neil Tennant curated an exhibition of photographs of Sir Noel Coward, as part of the Twentieth-Century Blues project. He also appeared in the recent BBC Omnibus film on Oscar Wilde, and delivered a filmed polemic on decadence - shown with The Prodigy's controversial video – on Will Self's Channel 4 talk show. In November 1998, his film for the BBC 2 series, Travels With Pevsner, was broadcast, and praised as 'masterful' by John Preston in the Sunday Telegraph.

From June to September 1999, Hoare co-curated the Icons of Pop exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, which achieved the highest attendance figures for any exhibition at the gallery, with over 225,000 visitors. The exhibition tours throughout the UK for the next two years.

In 2004, Philip Hoare co-curated a series of lectures for the National Portrait Gallery's Cecil Beaton exhibition. His catalogue essay to accompany David Moore's photographs of the interiors of the House of Commons is published in The Commons by David Moore, Velvet Press. He is currently working on a book about the New Forest Shakers and English utopias, England's Lost Eden, to be published by Fourth Estate in February 2005.

Hoare has also appeared on BBC 2's Newsnight, ABC's NewsLine and CNN's Larry King Show. He has made many appearances on radio, contributing to and presenting programmes for BBC Radio 4. A regular contributor to the Independent, the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, and Harpers & Queen, he divides his time between Hoxton and Southampton.

Contact: Gillon Aitken Associates at recep@gillonaitken.co.uk