About Mike Cormack
Writer. Critic. Editor. I write for the 10%.
Voice-led fiction, cultural criticism, political analysis, and music interpretation.
From Scotland, based in China.
Author of Everything Under the Sun: The Complete Guide to Pink Floyd (History Press, 2024) | Editor, Agenda Beijing (2012–2014) | Literary Editor, SupChina/TheChinaProject (2021-2022) | Author of Beyond Report: Poems of Distance and Meaning (2025)
Social - bucketoftongues.bsky.social. (No Twitter/X).
Published in: The Spectator, Times Literary Supplement, South China Morning Post, Reaction.life, Literary Review, PopMatters, LA Review of Books, and others.
Work at a Glance
Book: Everything Under the Sun: The Complete Guide to Pink Floyd
A full-scale critical analysis and biography of Pink Floyd — myth, narrative, legacy. Song analyses, chronology, a complete bootleg guide and interviews.
Praise for Everything Under the Sun:
“A staggering amount of description and historical context behind the songs” - Classic Rock magazine
“Both encyclopaedic and welcoming.” - LouderSound
“Authoritative... captures the band’s voice and legacy beautifully.” - PinkFloydz.com
“Its ambition must be admired” - Prog magazine
“Always cogently argued, exhaustively annotated and often extremely insightful” - Record Collector magazine
Fiction:
Here’s Men Like Us — a collection of novellas and short stories on alienation, male failure, emotional opacity, and class antagonism.
Currently seeking representation.
The Boys Club - published by Litro Magazine. (Editor’s pick.)
Memoir and Cultural Analysis:
Boy And Man - both a memoir on my time in the Scouts, and a defence of male spaces, mud, mess, and masculinity.
Currently seeking representation.
Essays:
Longform cultural criticism on issues such as masculinity, truth, resisting cultural infantilisation, and the value of transgression and nuance. Recent titles include:
Art on Trial: How Moral Surveillance Replaced Criticism — On the collapse of criticism in the age of performative purity
Why No One Grows Up Anymore, And Who’s to Blame — A sociological elegy for the death of becoming
High Art and Primal Sleaze: The Nietzschean Ethics of Appetite for Destruction — A reading of Guns N' Roses, and the nature of rock music and transgressive art
Art With Spikes: Cruising (1980) - An analysis of the film by William Friedkin
Poetry:
Beyond Report: Poems of Distance and Meaning - a collection of striking, meticulously crafted poetry that explores themes of loss, isolation, memory, and the search for meaning in a world that resists understanding.
Media
Available for podcasts and cultural discussions. Have appeared on Rock History Music and Conversations With Strangers podcasts discussing Pink Floyd.
