Tony Barrell (journalist)
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Tony Barrell is a British journalist, known for his humour and his exploration of the unusual and the unexplained. He has written many major features for the Sunday Times, and has also contributed to The Times, The Idler, and Cornucopia magazine, among others. He frequently writes about people with fringe interests and beliefs such as cult members, alien abductees and battle re-enactors. He was born in Crawley in West Sussex.
His features have covered subjects such as the Roswell UFO incident, the haunting of Gettysburg, the Raëlian religion, remote viewing, lucid dreaming, the twins festival of Twinsburg, Ohio, the re-enactment of the Battle of Hastings, the celebrity lookalike industry, live-action roleplaying, the science of kissing, The Beatles, Monty Python's Flying Circus, the enigmatic career of Harry Houdini and the life and tragic death of Screaming Lord Sutch. Barrell has also interviewed many celebrities: actors such as Gillian Anderson and Johnny Depp, comedians such as Vic Reeves, Paul Whitehouse, Matt Lucas and David Walliams, artists such as Marc Quinn, Keith Tyson and Rolf Harris, and musicians and bands such as Dido, Joan Baez, Ronnie Wood, Andy Summers, Donovan, Anastacia, Celine Dion, Mike Oldfield, Sandie Shaw, Garbage, Dixie Chicks, the Finn Brothers, The Beautiful South, Alisha's Attic and Goldfrapp.
From June 2005 to January 2006, he contributed a column to the Sunday Times called Born On The Same Day, which compared and contrasted the lives of famous people with exactly the same birth date – such as Marc Bolan and Rula Lenska, Margaret Thatcher and Lenny Bruce, and Laura Bush and Robert Mapplethorpe. Barrell has also written extensively about photography, and provided the text for the 2004 book Eyes Wide Open, about the annual Ian Parry photographic award.
