Dean Cavanagh

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Dean Cavanagh is a popular and successful journalist, screenwriter, DJ, and dance music musician, from Cottingley, West Yorkshire. He was born in Bradford, West Yorkshire, in 1966.

Dean Cavanagh started his writing career in freelance journalism contributing to UK magazines such as The Face, Melody Maker, I-D & New Musical Express. In 1990, in the height of the acid house culture, when local pirate radio airplay made Bradford a significant player in the Northern dance music scene, he founded the club culture magazine Herb Garden and a band with best friend Enzo Annecchini. His dance music outfit, Glamorous Hooligan, was picked up by Warner Bros, and in 1995, they released a critically acclaimed album ‘Naked City Soundtrax’.

As a musician, he featured on the late John Peel's Sounds of the Suburbs show, in the late 1990's [1].

As an up-and-coming clubland promoter, he organised popular combined house, techno, and drum and bass nites in Bradford, called Tolerance as a club promoter, before moving on to Leeds, where he promoted the successful Soundclash club happenings.

His professional writing came later. His first short story Mile High Meltdown was included in the best selling Disco Biscuits anthology, published by Sceptre, and brought rave reviews, but it was music that first introduced him to the public domain.

Music journalism was where he begun his career. As a journalist, he's been a contributor to The Guardian, The Mail on Sunday Magazine, New Musical Express, Melody Maker, Positive Energy of Madness,www.peom.co.uk The Face, as well as the Herb Garden, and i-d. He has also worked in copywriting, penning many famous adverts, before progessing to writing theatre plays and movies.

Dean works regularly with Irvine Welsh. Their play "Babylon Heights" was performed in Dublin, Chicago and San Francisco, in Spring 2006. Shooting on their screenplay "The Meat Trade" starring Robert Carlyle and Colin Firth and directed by Antonia Bird also began in spring 2006.

Irvine Welsh and Dean Cavanagh have a number of projects in development with companies such as Channel 4, HBO and Public Pictures. One of these projects concerns youth suicide (Irvine Welsh is a patron of a youth suicide charity) and the duo hope to go into production late 2006 for transmission in 2007.

Dean has done a number of script doctoring assignments for companies such as Endemol, Raw Pictures and Warner Bros. Fearful of being pigeonholed, he comments that he doesn't really have a niche, but does tend to veer towards projects that challenge the viewers assumptions.

Other screenplays that he has written include:

Dose... short film for BBC Wales co-written with Irvine Welsh (Bafta nomination)
Honky Sausages...sitcom for @radical media/BBC UK Play
Hotel California...feature screenplay co-written with Irvine Welsh
The Mook...US feature screenplay
Sympathy for The Devil...feature screenplay
Upstate...US feature screenplay