Luca Ferrari (writer)

Luca Chino Ferrari (born April 6, 1963) is an Italian music writer and lyricist.

He has written books about folk and rock musicians such as Third Ear Band, Pink Floyd, Robyn Hitchcock, Captain Beefheart, Tim Buckley, Syd Barrett, and articles and reviews for Italian magazines such as Ciao 2001, Vinile, Buscadero, and Rockerilla. He met Syd Barrett in 1986, and contributed to the reunion of the Third Ear Band during the 1980s.

Having run Italian fanzines about Pink Floyd and Syd Barrett since 1979, he worked together with Ivor Trueman (who was running the fanzines The Amazing Pudding and Opel) on a petition to release the album Opel. His book Tatuato sul Muro: L'enigma di Syd Barrett (Tattooed on the Wall: The Syd Barret Enygma), published in January 1986, was the first biography of Syd Barrett.[1]

In 1993 he contributed an essay to the Captain Beefheeart (Don Van Vliet) exhibition catalogue Stand up to be Discontinued: The Art of Don Van Vliet (Hatje Cantz Verlag) and in 2011 he gave an expertise advice to a book titled Barrett (Essential Works Limited, London 2012), edited by Russell Beecher and Will Shutes.

His book about Italian folk music titled Folk Geneticamente Modificato (Genetically Modified Folk) (2003) is one of the few books on the subject ever published in Italy. With the consent of the band's heirs and musicians, in 2009 he conceived Ghettoraga, the official archive of the Third Ear Band, of which he is the online editor at

In 2015 he published for Gonzo Multimedia Out of Nowhere, the first biography on English jazz piano player Mike Taylor. In the following years for Gonzo Multimedia and Cherry Red Records/Esoteric Recordings he edited booklets for CDs by Captain Beefheart and Third Ear Band, included the CD box titled Mosaics with all the remastered original E.M.I.-Harvest catalogue. In 2020 November Books published his book Glen Sweeney's Book of Alchemies about the story of the Third Ear Band. In 2021 he formed with avant-garde musician and composer Francesco Paolo Paladino the band His Majesty The Baby, which in 2022 released its first album Hope For Madness (Silentes), with all the lyrics written by him.

In 2022 with Paladino and singer Dorothy Moskowitz (once of late-60s band The United States of America), he formed Dorothy Moskowitz & The United States Of Alchemy, which in early 2023 released the album Under An Endless Sky on California label Tompkins Square Records, with all the lyrics written by him.