Richard Williams (born 1947 in Sheffield) is a British music and sports journalist. As a writer, then deputy editor, of the weekly music newspaper Melody Maker, he became an influential commentator on the rise of new forms of rock music at the end of the 1960s. Williams and MM, as it was known, helped promote and contextualise the progressive in pop music. In particular, Williams wrote several key articles around 1970 that increased UK attention to the (then disintegrating) Velvet Underground. Melody Maker still covered jazz and Williams wrote about the more progressive developments in this field also.