He undertook his Ph.D. at the Australian National University in linguistics and became one among the leading authorities on the languages of Papua New Guinea.
[1] He performed several pioneering surveys of the languages of the Sepik region of New Guinea.
Laycock also first identified the Torricelli (1968) and Piawi groups of languages.
He was described by his fellow authors of Skeptical (David Vernon, Colin Groves and Simon Brown) as a 20th-century 'Renaissance Man' as his interests were wide-ranging from Melanesian languages, to channelling, Tarot cards and bawdy songs.
After his death, Laycock's meticulous work on the Enochian 'language' (which was allegedly channelled to an associate of the Elizabethan mystic John Dee) was turned by a colleague into one of the very few classics of skeptical linguistics.