He received his formal education at South Eugene High School, Eugene, Oregon, and at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles, where he took a course in pop music criticism from Robert Christgau of The Village Voice; Christgau helped him get his first work as a journalist.

Ingham's articles appeared in Rolling Stone, Creem, and other contemporary magazines whilst he was still in college.

[3] From 1975 to 1977 he wrote high-profile interviews with the Rolling Stones, Jimmy Page, Roxy Music, Tangerine Dream and Queen, and was one of the first journalists to champion London's punk music movement, being the first journalist to hold interviews with the Sex Pistols,[4] and publish gig reviews of the Damned and the Clash.

[5][6] In early 1977 he left journalism to become co-manager of the pop-punk band Generation X for a year,[7] before relocating back to Los Angeles to work in the film industry.

[8] Ingham started the Fake Club in 1982, the first of LA's many "temporary" nightclubs that were a part of the city's nightlife in the 1980s, before he relocated to Tokyo in 1985 to work in advertising, where he became fluent in Japanese.