Mick Wall .com - Biography and Bibliography

Biography

Mick Wall began his career in 1977, at the age of 19, when he began writing for the weekly music paper, Sounds. Initially covering the nascent punk scene, by 1978 he had started to write more about bands like Thin Lizzy, UFO and Status Quo. He had never suffered the hang-ups about ’70s rock music that so many British music writers did in the aftermath of punk. Plus, he admits, travelling to the Hammersmith Odeon in the back of a limo with Thin Lizzy was simply “much more fun than being squashed-up in the back of a transit van with The Lurkers on the way to play a pub in Bradford” – the highlight of his rock-writing career until then.

In January 1979, he accepted a job at an independent PR company called Heavy Publicity, later becoming a partner in the firm; dealing with such clients as Dire Straits, Black Sabbath, REO Speedwagon, Thin Lizzy and Journey, to name a few. It taught him about the business and afforded him the kind of insights – and access – to the major artists he would never have enjoyed merely as a writer. By 1981 he was the press officer at Virgin Records, during the company’s first flush of success with the arrival into the UK charts of then new acts like the Human League, Japan, Simple Minds, Culture Club, Gillan and others.

The yen to be a writer had never left him, however, and when the opportunity arose, in 1983, he began working on a new title some of his old colleagues at Sounds had earlier launched as a one-shot and had now turned into a regular monthly magazine. Devoted entirely to heavy metal – an idea then unheard of in that pre-niche market – the magazine was called Kerrang! (after the sound of a loud open guitar chord). Over the next eight years Mick Wall became the magazine’s best-known and most popular writer, helping build the title into the world-beating brand it is today; from the first monthly of its kind (there have been several imitators since) to where it is now: the biggest circulation music weekly in the UK, with its own satellite TV station, radio show, website and officially Kerrang!-branded tours, albums, merchandise and much-publicised annual awards ceremony.

It was during his time at Kerrang! that Wall first began writing books, beginning with the official biography of Ozzy Osbourne, Diary Of A Madman, published by Zomba in 1986 (and later the same year in America by Cherry Red). Glowingly reviewed in both the broadsheet and tabloid press – Rock Book of the Year in the annual Virgin Encyclopaedia – it was also serialised for three days in the Daily Star.

Since then he has been the author of several other rock biographies. For a full list of titles see right but most notably, perhaps, his unauthorised biography of Guns N’ Roses: The Most Dangerous Band In The World, first published in Britain by Sidgwick & Jackson in 1991 (and in America, in updated form, the following year, by Hyperion) – the idea of which so incensed GN’R singer W. Axl Rose that he wrote a song about it, Get In The Ring, from their 1991 zillion-selling Use Your Illusion II album.

More recently, Wall’s semi-fictionalised memoir of working in the music biz in the ’80s, Paranoid: Black Days with Sabbath & Other Horror Stories – first published by Mainstream in 1999 (now into its third edition) – also received a lot of attention. Described by The Times as ‘dark, twisted and frequently hilarious’, The Telegraph and The Guardian also offered lavish praise, the latter claiming: ‘The heroin scenes make Irvine Welsh look like the Teletubbies.’

It was also in the mid-’80s that Wall began presenting his own weekly rock show for the then fledgling, pan-European Sky TV channel – a 60-minute dose of videos and chat called the Monsters Of Rock Show. It began in 1985 as the lowliest item on a cheap menu of game-shows, old comedies and endlessly recycled pop videos. By 1988, when it ended – along with all the station’s domestic music programming, in the wake of the new affordable Sky dish and the incidental arrival with it of MTV – it was the most popular music show on the channel: more than 5,000 letters were sent in protest at its demise. But then it was playing to a captive audience, unable to access such music at a time when it was undergoing a huge resurgence of mainstream interest as new albums by Guns N’ Roses, Def Leppard, Iron Maiden and Bon Jovi all now routinely went to No.1.

It was also at Sky that Wall began to write and produce his own documentary shows: 60-minute specials based on face-to-face interviews he filmed with major artists such as David Bowie, Elton John, Little Richard, Boy George, Bob Geldof, Phil Collins and others. In 1988, he was Consultant Editor on the documentary Heavy Metal, for the BBC2 Arena series; and in 1989 he co-wrote and presented an award-nominated 40-minute documentary for Sky One on the Moscow Music Peace Festival, starring Bon Jovi, Mötley Crüe and Ozzy Osbourne, and others.

It was also in the late-80s that he began appearing on radio. First, in 1987, as a regular pundit on the Sunday afternoon Andy Kershaw Show on Radio One. Then, in 1989, as the presenter of his own weekly Saturday night show on Capital Radio, the Mick Wall Rock Show.

He left London, however, in 1990 to spend more time in Los Angeles – a city he already knew well – leaving Kerrang!, Capital Radio and Sky TV behind to start a new life presenting and editing what was then billed as ‘the world’s first heavy metal video magazine’ (Hard N’ Heavy) and writing for American magazines like RIP, Faces, and Billboard.

Returning home to London in 1992, he began presenting a weekly Friday night show for BBC Greater London Radio (GLR), while also regularly deputising for Tommy Vance at Radio One. He also returned to Kerrang!, where he was hired to help bolster the circulation of its previously ailing sister title RAW. He also spent some time in the mid-’90s working in PR again, enticed back by the prospect of working with clients such as Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, The Band and Steve Earle.

Meanwhile, he also continued to write books and began contributing regularly to Mojo and other newspapers and magazines. That came to a temporary halt, however, when, in 1998, a contact at Dennis Publishing offered him the opportunity to help put together what, for shorthand, was simply called the “grown-up version of Kerrang!”

The result – a hurriedly thrown together 84-page test-run disguised as a one-shot called Classic Rock – sold over 25,000 copies. Two months later the second issue sold nearly 30,000. Future Publishing bought the title and launched it as a full-blown monthly with Wall as editor in February 2000. Within three years, its circulation had risen to over 50,000, as the mag became a 132-page fixture on newsagents’ shelves, making it the UK’s fastest growing music title in 2002.

Having spent years building the title up, Wall resigned as editor-in-chief in 2004 in order to return to full-time writing. Since then, as well authoring the best-selling biographies of Status Quo and John Peel, he has also contributed the extensive booklet notes for the recent lavish Led Zeppelin DVD; along with similar jobs for Motörhead’s 5CD box-set on Sanctuary, Rhino’s acclaimed 4CD Black Sabbath box-set in the US and, similarly, their 4CD Deep Purple collection.

Latterly, Wall has also become one of those talking heads that crops up regularly on various Channel Four Top 10 shows and the BBC’s Liquid News, not to mention several satellite TV documentaries, from MTV’s now infamous Behind The Music series to such televisual alco-pops as Sky One’s Pop Stars Behaving Badly. More seriously, he was delighted to act as Consultant Editor on director Chris Wilson’s excellent 2002 BBC1 documentary, When Rock Ruled The World; and again, when he appeared in his acclaimed 2003 follow-up, There’s Only One Rolling Stones.

Aside from his various book projects, in 2004 Wall accepted an invitation to write full-time again for Mojo, contributing acclaimed recent articles on Thin Lizzy singer Philip Lynott and Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham.

The rest of the time he tries to live as quietly as possible with his wife and three small children in Oxfordshire.