Mick Wall .com - Introduction

About the book

Back in the 1980s, Mick Wall was the star writer of Kerrang!, where his memorable, rollercoaster style of journalism helped turn an unfashionable monthly magazine into the world-beating weekly title it is today.

As the magazine celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, here for the first time are collected some of the best Mick Wall interviews and articles, including remarkable encounters with such stars as W. Axl Rose, Jimmy Page, Jon Bon Jovi, Ozzy Osbourne, Ritchie Blackmore and Lars Ulrich, to name just a few. With brand new introductions to each chapter, along the way you will travel to such far-flung rock’n’roll outposts as Los Angeles, New York, Moscow, Rio de Janeiro, Dublin, Berlin… and Ealing (with feeling).

Irreverent, funny, offensive to anyone who ever disliked very loud rock music, and occasionally, against his better judgement, quite serious in its analysis of the most famous people who made that music, this is writing that pulsates with rock’s own juddering rhythms. Hold on tight and enjoy the ride.

Foreword by Jon Hotton, Classic Rock

In April 1987, I rang Kerrang! magazine to ask if I could go for some work experience. I was at the London College of Printing at the time, studying journalism.

One of Kerrang!’s straplines was ‘the Bible of heavy metal’. For me, it was. I owned every issue. Just the thought of calling the number, which I had memorised, provoked days of fear. But when I got through, all they said was, “How long do you want to come for?”

“Er, a week?”

“Okay then.”

A month later I was in Hollywood, interviewing a hair band about living their dream. We were at the Sunset Marquis hotel, known locally as “the loser’s Hilton”, outside one of the little cabanas drinking free beer on a record company tab. Bruce Springsteen was in the swimming pool. The band looked at Bruce and they felt immortal. I took a look at Bruce and felt a bit immortal too.

Kerrang! had a sensibility that the other music magazines didn’t, probably because its first issue had been produced on someone’s kitchen table and its name was an onomatopoeia taken from the sound a loud guitar made. It was edited by the guy who’d invented it, Geoff Barton, a man who grew up obsessing over Stan Lee comics and Kiss. Geoff had made it big writing about heavy metal for Sounds, so he got the chance to start his own magazine. Within four years, Kerrang! was bigger than Sounds, which in turn was bigger than the Melody Maker. Kerrang! didn’t take any notice of reader research or marketing departments or any of that stuff. If Geoff liked a band, or if they made him laugh, he’d put them on the cover. He’d listen to any pitch from any writer or PR. Kerrang! got bigger and bigger, but it was still a fans magazine. If its writers hadn’t been writing for it, they’d have been reading it. It was Geoff that I’d phoned to ask for work experience. I had an idea in my mind of what he’d be like. (I already knew how he looked. I knew how all the writers looked, because Kerrang! quite often published their pictures). I visualised the office, with all of the writers I read sitting there writing: Mick Wall, Dave Dickson, Derek Oliver, Dante Bonutto, Xavier Russell, Steve Gett, Pete Makowski, Steffan Chirazi and the rest. But when I arrived, there were no rows of writers. They didn’t write in the office. They were all out on record company trips to America and Europe. When the writers did show up to pick up the great piles of free records they were sent every week, they were nothing like I’d imagined either. Dave Dickson was about five feet tall. He dressed entirely in black. He always wore black eyeliner and he always carried an umbrella whatever the weather. He was acknowledged as the magazine’s expert on Satanism. When he wasn’t writing, the others intimated, he was making his studies of the dark side. Derek Oliver was an obsessive record collector. He had so many, he’d had to reinforce the floor of his house. Xavier Russell – son of legendary film director Ken – was a film editor. Steffan Chirazi was a kid from Surbiton who’d moved to San Francisco to cover the scene close-up. Pete Makowski was addled from his years on tour buses and in airports. And Mick Wall I saw barely at all. He was the magazine’s star writer. His interviews were almost always cover stories, and Geoff would run them at great length over two or three issues. They were terrific. He seemed to be permanently on the road on one record company expense account or another, accompanied by a ferocious photographer called Ross Halfin. They came as a pair, Mick and Ross, and what a pair they made.

I learned how it worked on the hoof. Geoff didn’t really mind what you wrote as long as it was funny. The record companies didn’t care what you said, just as long as you said it at length. The bands rarely read it properly either; they just liked to see their faces over several pages. There was a trick to it. Mick told me that the trick was simple: give the people what they want. They wanted rock stars who acted like rock stars, who spoke like rock stars, who did the stuff that rock stars did. And they wanted to feel like they were there when they did it. The bigger the band, the easier it was. Mick was unbeatably good. Things happened to him that other writers dreamed of: he’d be in LA, staying with Ross at the Sunset Marquis, and rock stars would turn up to see them. He’d be invited not to record company offices but to band members’ houses, or on their jets. He’d ask them questions and they’d actually answer properly, not with an answer that they gave to every other chancer with a tape recorder.

The question I was asked most by people who read the magazine – and by bands who’d not yet made it – was always, “So this Mick Wall then. What’s he really like?” The answer was always the same too: “He’s exactly like you imagine...”

So what did they imagine? Well, he was small. Any picture of Mick with a band usually placed him at about a foot shorter than anyone else. He didn’t look like a wannabe or a pseudo band member. He had this look of his own, with not-quite long hair and not-quite rock star clobber. He was first-generation Anglo-Irish from a rough part of Ealing and he never really looked as though he was going to be surprised by anything that happened to him, either.

From his writing you could learn a little (but not much) more. As you’ll see from the pieces collected here, he quickly coined a style that came to encapsulate the times. He was a hard, fast wise-guy observer whose empathy with his subject came with a sub-text: that all were somehow implicit in a game in which Mick understood the rules better than they did. Unlike some writers, he revealed little of himself directly. Instead he developed a persona that made the bands feel safe but that offered the latitude to poke a little fun without breaking the bond between magazine and reader (the famous Poison piece here became known for pushing the limits of that bond).

Inevitably it was all more complex than that. Beyond the pages of the magazine, there was all of the usual politicking and egoism. As he acknowledged in his cult memoir of the times, Paranoid, Mick was as guilty as anyone of that. And yet, as you’ll see from the piece here, when Ozzy Osbourne tried to kill his wife Sharon, in 1989, and got sectioned for his trouble, it was Mick that he summoned to the hospital to tell his story. When Mötley Crüe cancelled a UK tour with an excuse dripping in bullshit it was Mick that they phoned, first to offer it and later to sheepishly withdraw it. When W. Axl Rose, puffed up with hubris, needed to have his mighty thoughts recorded, it was Mick he asked over to his LA apartment in the dead of night to do so.

Mick turned me onto lots of writers, Charles Bukowski amongst them. Bukowski was a hero of Mick’s long before his was a name worth dropping. One day in the Kerrang! office, Mick told me that Anthony Kiedis, the Red Hot Chili Peppers singer and another Bukowski fan, had said that he knew “where Bukowski hung out” in LA, and had offered to take Mick down there to see him. Mick declined. At first I couldn’t understand why, but I overcame my thickness eventually: when you’d seen lots of heroes at close-hand, when they’d just tried to strangle their wives, or fuck over their band-mates, or take their fans for a bunch of wankers, it didn’t do to go off and meet your own.

So the answer to that question asked all those years ago is, thankfully, that Mick Wall is nothing like you’d imagine. Most of the bands included here, I’m afraid, are a different story. So enjoy the monstrous little fuckers in all their glory once again... they’re well worth the price of admission, and so is Mick Wall.