He was eighteen, living in a hippy house, working in an employment agency and dealing speed on the side… He thought writing about gigs sucked, much like doing homework.
Mick Wall barely needs an introduction, the legendary music journalist made a name for himself as Kerrang! Magazines star cover story writer for nine years starting in the 1980s.
He is one of Kerrang! Magazines most famous writer and was able to get away with doing things other writers probably wouldn’t be able to do, in the office he and a colleague would empty out bottles of juice and fill them with either tequila or mescal and drink them throughout the day. A day of too much drinking once led to him being woken up by a phone call saying a new artist called Bryan Adams was ready for his phone interview, however Mick was furious with the record company girl for calling a day early and told her what for. He soon realised they weren’t a day early, but in fact he was a day late and had gone to bed on the Tuesday and not woken up until Thursday. It was then he suspected he might have a small problem with his otherwise perfectly normal drinking habits. If you could call secretly drinking tequila in the office normal…
In years since then, Mick has presented various radio programmes on a range of stations including: Radio One, Capital Radio and Planet Rock. He also wrote, appeared in and co-produced numerous TV documentaries, the most recent being When Albums Ruled the World, which was one of BBC 4s most viewed original programmes. Furthermore, Mick has continued to write for music magazines around the world, notably Mojo, Rolling Stone and Playboy.
He became the founding editor of Classic Rock magazine, in 1988, this magazine was applauded by all rock fans, but fellow writers were hugely sceptical. Mick is extremely proud of this magazine which focuses on key bands from the 1960s to the early 1990s, it has become one of the UK’s best-selling music magazines and even has a higher circulation than the NME.
Mick Wall is also known as a biographer and an author and more recently, in 2013, he published two best sellers around the world. The biography of Black Sabbath, Symptom of the Universe, and a personal tribute to Lou Reed, The Life.
The Guardian, The Times and The Daily Telegraph all recently and variously labelled him as: ‘road-hardened’; ‘veteran rock writer’; and, my favourite, ‘legendary, lived-it, done-it, rock scribe’.