Mick Wall (born 23 June 1958) is a British music journalist, author, and radio and TV presenter.^[1] He has been described as "the world's leading rock and metal writer".^[2]

Career

Wall began his career contributing to the music weekly Sounds in 1977, where he wrote about punk and the new wave, and then rockabilly, funk, New Romantic pop and, eventually, hard rock and heavy metal. In 1979, he left music journalism to become the partner in his own PR firm, Heavy Publicity, aged 20, where he oversaw press campaigns for artists such as Black Sabbath, Journey, REO Speedwagon, Thin Lizzy, Ultravox, The Damned, Dire Straits and several others. In the early 1980s he also worked at Virgin Records as press officer for such artists as Gillan, The Human League, Simple Minds, Japan and others.

By 1983, Wall become one of the main journalists in the early days of Kerrang! magazine, where he was their star cover story writer for the next nine years. During the mid/late-1980s, from 1985 he hosted several music video shows on now defunct satellite channel Sky Channel, including Sky Trax and the heavy metal show Monsters of Rock, ending in 1988 when the channel changed its music format becoming news network Sky News in 1989. He subsequently became the founding editor of Classic Rock magazine in 1998, ten years prior he presented his own television and radio shows on Sky TV (Monsters of Rock),^[3] Capital Radio, BBC GLR, BBC Radio 1, Planet Rock and others. He has also guested on several television programmes and documentaries on BBC TV,^[4] ITV, Sky One, Channel Four and MTV.

Wall has written many biographies of musicians and bands including Ozzy Osbourne, Iron Maiden, AC/DC, Metallica and Guns N' Roses.^[5] The latter mentioned him in their song "Get in the Ring" after Wall fell out with his former friend, singer Axl Rose. In April 2016, Wall made an impassioned apology to Rose, acknowledging that the spirit of the book he had written on Axl Rose ten years earlier was "mean, disgruntled, unworthy. I'm sorry I wrote it." He concluded by saying, "I can't wait to see what Axl Rose and Guns N' Roses do next. They are the last of the giants and I am a fan."^[6]

His book Paranoid: Black Days With Sabbath & Other Horror Stories (1999) is a semi-fictionalised account of his substance-abusing days in the 1980s working with some of the biggest rock stars in the world. In 2008, he wrote a biography of Led Zeppelin entitled When Giants Walked the Earth.^[7]

Wall was also the author of a blog on his official website, consisting of a compendium of domestic affairs and anecdotes from his past (2006-2014). He deleted his website in 2020. "I was sooo bored with it and nobody looks at websites anymore anyway," he said.^{[citation needed]} Instead he now has his Official Facebook page, his personal Facebook page, the Dead Rock Stars FB page and his twitter account. He also co-hosted a podcast called "Dead Rock Stars" with fellow writer Joel McIver, which ran for 23 episodes in 2018. In June 2018, The Guardian named "Dead Rock Stars" their podcast of the week.^[8] In 2020, Wall teamed up with podcast network, NoFilter Media, to launch "Getcha Rocks Off" podcast.^[9] His book, Two Riders Were Approaching: The Life & Death of Jimi Hendrix (Trapeze) is his most controversial, opening as it does on the first page an imagined account of the murder of Hendrix. The book is written in a novelistic style which Classic Rock said "does for Hendrix what James Ellroy did for the story of JF Kennedy, another murdered rock star."