Out through the in door - Rated 
'You were a typical British rock hack. You'd written about the Quo, The Guns, the Sabs, even Bono... but never about the ultimate British band, the Zep. Easy, wasn't it? Stick together a few articles from Classic Rock, the mag you edited. A few record reviews... you know the ones. Put in a bit of attempt at academia with the Crowley stuff - fans'll eat that up! Run off all the cliches - Pagey the Mystic, Planty the Hippie, Jonesy the Quiet One, Bonzo the Beast. Then here's your stroke of genius, gov. Pretend you're inside the heads of the Zep boys! What was it like back in Brum and Swinging London when they started? And don't just write these flashbacks once. Oh no. Put them throughout the book, so that just when the poor sap is getting 'into' it he/she will be magically transported back to Crawling King Snake & Little Jimmy the session hack'. Don't forget the spelling mistakes & factual errors. This is rock'n'roll, man, as the Zep themselves said'.
That's what the book is like. If you have any interest in finding out what the members of Led Zeppelin are actually like beyond the Satanic and groupie cliches, don't read this book. The only recommendation I make is that Wall's analysis of the albums is fair and reasonably balanced.
Get the Led out! - Rated 
Devoured this book within a matter of days - Mick Wall has crafted a feverish account of Led Zeppelin's rise to the very top and their eventual sad decline.
Where other books have been too tied up in perpetuating the many myths that surround the band, this manages to get to the very heart of the group and goes someway to offering a fresh insight into their history.
What really impresses is Wall's direct access to all the main players (save for Bonham) and also his attention to detail. The chapter on Crowley in particular seems well researched and gives some idea of how Page applied Crowley's philopsophies to his own work with the band.
Most affecting for this reader, was towards the end of this book, where I was left with the impression that Page is still living in the past and would be happy to trade on former glories, whilst Plant has striven to move on and ultimately holds the deciding vote on the future of Zep.
All in all a refreshing take on the rock biography genre and a welcome addition to any Zep fan's bookshelf
I bought this for a photo - Rated 
I usually dislike biographies. And naturally as a fan of Jimmy Page, who is always so little understood, I try to avoid everything that has been written about him by others... I bought this for a photo of Jimmy that it contained (it has a few pictures in it, not many!). The picture was worth all the money for me. I did try to read the book but I only liked the parts that included actual statements made by the band members. That was interesting. As for the rest, the author of this book is obviously too fond of being a journalist for the sake of being a journalist... He makes some comments which HE THINKS are super witty and interesting... I don't! I mean, is he really writing for the fans? The genuine fan, who is most likely to think about paying for this book, will not be impressed at all! Sometimes it's like a tabloid! But anyway it is a place to find out a few things about the band so, if you can read between the lines, maybe you won't feel sorry you bought it!
No cigar - Rated
Engaging, but irritating: especially Wall's speculative, second-person flashbacks. Plus, a good few factual errors and a lot of crappy, rock-journo ignorance (since when did Joni Mitchell have "aquiline" features?).
Wall to Wall Zeppelin - Rated
Led Zeppelin's latest author Mick Wall he has previously written books on Black Sabbath and Marillion as well as hastily assembled book on John Peel. I've no interest in Sabbath but have read his Marillion and Peel books and of course know his writing well from many high street rock magazines.
First of, despite some misgivings over Mr. Wall's writing style, I was really looking forward to this book. It isn't an authorised account, but Mick has had plenty of access to the band members in his time covering their solo careers for both Kerrang and Classic Rock. I was tempted to even think this could be the DEFINITIVE account of Led Zep.
It's certainly well researched - I noticed very few errors (although the idea that Genesis recorded at Headley Grange before Zeppelin was one that stood out a mile) and covers their formation in 1968 and those very early tours in excellent detail.
However there are 3 significant areas where the book is very disappointing.
The first is Chapter 9 which is entirely devoted to speculation on Jimmy Page's interest in the Occult. This might have been better included as an appendix rather than given a whole chapter in between the Third and Fourth albums. Aleister Crowley may well be someone that Jimmy Page has taken a lot from - he was an avid collector of his writings, and other memorabilia - he even bought his house on the shores of Loch Ness, but Page has resolutely refused to confirm in any detail precisely what his motives were in this and so far as Mick Wall's insight is concerned, he simply adds to the speculation that has been banded around for years that this interest somehow brought about the many disastrous and tragic events that plagued the group from 1975 onwards.
The second issue is the fairly extensive coverage giving over to the lads' insatiable appetite for sex mainly relayed through the memoirs of Pamela des Barres and a couple of other eye witness accounts to the groupie scene. While this has more relevance to the 'personality' of the band in terms of what they experienced - i.e. it relies far less on speculation for the coverage given to the subject, it's still nothing whatsoever to do with what made Led Zeppelin "Giants that Walked the Earth". They were blokes, a couple of them still in their teens, and given what was on offer, they were doing nothing here that other rock bands had done before. Again I would have thought a few references to other sources of information would give the reader interested in that sort of thing an idea of where to look.
Thirdly though, and this is really where my main disappointment lies, is the regular passages in the book in italicised text. The jacket to the book readily acknowledges that these are "imaginary flashbacks" where the author has taken information from various sources and pieced them all together to summarise in some detail episodes in their formative years, rather than simply report these factually with real quotes. I'm not sure why Wall resorted to this although I suspect he didn't want to over-populate the early chapters with brief snippets of information gleaned from here there and everywhere - in other words he makes these accounts a little more concise, because the source information may not put the various facts into a true historical perspective particularly well. But they pop up in the most obtrusive ways - just when you've got into a period of the band's later career you are suddenly whisked back to the "when Robert met Bonzo" or when "Peter Grant cut his teeth working for Don Arden and Micky Most" - but its not their words we're reading (which would be really worth it I'm sure), they're all Wall's.
So if you are thinking about buying this book - watch out. As Zeppelin biogs go, it's certainly a great read, with particular insight given over to the songs the band stole from in order to make the classic songs that we all know and love. For instance I had no idea that the opening words to Since I've Been Loving You were taken almost without amendment from a Moby Grape song called Never. There are of course plenty of other examples, mainly well documented elsewhere.
But reading this book has still left me wondering when the definitive Zeppelin book will appear? For all its extensive research, I'm not sure this is it.
It has made me dig out all my Zeppelin recordings including a small number of bootlegs (Intimidator from March 1970 is playing while I type) that rarely get played these days as well as their two DVDs and 12 official albums and I must thank Mick Wall for making me take the trouble to listen to these again. When they were at the peak of their prowess, there really was no one else like Zeppelin. Yes, they succumbed to over indulgence and many of their off stage antics leave me shaking my head a lot of the time, but when they gelled and their musical jams came to something special, they were in a class of their own.
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