Hi, I am Mohsen Fayazi, Chief Editor of Metal Shock Finland. As you may know we truly love Heavy Metal Music at our tiny but magical home, Metal Shock Finland. But love is just like other verbs in words and actions in the real world and I believe it means nothing when it is not demonstrated by some particular behaviour, it needs appreciation, remembering, sacrifice…etc. To appreciate our beloved ones, we pay tribute to the people who helped and improved this amazing industry of true forthright music.

Martin Popoff is a Canadian rocker and metalhead, well-known from writing thousands of articles and more than 40 books, all about rock and metal music. To know Martin and his work I recently conducted a series of interviews with him and now you can check out the first part here on Metal Shock Finland. These interviews are a part of tribute week to Martin Popoff.

I knew that Martin was working on new book, so I used this to begin our chat. However, we talked about it later too as you will see in the other parts of this series. I like chatty people and I love to encourage my guests to talk about their likes and what they think is important as a whole and with Martin, it was not difficult at all. “I am working on a book called ‘Who Invented Heavy Metal’ and it’s a very big book, it’s coming in at about a hundred and twenty thousands words,” stated Martin Popoff on his newest book. “I am doing it in my timeline with quotes format that I have done with the ‘Hair Metal Coffee Table’ book and I also use that format for books on Ozzy Osbourne and Iron Maiden.” Then Martin told me that it was a kind of battle between Black Sabbath and Deep Purple to be the right answer to the question. I have found it interesting.

We previously agreed on Facebook to begin this series of interviews about Martin’s Collector’s Guide book series. Martin told me the story about his first book, ‘Riff Kills Man!: 25 Years Of Recorded Hard Rock and Heavy Metal’ in 1993, the days before the reign of the internet. He reviewed all the heavy metal albums which he could have done in those days, but in 1997 he came back to that book, extended it and added many more reviews, then published it under the name ‘The Collector’s Guide To Heavy Metal’. Later, in the internet age, when Martin found that he could access more and even older albums, he decided to categorise the albums in different decades, which I believe was a good and reasonable decision. But I was curious to hear his opinion on which of those decades was the best. “For heavy metal music, the way we know it, I think the golden period really was the ’80’s” Martin answered me. “When we had the NWOBHM, the birth of Thrash, Hair Metal and almost every band from the ’70’s was still participating in the ’80’s and making pretty good albums.”

Collector’s Guide Publishing seemed to serve Martin well, “Those guys were great, It was a blast working with them.” Martin commented on working with them and he continues about his experience – “Those are tricky hard layout jobs, there’s hundred of thousands of words there, they were great and I am still buddies with them. Rob Godwin over there is a legend, he’s done so many cool things in his life and he is such a deep music fan himself. Those books sold really well, they were good at their job. I am happy with what they did.”

We also talked about the designing matters of his books, metal in the ’70’s, ’90’s, the damage that Grunge did to heavy metal and many things more. So if you are interested to hear them all just click on the ‘Play’ button below and enjoy.