What do you do when you want to know more about your favourite artists? Check Wikipedia? But you can’t find detailed stories. Seeking on the net? It will take a long time. Contacting the artists themselves and asking, no it does not work like that. But what exactly is the best way to find the information that we want? I would say Biography Books!

Martin Popoff is one of those who made it easier for you, to know, to learn and to feel what happened to your favourite artists. He spent years and wrote many biographical books on notable metal bands such as DIO, BLACK SABBATH, JUDAS PRIEST and many more. However there are tons of other stories and facts that can be found in other book series by Martin, even if they are not officially biographical ones.

Throughout the third part of my interview with Mr. Popoff, we discussed his biography books and how the process works. Martin told me that he does not start writing any book until he has had enough interviews with the band members, in order to ensure he has all the information that he needs: “I have talked to Threshold twenty or thirty times…” Martin said. Obviously he wanted to be thorough, he then continues: “Also I talked with their producer and artwork designer.”  Martin also told me that there a few bands that he would have liked to write books about, but he didn’t, as there are already many books published about them and as he had not had enough interviews with them, he doesn’t have anything new to add. But what is Martin Popoff’s style when writing these kind of books; He likes start with the artists albums, as he believes that those albums are the real subject matter, “Because the albums are the way most of us interact with these bands anyway, I mean that art and music is what gives us pleasure.”

We continued talking about his ideas and opinions about censorship, DEEP PURPLE, his newest book “Who Invented Heavy Metal” and also we had a chat about his books on DIO and Rainbow; “I love those books …They are really good books, because again, tons and tons of my own interview footage are in both of them,” Martin described those books. Finally at the end of our chat, I asked Martin how he rates his biographical books: “5 out of 10 … I want to just get all of this knowledge out there!” I told you already that Martin is a cool and nice person, also down to earth.

You can listen to the whole of this chat between Martin Popoff and I, Mohsen Fayazi, on the audio player below:

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.