Chris Salewicz

Page has always been one of those artists who keeps much of his life close to the vest. So, it's gotta be a bitch for anyone to try and write a comprehensive biography for him.

This book does a great job at trying to lift the edges and push open the doors a bit to shed some light on some of those mysteriously dark areas of Page. Salewicz does a great job of detailing the music of Page, and his musical career prior to, during, and after Zeppelin. He also goes quite in depth with John Paul show more Jones, John Bonham, and Robert Plant as well, as he needs to to detail the full Led Zep experience.

But he also digs into Page's predilection for shockingly young girls (he manages, barely, to escape a pedophile tag, but only barely). We get a fairly detailed look at his other obsession—Aleister Crowley, and all things dark and brooding.

Overall, probably the best look into the enigma that was the engine of Led Zeppelin. show less

Sour-grape flavored prose in a sadly transparent attempt by Chris Salewicz to exploit interviews he was granted with Page in the 1970s. In a 1979 article in New Musical Express, Salewicz could not hide his contempt for Page, and Salewicz gleefully espoused what he believed to be the superiority of punk music. Forty years later it’s abundantly clear Salewicz still resents Page but didn’t resent the potential dollars a book about Page might bring. The antagonistic text of the book is show more bursting with inaccuracies, wild conspiracy theories, and between each line is his glaringly palpable lament that Salewicz failed to slay the rock "dinosaur" in 1979. He failed on this occasion as well. show less

Redemption Song is an atypical rock star biography of a man who was, by any measure, an atypical rock star. By showing us Joe Strummer née John Mellor, warts and all, Salewicz paints a true portrait of a man who embodied contradiction as much as he embodied the idea of personal freedom.

Detractors often took Strummer’s restlessness and curiosity as signs that his most famous incarnation as a Camden Town garage rat was ultimately a pose. His life story leaves you with the impression that show more whatever Strummer believed at any given moment, he believed it all the way.

The world is a poorer place without Joe. Believe. show less

This is an informative but uneven biography. From the opening pages, it reads as an overdramatised exposé akin to a National Enquirer. The dense technical detail in chap 2 - bands, gigs, recordings, peers - redeems it somewhat, but later chapters with long stretches of mundane detail are interrupted by florid passages like a fever dream. The "definitive" information includes a jumbled mass of questionable and sometimes repeated claims. Other biographies are "magpied" and uncritically show more paraphrased, and too many rumours are hinted but not followed up. To top it off, the author weaves in pointlessly long and vague assertions about astrology and the mysticism of Aleister Crowley as means of understanding Page and some of his rock peers. show less