Joel McIver (born 10 February 1971) is a British author. His best-known work is Justice for All: The Truth About Metallica, first published in 2004 and appearing in nine languages since then. McIver's other works include biographies of Black Sabbath, Slayer, Thunder, Ice Cube, and Queens of the Stone Age. His writing appears in newspapers and magazines such as The Guardian, the Daily Telegraph and Classic Rock, and he is an occasional guest on BBC and commercial radio and television.

Education and career

McIver is an alumnus of Backwell School and the University of Edinburgh. McIver was the editor of Bass Player magazine from 2018 to 2022, having spent six years before that editing Bass Guitar magazine.

Works

Since 1999, McIver has written 35 books. In the introduction to Neil Daniels' 2009 book All Pens Blazing, writer Martin Popoff described McIver as "probably the top [rock] scribe in the world". In a review in April 2012, Classic Rock magazine described him as "...by some distance, Britain's most prolific hard rock/metal author..." As well as writing his own books, McIver has co-written several musicians' autobiographies. The first of these was the memoir of sometime Deep Purple bassist Glenn Hughes, published in 2011. Other memoirs co-written by McIver include those of Max Cavalera of Soulfly, Megadeth bassist David Ellefson, David Bowie's former drummer Woody Woodmansey and blues veteran John Mayall.

Awards

As editor of Bass Guitar magazine, McIver received the 2018 Award of Excellence for Best Educational Project from the Players School of Music in Clearwater, Florida. The same year, Sony's 35th-anniversary-edition reissue of The Alan Parsons Project's 1982 album Eye in the Sky, for which McIver wrote extensive liner notes, won its category at the annual Prog magazine awards. Parsons, along with surround mastering engineers Dave Donnelly and P. J. Olsson, won the Grammy Award for Best Immersive Audio Album for the box set at the 61st Annual Grammy Awards. In 2018, McIver co-hosted a podcast called Dead Rock Stars with fellow writer Mick Wall. In June that year, The Guardian named Dead Rock Stars their podcast of the week. In 2024, an extinct species of brittle star was named Ophiolofsson joelmciveri by Dr Mats Eriksson of the University of Lund, Sweden.

As writer

As official biographer or co-writer

Forewords and introductions