Johnny Black

Johnny Black

Johnny is a music journalist, author and archivist of forty years experience. In the UK alone, he has written for Smash Hits, Q, Mojo, The Sunday Times, Radio Times, Classic Rock, HiFi News and more. His website Musicdayz is the world’s largest archive of fully searchable chronologically-organised rock music facts, often enhanced by features about those facts. He has interviewed three of the four Beatles, all of Abba and been nursed through a bad attack of food poisoning on a tour bus in South America by Robert Smith of The Cure.

Articles by: Johnny Black

When BB King came to London…

By Johnny Black published

As the 70s kicked in BB King was playing to a whole new audience of white kids. Then he decided to leap across the Atlantic to cut the classic In London with the British rock elite...

Fly On The Wall: Beck, Page, Moon And The Birth Of Led Zeppelin

By Johnny Black published

In a small London studio, two Yardbirds, one member of The Who and a pair of passing session maestros united to record a spontaneous instrumental track. Things would never be the same again.

Jimmy Page, Tony Iommi, Ritchie Blackmore and Paul Kossoff

The Birth of Heavy Music: How Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Free and more ditched the 1960s and changed the course of music forever

By Johnny Black published

"It was the incredible guitar playing and the violence of the drums that did it for me" - the story of how rock got heavy

Uriah Heep Help End The Cold War

By Johnny Black published

Moscow at the height of East-West tensions was a grim, alien city. What better place for a fading British rock band to raise their profile? Cue stony-faced KGB, guns, girls and gallons of vodk

Fleetwood Mac: "Green's the best blues guitarist the UK's produced"

By Johnny Black published

Among the many stars of London’s mid-60s blues scene, one guy outplayed them all – Peter Green. Here he tells us the story of how Fleetwood Mac were born...