Like all the great rock books, this is not a book about rock music; it is a book about rock life. A hard-hitting, iconoclastic tour de force, written with affection, rudeness, and wincing honesty, Paranoid proves that music can be an arena for moral choices, and that it can quite literally change your life. Mick Wall was a teenage Black Sabbath fan who, leaving school with no qualifications, somehow found himself working with the band. These people, whom he first only knew as pictures on his bedroom wall, would help seal his fate forever. As he writes, "It was never about what happened on stage, it was about what happened afterwards, when the crowd had gone and the band could really start to play."