Bestselling author Tony Fletcher's account of a life in love with music,
taking the reader back to the glory days of the 70s.
"'I was no longer fitting in at school. I was unsure of my friends, and
they were increasingly unsure of me. I wanted to be a rock star. But
while all around, voices were starting to break, acne beginning to
appear, facial hair sprouting, I remained all flabby flesh and innate
scruff, with a high-pitched whine and not a muscle to my name. I was the
runt of the class and rarely allowed to forget it. I had no father at
home to help me out, and could hardly talk to my mum. So I took solace
in The Jam.'"
As a boy, Tony Fletcher frequently felt out of place. Yet somehow he
secured a ringside seat for one of the most creative periods in British
cultural history. "Boy About Town" tells the story of the bestselling
author's formative years in the pre- and post-punk music scenes of
London, counting down, from fifty to number one: attendance at seminal
gigs and encounters with musical heroes; schoolboy projects that became
national success stories; the style culture of punks, mods and skinheads
and the tribal violence that enveloped them; life as a latchkey kid in a
single-parent household; weekends on the football terraces in a quest
for street credibility; and the teenage boy's unending obsession with
losing his virginity. Featuring a vibrant cast of supporting characters
(from school friends to rock stars), and built up from notebooks,
diaries, interviews, letters, and issues of his now legendary fanzine
"Jamming!," "Boy About Town" is an evocative, bittersweet, amusing and
wholly original account of growing up and coming of age in the glory
days of the 1970s.
