Boy About Town

'I was no longer fitting in. I was unsure of my friends. I wanted to be a rock star u a punk rock star. While all around, voices were starting to break, facial hair sprouting, I remained all innate scruff, with a high-pitched whine and not a muscle to my name. I could come top of the class, I could converse with the older teens on the football terraces and with adults in record stores. Yet 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.' Tony Fletcher was a boy who often felt out of place. In love with music, but unsure of so much else, he somehow found a way to get himself a ringside seat to one of the most creative periods in British cultural history. Boy About Town tells the story of the author's formative years in the pre-punk and post-punk music scenes of England's capital, counting down, from fifty to number one, legendary gigs and encounters with heroes, schoolboy projects that turned into national successes, punks, sex, violence, football terraces and the neverending quest for street credibility. Built up from notebooks, diaries, interviews, letters and issues of his now legendary fanzine Jamming!, Boy About Town is an evocative and wholly original account of growing up, of music, of friends, fathers, Paul Weller and England in the glory days of the 1970s.