A light-hearted account of growing up in Essex in the 1960s and 1970s, and a lifelong love affair with pop music
In My Life is a light-hearted look back at growing up in the 60s and 70s and what happens when you don't fully achieve that boy-to-older-boy odyssey of stemmed ambition. It’s a confessional yet unrepentant autobiography that runs from childhood memories to mid-life crisis and taps into all of our pasts along the way, with a particular focus on popular culture.
It’s a book for anyone that sniggered at Mrs Slocombe’s pussy, dreamed about scoring the winning goal at Wembley, played in a band or simply stood in front of their bedroom mirror, strapped on an air guitar and sang into a hairbrush. It's about listening to pop music: buying it, loving it, hating it, making up with it and eventually settling down with it.
Written with great humour and a touching frankness, In My Life is a compelling blend of nostalgia and cultural overview, interwoven with a literary soundtrack that saunters through some of the most powerful – and most ghastly – music of recent decades.
Celebrity autobiographies are two-a-penny nowadays, but here is the story of an everyday life to which all readers can relate, but which nevertheless constantly manages to find and revel in the extraordinary within the ordinary.