<DIV><B>The author of highly acclaimed Keith Moon and Smiths biographies now tells his own story of a life in love with music, taking the reader back to the glory days of the 1970s</B></DIV><DIV> </DIV><DIV><I>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.<BR><BR></I>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.<I> </I>This is the story of his formative years in the pre- and post-punk music scenes of London, told via a Top 50 countdown: 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 <I>Jamming!</I>, this<I> </I>is an evocative, bittersweet, amusing, and wholly original account of growing up and coming of age in the glory days of the 1970s.</DIV>