Visceral and always entertaining, Clean Living Under Difficult Circumstances is a stand-out memoir that relives the thrill of the 70s and 80s, and the movement that helped make mod the most enduring and successful British youth culture of all time. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. A thirty-year career in specialist radio has included successful spells presenting at radio stations such as Jazz FM, BBC Radio London, 6 Music, and Kiss FM. As someone who lived through this period, I can honestly say that Eddie has done a fantastic job in sharing what it was like to be a Mod. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

Mod isn't about what decade you lived in, it's about your attitude, and this book has tons of it' Kenney Jones, The Small Faces'A charismatic storyteller, witty and unpretentious, he is at once an engaging protagonist and an indisputable authority, giving a live-wire, visceral perspective on mod life in that short flash of time. An unstoppable wave of like-minded kids fall headlong in love with 60s mod culture, revived and reformatted for the 70s and 80s generation. Once mod touched your soul it changed the way you looked at life, unexpectedly broadening your horizons.Currently, Eddie, among other things, manages the actor/musician Matt Berry and can be spotted, if you're eagle-eyed, in the latest series of Toast as a Californian cop. Eddie Piller: 'Clean Living Under Difficult Circumstances: A Life In Mod - From The Revival to Acid Jazz'. I was a bit too young to be a Mod in the second wave (born in 72) but having grew up in East Ham in the 70's and 80's I could relate to a lot of the places and venues mentioned in the book.

He manages to create a welcoming space in this rather exclusive world while never losing his formidable edge as a narrator.CLEAN LIVING UNDER DIFFICULT CIRCUMSTANCES] never loses its percussive humour or whip-hand sense of style. Visceral and always entertaining, CLEAN LIVING UNDER DIFFICULT CIRCUMSTANCES is a stand-out memoir that relives the thrill of the 70s and 80s, and the movement that helped make mod the most enduring and successful British youth culture of all time. As we DJ’d together, sat in pubs and then eventually worked together (he employed me when no-one else would), he was always a riot of stories. We run with the crowd to decaying seaside towns, East End backstreet boozers and sweaty teenage gigs, all fizzing with an uncontainable excitement and often exploding into violence. Piller has recently written two books for Omnibus on the subject of Fanzines, and has written nine documentaries for Sky, ITV and the BBC as well as two radio documentaries.

In 2019 he founded specialist internet radio station, Totally Wired Radio (TWR) and is especially well known for his regular Modcast show. If I'd have lived through the mod movement in London in the 60s my heroes would've been Guy Stevens and Pete Meaden - but as a teenage mod in the early 1980's Eddie Piller was that guy. Piller is one of those inspirational figures (a lot like Creations Alan McGee ) who has always acted like a conduit between creative talent, lighting the blue touch paper for those with musical chops and similar vision. As I was into the Soul and Jazz scene in the mid to late eighties, I first heard of Eddie around this time via Acid Jazz Records but so much of the information in this book I never knew about Mr Piller. Written with humour, passion and attention to detail, CLEAN LIVING UNDER DIFFICULT CIRCUMSTANCES is perhaps the ultimate mod memoir, taking us from meeting the Small Faces as a toddler, to the 1979 Mod revival, through the more purist 1980s mod scene and eventually to Acid Jazz.

Written with humour, passion and attention to detail, Clean Living Under Difficult Circumstances is perhaps the ultimate mod memoir, taking us from meeting the Small Faces as a toddler, to the 1979 Mod revival, through the more purist 1980s mod scene and eventually to Acid Jazz. Late in 1984 I went to the National Mod Meeting – really, don’t ask – and in amongst the pettifogging nonsense of such organised fun one thing stands out, and it was Eddie Piller, introducing ‘keynote speaker’ Irish Jack, dealing with a heckler. Eddie was already a long way through his mod journey, and I had only really started mine (the advantage of always being 5 and a half years younger than him I guess! It even takes him to Ireland at the height of the troubles and to Australia where the local mods take him on a military exercise. By the time I began to know him socially he was even further in – and also further out – as both of us had given up mod clubs and gotten into the jazz scene.

If this book is his legacy, then it's a fantastic one, for his is most certainly a life less ordinary. He was managing the James Taylor Quartet, and running the coolest new record label that I knew, Acid Jazz. Eddie Piller: ‘Clean Living Under Difficult Circumstances: A Life In Mod – From The Revival to Acid Jazz’.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Mod isn't about what decade you lived in, it's about your attitude, and this book has tons of it' Kenney Jones, The Small Faces WITH A FOREWORD BY PAUL WELLERThis is the memoir of a teenage mod from the East End of London. I was never a MOD myself but many of my school mates were at the start of the 80s and this book evokes the era wonderfully. MagazineWITH A FOREWORD BY PAUL WELLERThis is the memoir of a teenage mod from the East End of London.