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. Any of us who sat through them, wondering how, even now after thirty years of hearing some of them, they still sounded fresh, knew that they would make an amazing book.

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! 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. He manages to create a welcoming space in this rather exclusive world while never losing his formidable edge as a narrator. 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.If this book is his legacy, then it's a fantastic one, for his is most certainly a life less ordinary. 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. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.

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. MagazineWITH A FOREWORD BY PAUL WELLERThis is the memoir of a teenage mod from the East End of London. Eddie Piller: 'Clean Living Under Difficult Circumstances: A Life In Mod - From The Revival to Acid Jazz'. 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. 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.You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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. He was managing the James Taylor Quartet, and running the coolest new record label that I knew, 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. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. He always strikes me as one of the lucky few who win the lottery by making up their own job description.In 2019 he founded specialist internet radio station, Totally Wired Radio (TWR) and is especially well known for his regular Modcast show.

An unstoppable wave of like-minded kids fall headlong in love with 60s mod culture, revived and reformatted for the 70s and 80s generation.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.