Once mod touched your soul it changed the way you looked at life, unexpectedly broadening your horizons. In Eddie it awakens a can-do attitude that sees him setting up a fanzine, putting on club nights, hustling jobs in the music industry, and eventually setting up a record label. 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.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. 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. Eddie Piller: 'Clean Living Under Difficult Circumstances: A Life In Mod - From The Revival to Acid Jazz'. 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.MagazineWITH A FOREWORD BY PAUL WELLERThis is the memoir of a teenage mod from the East End of London. If this book is his legacy, then it's a fantastic one, for his is most certainly a life less ordinary. 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. 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. 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.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. An unstoppable wave of like-minded kids fall headlong in love with 60s mod culture, revived and reformatted for the 70s and 80s generation. 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. 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.

He is perhaps best known as the co-founder of Acid Jazz records which recently celebrated its 35th birthday and remains one of the most successful indie labels of a generation.

He always strikes me as one of the lucky few who win the lottery by making up their own job description.He was managing the James Taylor Quartet, and running the coolest new record label that I knew, Acid Jazz. 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. 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. 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. 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.