He manages to create a welcoming space in this rather exclusive world while never losing his formidable edge as a narrator. 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. 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.

In 2019 he founded specialist internet radio station, Totally Wired Radio (TWR) and is especially well known for his regular Modcast show.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.

He always strikes me as one of the lucky few who win the lottery by making up their own job description. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Eddie Piller: 'Clean Living Under Difficult Circumstances: A Life In Mod - From The Revival to Acid Jazz'. 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!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. Eddie Piller: ‘Clean Living Under Difficult Circumstances: A Life In Mod – From The Revival to Acid Jazz’. 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. 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.

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. 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.He was managing the James Taylor Quartet, and running the coolest new record label that I knew, 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.