Nicholas Lezard 

Boy About Town by Tony Fletcher – review

Nicholas Lezard's paperback of the week: Wearing the right clothes, liking the right bands – this book summons up what it meant to be a teenager in the 70s
  
  

The Jam
Something like magic … the Jam. Photograph: Steve Morley/Redferns Photograph: Steve Morley/Redferns

I started this book purely for the half-guilty pleasure of nostalgia, for Boy About Town is mostly about the music of the late 1970s, a time of extraordinary creativity and excitement, and written by someone who appears to be the same age as me. So even though our social circumstances at the time would have been very different – Fletcher had street cred (as you said in those days) that I could never hope for – our record collections could easily have been confused, and we probably bumped against each other at a few gigs in our teens.

However, about halfway through his book, Fletcher describes what it was like to listen to John Peel, in particular the pared-back sessions he would invite favoured bands to perform. "Stripped of the production gloss that often came with a major label release, a listener – even a 14-year-old like myself – could quickly tell whether a song was any good. And if it wasn't a conventional 'song' ... it was still perfectly possible to listen between the notes and around the riffs, to ascertain whether a group had it, whether there was some emotion involved in their collective music-making, and better yet, some magic."

It was at that point I realised that Fletcher had been doing something similar with his writing. I wouldn't say it's artless, but it's not fancy; even the dangler in the first sentence quoted, which suggests that it is the listener who has been stripped of the production gloss, and not the band, seems strangely appropriate. But there is a feeling between the words and around the riffs, as it were, which suggests not only emotion but something like magic.

You don't have to be interested in the music of the time to get the point of this book, but it does help if you understand what it was like, as a teenager, to make a point of liking the right bands, and wearing the right clothes. The decisions you made then determined not only your social circle, but whether you'd be getting beaten up that evening. Fletcher might have had more street cred than me, but there were people far closer to the street than he was; as one of his teachers points out, "Tony from Norwood" has rather more clout in this respect than "Anthony from Dulwich", and much of the book is spent trying not to get mashed into a pulp by skinheads.

It is also spent trying to lose his virginity. Oh God, does this bring that all back: the awkwardness, the fumblings, the snogs, the hand being pushed gently but firmly away; and the injunction towards patience that immediately precedes the realisation that one's time might be more profitably spent elsewhere. These are always entertaining things to read, even though one blushes fiercely for the narrator.

Fletcher at least had his fanzine, Jamming, to fall back on (I recall buying a copy from Rough Trade back in the day; one was basically meant to, even if you didn't worship the Jam as much as he did). Touchingly, he was accepted as a hanger-on (I do not use the term disparagingly) by various bands – most impressively, the Jam themselves, but also Pete Townshend and, just a month before his death, Keith Moon.

I wonder, again, how much of my pleasure in this book is due to the overlap between Fletcher's interests and mine. (I should point out that this writing lark was always plan B; plan A was to be in a respected indie band, which would by about now be on its third reunion tour.) But I can certainly vouch for the book's authenticity, its alertness to the political and ethical concerns of the time. At which point I suddenly find the Buzzcocks' "Sixteen Again" playing, with astonishing clarity, on memory's small but powerful transistor radio.

• To order Boy About Town for £7.19 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk.

 

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