Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from July, 2013

INTERVIEW: Tony Fletcher in conversation at Hull Central Library for Head in a Book

  Recently I was invited to host the HEAD IN A BOOK event at Hull Central Library with Tony Fletcher, author of memoir Boy About Town. As a reader and one time contributor to Tony’s fanzine ‘Jamming’ at the dawn of the 1980s, there was a degree of common ground and the following are edited highlights of a conversation about Tony’s life and music that could have continued all evening. Tony began by reading a couple of sections from the book, focusing on the early years of Jamming, meeting Keith Moon and the response to a speculative letter he sent to Paul Weller back in 1978. I asked Tony about the emergence of the 1970s fanzine culture. What was it that inspired you to start and – based on the premise that, at that age, we all start things that don’t last – what kept you going? The inspiration was a Jon Savage feature in Sounds about the fanzine culture. I totally remember we’d get the music papers and swap them around and read them in school. I remember thinking: thi

Head in a Book: TONY FLETCHER at HULL CENTRAL LIBRARY (and me)

    Tony Fletcher reads from his fast-moving memoir Boy About Town at Hull Central Library this Thursday evening at 7.30. (He'll be talking about the book and his life and times with David Burns on BBC Radio Humberside on Thursday morning.)   In 1977 as a 13 year-old in south London, Fletcher employed a potent mix of adolescent chutzpah and a boundless enthusiasm for the music scene in his own fanzine Jamming!   Printing the first few editions on his school's Xerox machine,  Jamming! brought Fletcher close to some of the most influential bands of this, and any other, period in the history of British music.   Boy About Town's  chart rundown  of chapters counts down from 50 to 1 and en-route takes in meeting and interviewing (among others) Paul Weller, Pete Townshend, the Damned, John Peel and Adam Ant. Amid the teenage traumas of busted friendships and drunken fumblings, Fletcher's anecdotes also give us the observer's eye at some of the era's ic