Clean Living Under Difficult Circumstances: A Life In Mod – From the Revival to Acid Jazz

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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. 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.

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. 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. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. If this book is his legacy, then it's a fantastic one, for his is most certainly a life less ordinary. In 2019 he founded specialist internet radio station, Totally Wired Radio (TWR) and is especially well known for his regular Modcast show.

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! To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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.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. He always strikes me as one of the lucky few who win the lottery by making up their own job description.

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. 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 WITH A FOREWORD BY PAUL WELLERThis is the memoir of a teenage mod from the East End of London. 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. 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.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. MagazineWITH A FOREWORD BY PAUL WELLERThis is the memoir of a teenage mod from the East End of London. An unstoppable wave of like-minded kids fall headlong in love with 60s mod culture, revived and reformatted for the 70s and 80s generation. 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.