An unstoppable wave of like-minded kids fall headlong in love with 60s mod culture, revived and reformatted for the 70s and 80s generation. 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. If this book is his legacy, then it's a fantastic one, for his is most certainly a life less ordinary. 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. Any of us who sat through them, wondering how, even now after thirty years of hearing some of them, they still sounded fresh, knew that they would make an amazing book.

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. 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. Once mod touched your soul it changed the way you looked at life, unexpectedly broadening your horizons. He was managing the James Taylor Quartet, and running the coolest new record label that I knew, Acid Jazz.To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. 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. 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. 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.

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.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. 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.