Pete Fowler’s picaresque memoir of schooldays and his musical awakening. A story of sex, trains, death and rock’n’roll.
Pete Fowler has been a writer, lecturer, university professor, railway enthusiast, question-setter for Johnny Walker’s Radio One quiz, Pop the Question, and very nearly a rock star. Almost Grown opens with a brush with death and proceeds to explore the author’s awakening to life, in the Fifties and early Sixties, through the medium of music. It ends with an actual death. All in all, the story of a journey of self-discovery to a rock’n’roll soundtrack, by turns funny, moving and insightful. Everyone will benefit from sharing that journey.
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“We are lucky to have Pete Fowler. I’ve known him since 1973, when I was an eighteen-year-old art student and he was one of our lecturers. He’d written a study of skinheads, at a time when nobody would touch that kind of subject matter with a bargepole. Then he made a really good record, The Miners’ Strike, for Charlie Gillett’s Oval label…. Now, Pete describes Britain’s darkening political and social landscapes from the 1950s to the present. What you’re reading are words from someone who was there during the rise of rock and roll, Bob Dylan, and the counter-culture, just as he was there when the NHS, the Labour Movement and a nationalised rail system were cherished by millions of ordinary people. Taking events and experiences from today’s very different world, Pete prizes them apart to delve back into the past, with results that are sometimes moving, sometimes hilarious, but always passionate and thought-provoking. Pete’s always deserved more readers, and I hope this book brings them in, in droves.”
# Bob Dickinson
“Pete Fowler’s memoir adds to our understanding of the Sixties, a much maligned and misunderstood decade…”
# Jon Savage
“I think [Pete Fowler’s The Miners’ Strike] is a virtually perfect cut…. I’ve never played [it] for any contemporary who wasn’t moved by it. It seems a shame, doesn’t it, that almost no one has ever heard this record, and that Fowler may never make another?”
# Robert Christgau
