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Brian Nevill
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Boom Baby Paperback – 19 Sept. 2013

by Brian Nevill (Author), Jennie Condell (Editor)
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After their parents' extraordinary experience of the war, the future welcomed them with open arms to a world of extraordinary ordinariness and the illusion of blatant consumerism, which they set about exploiting and dismantling. If you want to read about 'Swinging London' in the sixties this book is not for you. This book is a memoir of one of the faceless faces of the baby boom. How to avoid work and influence people ? Read on.
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  1. Print length
    272 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    McZine Publishing
  4. Publication date
    19 Sept. 2013
  5. ISBN-10
    095741983X
  6. ISBN-13
    978-0957419834
  7. See all details
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Product description

About the Author

Musician, Writer, Record Collector and Creative Loafer. Brian Nevill is a baby boomer born of Anglo-German parents in occupied Germany. Raised an only child in the post-war suburbs of Surrey and Kent, he had a secondary modern education before beginning a career in varying jobs as a motor mechanic, estimating clerk,RAC itinerary planner, market gardener and warehouseman. At the age of nineteen, having played drums in semi-professional groups, he tried his hand at turning professional. When this gained him much experience but little remunerative reward, Brian returned to 'day' work. This period included publishing an underground newspaper and eventually moving to west London and working for a London underground paper. Selling records at his own indoor market stall on Portobello Road was followed by working in many of London's specialist record shops over the next few years. When the lure of playing music returned it led to Brian's longest period as a professional musician, travelling extensively and living in Europe and the United States. Another lull in his music career caused him to take on freelance music consultancy work, a role that brought writing back into Brian's life. Since'retiring' from this, he has turned to his other first love, that of writing proper. Boom Baby is his first book. He is married, has no children, has a large record collection, and lives in London.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ McZine Publishing; 1st edition (19 Sept. 2013)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 272 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 095741983X
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0957419834
  • Customer reviews:

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Brian Nevill

Brian Nevill

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Customer reviews

3.9 out of 5 stars
3.9 out of 5
11 global ratings

Top reviews from United Kingdom

Pete Farrugia
5.0 out of 5 stars The '60s Redefined
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 20 September 2013
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Boom Baby is a thoroughly enjoyable read. History gives us a distorted view of the `60s, filtered through clichés and over-simplifications. Things may have been swinging in Carnaby Street, but most of us lived in a completely different place, still under the shadow of the war, and pre-war attitudes. This books tells it as it really was, and is full of details that many of us will recognise and identify with. Reading this made me yearn for a time when you could drive to Leicester Square and legally park wherever you liked, and before suburban and regional town centres were all redeveloped into soulless shopping centres with the same bland chain stores. The author's adolescent and young adult experiences will resonate with many, especially those born and raised in the suburbs, with a yearning for the bright lights where we suspect people are having a better time than us. Young love, bad education, disappointed parents, dead-end jobs, youth subcultures, fashion, music, drugs and drug busts, radical politics, motorbikes and sidecars are all within these pages.
4 people found this helpful
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Big Red
5.0 out of 5 stars Fabulous read
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 20 September 2013
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What a fabulous read ...... could not put it down.... read it in two days ........ grabs your attention and takes you back in an instant to the black and white life of the 50's easing into the colourful world of the sixties..... a time full of excitement and promise ...... the true story of a baby boomer whose love of music is paramount. Written with rare honesty and a tenderness for people, places and time gone by ....... it brings warmth to the soul and a longing for a time that was so much more simple than today. Thoroughly enjoyable ....
4 people found this helpful
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Graham
5.0 out of 5 stars Enjoyable read
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 22 March 2014
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I enjoyed reading this book. It gave a good view of life growing up in the post war years and the alternative culture in the sixties and seventies (and beyond).
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PJ Doherty
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 27 July 2014
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very good
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george titner
5.0 out of 5 stars Book made me relive my past ... and think about the present.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 1 October 2013
As the back of the box says, written by a 'faceless face', which one has to take to mean, someone we haven't heard of, writing a first-hand first person account of growing up, adventures and misadventures in the immediate post-war decades of the fifties, sixties and early seventies. I recommend this gripping read to anyone too young to know what those decades of making-it-up-as-you-went-along were like, without the gloss normally put on accounts of the "swinging sixties". This refreshing book is not 'Quadrophenia', thank goodness. This is an honest, but often hilarious, romp through the baby boomer years, by someone who obviously took advantage of all that those years had to offer, while taking enough of a back step to not get destroyed by the dark side of it all. An honest view of the times that were a'changing.
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Vic Templar
5.0 out of 5 stars Boom Baby Boom Baby - So Good I've Read it Twice
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 3 December 2013
We can safely say that whoever first quipped that 'if you can remember the Sixties, you weren't there' either hadn't experienced the pleasure of hanging out with Brian Nevill or, quite plausibly, they forgot that they had. For he was most certainly there... and he can remember it.

However, this book is not, as the cover declares, an account of the 'Swinging Sixties'. What it is, in a very big way, is an account of exactly what it was like to be growing up when the youth bomb dropped on post-war Britain. An only child growing up in a London suburb, with a micro-climate that earns it the tag 'Little Siberia', with an English dad and German mum (who would one day almost kill Eric Clapton), Brian puts the gravy on the dinner of a story I thought I knew well from reading countless biogs of Sixties pop stars and actors.

Aside from being better written than many biogs, which it is, the pleasure is in the detail, such that it serves also as a document almost Chaucerian in nailing the age for posterity. Just as today's child will have no concept of a time before mobile phones, multi-channel tv, the internet or a house without a computer, so I never imagined that people once roamed the land who had never seen a desert boot! Brian chronicles the day he first saw a couple of pairs, sported by 'two well-suited mods' on the top deck of a Croydon bus. 'I had to have some. I was already working out how they would fit with my Rocker image.' The problems of a teen are perennial. How do you find your way in the world? I like this music, but these clothes. However, I also like those clothes and that music. Can I blend a bit of both, do I have to stick to the rules, what will my friends think?

Brian forensically unpicks that first decade of teen culture. How the true trendsetters are morphed into the mainstream. From the Edwardians to Teds, Ivy League Modernists to mods, via trad jazzers, beats, beatniks, hipsters, and hippies. How ton-up boys, cafe racers, and plain motorcyclists all became 'Rockers'.

Clothes, hair, music, hang-outs, crash pads, parties, girls, drugs, bikes, fights, being a musician, watching musicians, friends, enemies, political activism, and dead-end jobs, are documented anecdotally and so vividly that, for one who wasn't there, I can see and smell the era.

I have read many first-hand accounts of people who have seen the likes of Hendrix, Jansch, Cream, Hooker, Driscoll, Fame, Floyd and Mayall, but invariably they dwell on a particular song, or amazing solo. Brian may mention what the musicians were wearing, but he brings the gig alive by describing the walk home - from Soho to Croydon, via the soup kitchens of St Martin's or St Anne's! And it brings it back to me, that that is exactly what my early London gig memories involve - missing trains, wandering streets in the wee hours, shivering and seeing your own plumes of breath like fog.

I am experienced - I have had the pleasure of sharing a glass or two with the author, although not until four decades after the period covered by this wonderful book. That's as far as my disclaimer goes. Yes, he's a pal, but I don't read any book twice in two months unless the book compels me to. It's a great tale and I'm very much looking forward to the sequel. Take a bow, Mr Nevill.
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