True, proper rock 'n' roll. A funny, sad, superbly written saga. This book is great.

The greatest rock 'n' roll story you've never heard: the Hollywood Brats hit the early 70s like a spaceship landing in Victorian London. Matheson's book is as lurid and compelling as the band themselves.

The Hollywood Brats are a folk legend; they were doing what they were doing before anybody. This is one of the great rock 'n' roll hard luck stories, by turns shocking and hilarious, and Andrew Matheson has a terrific eye for comic detail.

Flagrant, addled, highly competitive, the Hollywood Brats predicted Punk in the moribund early seventies. Andrew Matheson’s concise, hilarious memoir tells the pleasure and pain of being an unheralded pioneer.

The best rock 'n' roll memoir you will read all year.

Riotously hilarious story… Might just be the most entertaining music memoir ever written

History is told by the victors, but Andrew Matheson's tale of rock 'n' roll failure is much more compelling than any tired celebrity narrative. Lurid, stupid, crazed and quixotic, the primal adolescent silliness and arrogance of great pop music runs through every page.

The funniest music book I’ve ever read – by some measure.

Rock ’n’ roll at its disastrous best…brilliant. Someone needs to make a film of this immediately.

The Hollywood Brats are the greatest band I’ve ever seen

Britain’s great lost punk band

So colourful, so comical, so damn bitchy... hilarious

One of the great rock reads

Rock’n’roll at its disastrous best…its brilliant’.. Someone needs to make a film of this immediately - 8 stars out of 10

Warts and more warts memoir

Possibly the most disaster-strewn story in rock, vividly recalled in this brilliant portrait.

Defiantly populist ... Dominic Sandbrook zestfully charts the route that has taken Britain from 'workshop of the world' to 'cultural superpower' ... as Sandbrook rightly insists, 'we still live in the shadow of the Victorians

Brilliant.

An engaging and very accessible history book about our modern artistic achievements that, provocatively, also debunks some of the very icons it praises.

I loved this book about British culture, partly because there's so much in it, and partly because of the brilliant way the author joins the dots ... Sandbrook gets us thinking about cinema, art, country houses, Tolkein, Doctor Who, and, superbly, much more.

An entertaining trawl through British culture ... [Sandbrook] has produced a book that is not only thoroughly enjoyable to read, but also crammed with as many serious insights as a shelf of academic studies

It's a great premise, and I dived into, and splashed around in, this book gleefully at first. Here were lucid and often amusing expositions on the work of Lennon and McCartney, Ian Fleming, JRR Tolkien, Christie ... in his books on Britain in the 1950s and 60s, Sandbrook has covered some of this ground before. But he doesn't repeat himself, and his scope is wider than heretofore - he notices, for instance, how ingrained Charles Dickens's influence is, still, in popular entertainment ... It would be impossible to please everyone. But when Sandbrook is pleasing, he is very pleasing indeed.