Mim Scala

Stepping out of your life and onto the pages of Diary of a Teddy Boy is like getting out of a Morris Minor (no offence Will) and getting into the passenger seat of a Ferrari, Mim Scala is in the driving seat, and man What a trip!

Of Italian immigrant stock, Scala's extraordinary story first recounts how on March 28 1931 his grandfather, Emilo a hardworking but poor artists model want to watch the 95th Grand National at Aintree with a stub of a ticket in his pocket for the second Irish Hospitals Sweepstakes. Bob Lylle coaxed the tired but game Grakle past the wining-post and he collected first price for £354,724 12s 4d.

The book itself then races ahead through post-war Britain, the ferment of the fifties, the sensation of the sex and drugs fuelled sixties and right up to the mid-eighties, when the machine took over from the minstrels.

It's a riveting account of a romp through the craziness which was the sixties recounted in the style of the raconteur rather than the writer.

Mim Scala who left school illiterate, is never pedestrian in his style as he leaves his passenger breathless and wide-eyed at the end of this incredible journey.

Scala may not have had a lead part in the sixties script but he plays more than a cameo role as he trucks on his wit and wisdom to rub shoulders with the rich and famous. He dives right in to the heady and hedonistic mix of music, theatre and film to live the lifestyle of the playboy before coming up for air and respite as a guru bohemian traveller. This fork in the road takes him in another direction (for a while) to mingle with the tribes of Africa, the sun seekers in the as yet unblemished beach resorts of southern Spain and pot-smoking duels with heavy duty hippies in the jungles of Morocco. It was magic, manic and madness.

In cockney parlance this book is the Mae West. A veritable who's who of the swinging Sixties scene (and underworld). Scala was more than a bit player. He had his finger on the throbbing pulse of London in its helter-skelter heyday. Always at the heart of the action he takes his reader for a ride in this weird and wonderful world of race tracks and revelry, of crime and passion, pleasure, defiance and decadence on the sixties carousel. It all makes for an intoxicating mix of rock, rebels, roll-ups and rouge and comes with a stage left money-back recommendation.

As Jerry Lee Lewis said to Chuck Berry 'Follow that'!