Jim Godbolt first emerged on the British jazz scene as unofficial manager of George Webb's Dixielanders in the late 1940s. Throughout the trad boom he was an agent and club manager, and his story also encompasses the pop revolution of the early sixties when, uncharacteristically, he enjoyed a brief taste of success as agent of the Swinging Blue Jeans. In 1971, Godbolt retired from the music business in order to become a writer. His memoirs are packed with hilarious anecdotes and accurate portraits of British jazz stars such as George Melly, Sandy Brown, Humphrey Lyttelton and Ronnie Scott. With his renowned humour and insight, he recalls his years as an electricity meter reader, exiled from the jazz world and struggling for recognition as a writer. The final chapters chart his return to eminence in British jazz, becoming by dint of stubborn application a published author and editor of "Jazz" at Ronnie Scott's.

This title examines in great detail the arrival of jazz in Britain, the influence of American musicians, the big-band era and then the advent of bop, the Musicians' Union ban, the development of jazz journalism and specialist clubs and the fascinating cloak and dagger plots culminating in the defiance of the Musicians' Union ban on the appearance of American musicians in Britain. It features conscientiously researched and related with trenchant and pithy humour.