"Mim Scala takes us all on a great adventure in this delightful book, capturing that hinge moment when everything in England changed from grey to colour"

Marianne Faithfull

"One of the best evocations of the period that you are ever likely to come across"

John Hurt

The heady ferment of Sixties culture: the sharp-suited world of cockney hustlers, the intoxicating buzz of Swinging London in its heyday - fashion, theatre, film and above all the great pop music, pulsing through Soho clubs, Chelsea coffee bars, Carnaby Street boutiques and decadent country-house weekends. In his Diary of a Teddy Boy: A Memoir of the Long Sixties, Mim Scala the Pied Piper leads us on a kaleidoscopic dance down the years, from ice-cream salesman in the East End of London, to gambler, agent, record-producer and hippie traveller.

Wherever the action was, Mim Scala was there. Riding high on a roller-coaster of flickering fame and fortune, Mim entertains Diana Dors, hosts gaming parties with Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, evades the wrath of the Kray Twins, bumps into Bill Burroughs in Morocco, hires Dennis Hopper, cajoles Jean-Luc Godard into filming the Rolling Stones, turns down the musical Hair on the say-so of Salvador Dali, signs Cat Stevens to Island Records, and minds Marianne Faithfull through her stunning Broken English comeback.

When his friend Brian Jones dies in July 1969, Mim also senses the death of an era. He reinvents himself as a psychedelic nomad in Sri Lanka, explores North Africa in his miracle vehicle Shadowfax, and in Tangiers records the G'naoua sect of dervish musicians. At each twist and turn of this journey of survival and redemption. Mim is forever 'looking to be amazed', constantly finding companions equally moved by his passion for 'creative hedonism'.

Richly anecdotal, humorous and quintessentially of its time and ours - Diary of a Teddy Boy: A Memoir of the Long Sixties conveys like few other memoirs what it was like to experience, and to propel, the most pivotal decade of the twentieth century.

Mim Scala lives in County Carlow, Ireland