If you’ve ever stayed up too late arguing about whether the Smiths’ debut holds up (it does), or whether Dexy’s Midnight Runners deserve more than just “Come On Eileen” on the karaoke rotation (they do), you already know Tony Fletcher’s name — even if you didn’t realize it. The man behind best-selling biographies of Keith Moon, R.E.M., and the Smiths is finally turning the tape recorder on himself. Again.

On August 18, 2026, Trouser Press will publish POW! When UK Pop Went Punk 1980–1984, Fletcher’s new memoir picking up where 2013’s Boy About Town left off. And from the early word, this one is less “rose-tinted nostalgia trip” and more “front-row seat in the eye of a cultural hurricane, written by someone who actually took notes.”

A Teenager With a Fanzine, a Label, and an Access-All-Areas Pass to History

Fletcher was 16 when his fanzine Jamming! — started in 1977 — turned into a full-blown record label co-run with the Jam’s Paul Weller. While most of us were figuring out how to sneak into pubs, Fletcher was interviewing rock stars, promoting concerts, fronting his own band, and, somehow, finding time to chase girls and meet Paul McCartney. The kind of teenage CV that makes the rest of us feel like we wasted the 1980s entirely.

POW! captures the moment when the Clash and Sex Pistols handed the baton to a glossier, MTV-ready new wave: Madness, Adam and the Ants, Echo & the Bunnymen, Wham!, Killing Joke, Dexy’s Midnight Runners, and — yes — the Smiths. Fletcher wasn’t watching from the cheap seats. He was knee-height in the scrum, scribbling, scheming, and occasionally sleeping next to hotel air vents in Manchester when the bouncers wouldn’t let him in to find the Jam.

The Praise Is Loud and Unanimous

Johnny Marr, who knows a thing or two about that era, puts it simply: “Tony writes with the energy of the music he loves and knows. Forward motion: it’s the life he’s lived.”

Gang of Four’s Hugo Burnham goes further, praising Fletcher for refusing to let his heroes off the hook: “His gods are as slammed as they are revered, by showing both their humanity and their human-ness, their own faults and problems.”

Creation Records founder Alan McGee — who has admitted Jamming! directly inspired him to start his own label — calls Fletcher “one of the great post-punk inspirational writers and thinkers.” And Pat Gilbert (Passion Is a Fashion) flags the book’s killer hook: “the inside skinny on running a record label with Paul Weller.”

Why This One Matters

Most music memoirs from this period are written from the top down — the stadium view, the limo window, the airbrushed remembering. POW! is the opposite. As Mark Jay puts it, it captures the early ’80s UK music storm “not from the top of the industry but from knee height, through the eyes of a 16-year-old who had somehow blundered into the middle of it.”

That’s the trick of it. Fletcher remembers everything — the gigs, the deals, the heartbreaks, the freezing nights stranded in Manchester — with the kind of granular detail most of us can’t muster about last Tuesday.

Soundtrack While You Wait

Need to set the mood before August? Cue up the Jam, whose orbit Fletcher shared throughout the period the book covers. Start with “Town Called Malice” and work outward: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cD6FdF9HytA

POW! When UK Pop Went Punk 1980–1984 is out August 18, 2026 via Trouser Press Books. Pre-order info and more at http://www.TrouserPressBooks.com. Fletcher writes twice weekly at tonyfletcher.substack.com.