Born in Newark-on-Trent in 1948, Alan Fletcher’s formative years were spent aspiring to be both Davy Crockett and Gil Merrick, the Birmingham City and England goalkeeper. His grammar school education was wasted on him and on leaving Newark Magnus School he hit the streets running in the mid-60s and was immediately absorbed by and obsessed with Mod.

His “active” Mod period was a long wild weekend which lasted for the years 1964 and 65, during this period he worked briefly at Worthington Simpson’s pump factory (he has no logical reasons why he chose this initial career path) and eventually, he drifted into the Insurance industry, where he stayed for the rest of his working life.

Insurance is the perfect bedfellow for an aspiring novelist – the two are linked by a common denominator: a need for imagination. In the late 60s/early 70s he wrote copious amounts of poetry (most of it rubbish) and spent a good part of his life traipsing around Newstead Abbey imagining himself to be Byron.

In 1973 he wrote a screenplay entitled Two Stroke Sonata, centred on his Mod life experiences along with Dave Hill and Paul Mitchell (Mitch). The manuscript eventually found its way to Pete Townshend and was responsible for his involvement on the Quadrophenia film project, where he was credited as a story consultant. He also wrote the Corgi novel which tied in with the film.

Two Stoke Sonata eventually became the novel Brummell’s Last Riff – the first book in The Mod Crop Trilogy published the late 90s (the other two books in the set are The Learning Curve and The Blue Millionnaire). In 2009 Brummell was turned into a piece of musical theatre. Mod Crop: The Musical played for a week in June of that year at The Theatre Royal, Nottingham and was a critical success but a financial disaster.

Since taking early retirement from the insurance industry he has performed poetry with The Threads, a Mod band from Lincolnshire and has guested at numerous University symposiums on Mod, the 60s and Quadrophenia (he is still trying to understand why anyone would want to hear stories of his miss-spent youth).

His current lifestyle centres around restoring and riding classic French and Italian road bikes.