Laurence Myers was born on 29 July 1936 in London, England and studied to be an accountant. Certainly it’s a steady job and in some cases very well paid, but it’s not particularly glamorous. Myers started his practice in the sixties, a time when things were a little more fluid, and when he took on Mickey Most as a client it was his entry into the world of pop and films...

Hunky Dory (Who Knew) (2019. 304 pages) is the autobiography of Laurence Myers. If you don’t know the name, it could not be more in the moment as Renée Zellweger has just won the Oscar for her performance in Judy, a film, Myers was executive producer for.

Between the two extremes of being an accountant and being the executive producer in an Oscar winning film Myers has had quite the ride. During his time he has worked with both the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, to name drop just a couple. The book is a veritable who’s who of the sixties and seventies.

Now, this could be an exercise in grand self-promotion, and a lot of these sorts of books certainly suffer from this, but not this book. Myers writes like a man who cannot quite believe how lucky he was to be able to follow some of his dreams. He met the great and the not so great, but the book is infused with kindness, even towards those who patently did not deserve it. It is also infused with wit. Given the stories he can tell and the gentle wit employed, I would imagine he would be a great dinner guest.

So, if you want to read an autobiography of a nice Jewish kid from Finsbury Park who had a much bigger influence on my generation than we knew, I highly recommend this.

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Charles Packer