Adam Ant tells the story of a life mapped out in chart positions in his autobiography Stand & Deliver. Fame takes its toll on the unwary, says Holly Johnson.

It is time to adjust history: the golden age of British pop lies in the late Seventies and early Eighties, not in the Sixties. From Adam Ant to ZTT, a bizarre assortment of radicals, artists, chancers and unclassifiable oddballs took over the mainstream, and for once we had the best of both worlds. Simon Reynolds, leading pop historian of the period, makes the case that we never had it so good.