Me Neither - A Memoir
1970s first shoots of the gig economy.
Me Neither is a first-person, retrospective memoir that traces a particular arc of working life and cultural experience in Britain between 1974 and 1988. It is a memoir “from a life” rather than an exhaustive autobiography: the narrative focuses insistently on places of work, modes of employment, and the networks of people Eamonn Vincent met in those contexts. The voice is wry, self-deprecating and literate; the author delights in anecdote, detail and associative digression. That sensibility is the book’s chief strength. It lends colour and authority to small scenes—an ill‑fated milk‑float crash, the peculiarities politics of a West End theatre box office, the backstage improvisations of a pantomime—while allowing the memoir to function as a repository of social history: work practices, the contemporary music scene, the mechanics of pre‑digital publishing and the texture of London and provincial life in the 1970s and 1980s.
The book’s organizing principle is episodic and occupational: a sequence of jobs and episodes—milkman, bus conductor, Arts Theatre stagehand and stage door, Dalmally cottage, Adelphi box office, Tellex, Radio & Record News, R&RN, Architectural Press, GLC, Labour Party publishing—constitutes the spine. Vincent’s education at Cambridge is a constant reference point (a privilege offset against urgency and improvisation), but romantic or psychological interiority is rarely the main subject. The body of the memoir is a parade of workplaces and transient communities, framed by reflections on how economic change, technological transformation and political culture shaped the possibilities of a working life in late twentieth‑century Britain.