People ask me how come I m still alive, and I don t know what to say. When I was growing up, if you d have put me up against a wall with the other kids from my street and asked me which one of us was gonna make it to the age of sixty, with five kids and four grandkids and houses in Buckinghamshire and California, I wouldn t have put money on me, no f**king way. But here I am: ready to tell my story, in my own words, for the first time.

A lot of it ain t gonna be pretty. I ve done some bad things in my time. But I ain t the devil. I m just John Osbourne: a working class kid from Aston, who quit his job in the factory and went looking for a good time.