Twenty Pairs of Pants and a Passport

It's 1963. The Beatles are on the radio, Britain is changing fast, and in a Cardiff suburb, a young woman eating egg and chips gets an unexpected question from her father: "How would you like to be in showbiz?"

That question launched Sarah Wrigley and three friends into one of the most unlikely adventures of the Swinging Sixties. As The Fabs, later renamed The Jonson Sisters, these four young Welsh women picked up guitars and drumsticks and threw themselves headlong into a music scene that had no intention of making room for them. Boy bands were ten a penny. All-girl bands were virtually unheard of. They did it anyway.

Twenty Pairs of Pants and a Passport is Sarah's vivid, funny and deeply personal memoir of eight extraordinary years on the road. From early gigs in the clubs of South Wales, where male musicians laughed at them before they played ("What type of guitar have you got? Aaw a nice red one!") and quickly shut up once they started, to a chance encounter with Roger Daltrey of The Who, who told them bluntly that girls would never make it in pop, this is a story of determination, friendship and sheer nerve.

The adventure soon took the band far beyond Wales. A four-month contract on US army bases in southern Germany, just twenty years after the end of the Second World War, plunged them into a world of Cold War military life, late-night sets, and eye-opening cultural encounters. They learned to navigate foreign countries with little more than a phrase book and youthful confidence, playing four-hour shows every night and discovering that talent and hard work could open doors that gender was supposed to keep shut.

Then came Mexico. A six-month residency in Mexico City arrived just in time for the 1968 Olympic Games, bringing encounters with diplomats, bullfights, Aztec ruins and Acapulco. The band played to international audiences in glamorous nightclubs, tasted a life far removed from anything a working-class Welsh upbringing had prepared them for, and navigated the complexities of being young women abroad in an era long before mobile phones or the internet.

Back in Britain, the band pushed for the big break. Through connections to the comedy writers behind Morecambe and Wise and Frankie Howerd, they landed a television appearance, played major club venues across the country, and came tantalisingly close to the success that always seemed just out of reach. They shared bills with household names, appeared on BBC Wales, and performed summer seasons that kept audiences coming back night after night.

Through it all, the thread that holds this story together is friendship. Four young women who stuck together through eight years of shared digs, cramped vans, questionable accommodation, late nights and early mornings, romantic entanglements, homesickness and hilarity. They started together in Wales and, eight years later, took their final bow in Wales.

Sarah writes with warmth, wit and an unpretentious honesty that brings the era vividly to life. This is not a story of fame and fortune. It is something rarer and more valuable: a story of four ordinary women who grabbed an extraordinary opportunity and never looked back. For anyone who loves the music and culture of the 1960s, the untold stories of women in the entertainment industry, or simply a rollicking good memoir about friendship and adventure, Twenty Pairs of Pants and a Passport is an absolute delight.

It was fab.