In Clayton’s preface to the book, he tells of one day in 2010 getting an email out of the blue from Iain Matthews who had read the original version of his book "Bringing It all Back Home", a work described by Record Collector magazine as "One of the best books about popular music ever written". Matthews told Clayton that he was considering publishing an autobiography and asked him if he would consider writing it. Several years went by before the project eventually came to fruition, though not as a straightforward biography but as co-written book based on multiple sessions of working together for several days at a time to capture all the information and memories.