I first met Barrie Sharpe 10 years ago after he won a five-figure compensation payout from the Met Police.

Officers had laid into him outside his home, in Agar Grove, after he tried to stop them striking a teenager with their batons.

They were later found to have withheld crucial witness statements during the legal disclosure process that backed up his version of events.“

A decorated officer resigned from the police force, apparently his next venture was as a male stripper,” writes Mr Sharpe in the second of two recently published memoirs of a “naughty boy”.

Together they document a roller coaster life of sex, drugs – and rare groove.

Both books were rejected by all publishers but have gone on to sell several thousand copies through word of mouth alone.

Not bad for a dyslexic lad from the East End who couldn’t write with a pen until a few years ago, and only discovered a passion for prose after posting comments on Facebook.

Barrie, who grew up deep in the working-class skin-head culture of the 1960s and 1970s, founded what he describes as the “world’s trendiest fashion label” and also pioneered a new underground music scene.

His mother was in and out of mental institutions but could still make “the best cheesecake in the world”, while his father was a mysterious man who once put a hammer through the television when Oswald Mosley came on.

Barrie recalls how he was given a Malcolm X biography aged 15 by his father who advised him that those who “preached peace and not revolution”, like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, were simply “tools of the government”.

Barrie writes: “I am not a leader, not a radical, not a revolutionary… But I do attend protests, I am one of the people, I do support insurrection – I am willing to bleed for what I believe.”

The books are beautifully crafted and made up of short readable sections that bounce about joyfully from childhood memories of walnuts and nearly drowning at sea, to darker tales including “my first stabbing”.

There are unexpected passages on his passion for boomerang-making, the Marchioness disaster, and his lecture at the Royal College of Art.

Barrie started out selling clothes from a suitcase in Camden Market and went on to found the 1990s Duffer brand and later Sharpe-Eye. He opened stores in Portobello, Soho and Covent Garden.

He DJ’d alongside music legends and was resident at the Wag bar in Chinatown. With Diana Brown, he had a top 40 hit in the UK and US with Masterplan in 1990.

Barrie comes across as a confident man when you meet him, but the early pages reveal his insecurities. He’s plagued with questions about being a “fraud”, of being “found out” for “bluffing” or, worse yet for any creative, that he would “run out of fresh ideas”.

He writes openly about his own depression and anxiety and how he sometimes feels stuck: “The weight of life becomes immensely heavy – a load sometimes too hard to bear; yet I have responsibilities.”

Barrie gave up on the music and fashion world to bring up his son.

“I fell into the fatherhood mantle quite comfortably and although I had no role models on the correct ways to bring up a man child, I certainly knew what not to do. I knew I had to keep him close, safe and for him to be my main focus in life.”

This Was Not Part of the Masterplan: Memoirs of a Naughty Boy and
Outside the Lines: Memoirs of a Naughty Boy #2 are available at https://sharpeye.london