AFTER what must surely be one of the most disastrous interviews ever, in which her shorthand proved so indecipherable she was driven to make up her own letter, Judith Wills unbelievably landed the job of her dreams as secretary to the editor of Fab – the UK’s first-ever pop magazine.

That was 1967 and pop ruled her life, but 40 years on Judith, who lives in Brilley and is now the best-selling author of The Food Bible, hadn’t spent a lot of her time living in the past until one day last winter.

“I hadn’t got a lot on work-wise, and I was walking down the stairs with a load of laundry when the phrase ‘Keith Moon stole my lipstick’ popped into my head,” she recalls. “I dropped the laundry, rushed back to the office and started writing.”

The result, published this summer, is a hugely readable memoir, Keith Moon Stole my Lipstick, chronicling her years in the heart of the pop industry, in the course of which she met everyone who was anyone in the charts and had more than a few memorable encounters.

Judith was a typical pop fan of the 60s – a teenager with a crush on Billy Fury and a transistor-under-the pillow Radio Luxembourg habit – whose passion for pop was an antidote to the loneliness of life with her mother in a caravan in rural Oxfordshire.

“Over the months I slowly enjoyed a kind of metamorphosis from country bumpkin into slightly more of a fab person both outwardly and inwardly,” she writes.

Her fantasies of winning Billy Fury’s heart were never to be realised – the closest she came was a close friendship with Jason Eddie, a wannabee pop star and, more significantly, Billy’s brother.

Secretarial skills were never Judith’s forte and she had several close calls and warnings that if she didn’t shape up, she’d be out, but she was saved by being moved into a features role, at which she was a great deal more successful.

And, of course, her role as writer meant many more meetings with the stars, about whom she is never less than frank in this account of her eight frantic London years.

Among her memorable encounters was a meeting with Leonard Nimoy – “The fact is, if Nimoy hadn’t been married,” she writes, “I would have done anything in my power to spend more time with him, to get to know him. He really was the one that got away.”

In 1973, Judith became involved with one of the pop phenomenons of the era – The Osmonds – when Osmonds’ World was launched and she wrote or ghost-wrote for it. Among the more bizarre aspects of this job was ‘being’ Marie Osmond, the magazine’s agony aunt, “a feat that took some dexterity of thought and pen as Marie had never dated a boy and had a mindset as far removed from the average UK teenager as you could imagine.”

Running throughout her account of eight years of magic, modelling, mayhem and a memorable (for all the wrong reasons) trip to the Isle of Wight Festival is Judith’s relationship with The (married) Boss, who is finally revealed to have been her husband for the past 28 years.

As for Keith Moon, he stole her lipstick to adorn his chest at a gig. “But the lipstick was too muted a colour to be seen properly under the lights. Poor Keith. If only I had bought the bright red!”

Keith Moon Stole My Lipstick is published by UKA Press at £8.99.