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 the best-selling author of several food, health and diet books, is slightly surprised to find herself a footnote in history, with her 2008 memoir, Keith Moon Stole my Lipstick, now published by The History Press. Hugely readable, the book chronicles 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, many of them with some of the biggest names.

One afternoon when I hadn’t been at Fab long, I was sitting smoking a fag, drinking a coffee and feeling slightly bored with doing the books for the freelance payments (the part of my secretarial duties that I hated the most and used to put off until irate freelances would ring up demanding to know where their money was!) when a rather pale, sickly-looking young boy with mousy, straggly hair appeared in the room accompanied by an older, more together-looking guy who was obviously his manager.

The boy was very thin, quite small and when he smiled at me, a nervous little smile, I noticed that his teeth were very strange and his eyes seemed to be mismatched. They'd come to plug him as a singer, and I thought, well if this boy makes it as a pop star, I will be extremely amazed.

Anyway we all got chatting, the manager, Ken Pitt, persuaded us to put the vinyl on our record player (I believe it was a song called Love You Till Tuesday) and the boy perked up at the sound of his single. Yes, it wasn’t bad, it was a funky ballad – we danced around the office and the little boy joined in. When it finished we all had a drink, more chat, and after half an hour or so, they left.

“Who was that” I asked – having as usual missed out on the introductions.

“David Bowie? New boy from Kent?” says Julie.

“Well I wonder where he got him from… he’s not going to go far is he? He’s just not star material,” says I, and that was the first of quite a long line of miscalculations on my part about the career prospects of a variety of stars. I was certainly no Mystic Meg.

Having left life in the pop world behind for life in the country, Judith hadn't given it much thought until one day, she explains: “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.”

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.

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 - the lipstick of the title was stolen 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 The History Press at £8.99.

“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.