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journalist.
    In summer 1957 on the Isle of Man, Jimpy came for another visit. We had a great time together, and Dad took us to the cinema to see a musical film. I asked Dad what he thought of the music. He said he thought it had some swing, and anything that had swing was OK.
    For me it was more than just OK. After seeing Rock Around the Clock with Bill Haley, nothing would ever be quite the same.

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    A TEENAGE KIND OF VENGEANCE
    I was still playing the harmonica, and getting good at it, but it was clear that the guitar was the instrument that mattered. Jimpy and I had been mesmerised by Rock Around the Clock , and Haley’s band only had a single sax player. They marked their Country & Western heritage with a pedal-steel guitar, and the swing was jaunty and extremely cheerful, bordering on manic. The words were often nonsensical. Today almost every early rock lyric has been interpreted as having some secret meaning to do with sex, but if they did I never noticed.
    I only liked Bill Haley for a few months, but Jimpy was totally hooked and bought several Haley and Elvis records. While Jimpy was still with me on the Isle of Man, he and a pretty girl named Elaine – with whom we had both fallen in love – started singing Elvis songs together. They lost me there. To my ear Elvis sounded corny, a drawling dope singing about dogs. I just didn’t get it. Unfortunately I had missed his first masterful releases like ‘That’s Alright Mama’ and ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, and had come in directly on ‘Hound Dog’ and ‘Love Me Tender’, a song that made me want to vomit, especially when Jimpy and Elaine crooned it at one another. In his movies (apart from Jailhouse Rock ) Elvis confirmed my view of him as a chump.
    After the holidays I started my second year at Acton County Grammar School. To my parents’ enormous joy, my mother finally got pregnant, and my brother Paul was born. Mum and Dad made plans to move to a bigger flat, and found one on the same street where Dad’s parents still lived on Uxbridge Road. It seemed good karma all round. In the new flat, on Woodgrange Avenue, I sat on a ladder in the empty dining room, playing my harmonica. I knew this was going to be a lucky place. I had my own room with a door, and Paul was the sibling I’d always wanted.
    That autumn Dad got tickets for Jimpy and me to see Bill Haley live at the old Regal cinema at Marble Arch. I went along mostly for Jimpy’s sake. We had seats in the highest gallery, the very back row, where we were surrounded by rowdy older teenagers. The cinema had been structurally weakened by bombs, so when the audience bounced enthusiastically to the beat the gallery literally shook. (The building was demolished a few months later.)
    Several boys at school had got the rock ’n’ roll bug, but their interest seemed confined to whistling whatever record was number one at the time. Jimpy got his father to make him a guitar. He stood in front of the mirror, wiggling like Elvis, strumming at the tuneless piano wire with which Fred had strung the homemade instrument. One day I grabbed the wooden box and, not quite knowing what I was doing, picked out a tune. Jimpy was gobsmacked. He ran into the other room where both our dads sat drinking, and brought them in to hear me. Dad didn’t say much, but Fred Beard said, ‘If he can play that thing, he could do really well with a proper guitar.’
    Dad wasn’t convinced. I badgered him, but because I’d never followed his advice and learned to read music he wouldn’t take my aspiration seriously. (Without a piano in the house I’m not sure how he thought I would be able to learn.)
    Ironically, it was Denny who stepped in. She bought me a guitar that she saw hanging from the wall of a restaurant, whose owner was a friend of hers. It was an awful instrument, almost harder to play than the one Fred had made for Jimpy, but I was delighted. After I got it correctly strung, I started learning a few chords. Within minutes