If you remember the Sixties . . .

I always think that my mate Rod should write an "I was there" book of British rock. He started out having a No 2 hit in The Nashville Teens with Tobacco Road in 1964 and much later went over to studio work, after playing guitar for Badfinger and Tina Turner among others. Which means that he covered a fair bit of the turf.

He always thinks I should write it, on the grounds that he was there but can't remember it whereas I can remember it . . . but wasn't there. Well I was sort of, but being only eight in 1969, with possibly the squarest parents in the known universe; I faced certain drawbacks in terms of listening cool.

My parents' singles collection mostly consisted of Bernard Cribbins's original Right Said Fred. Much later on I discovered a copy of Joe Brown and The Bruvvers' What A Crazy World We're Living In, lurking on an old portable record player in the boxroom. Actually, that's not a bad record so I suspect it was left on the turntable by whoever sold my dad the record player . . .

My best mate Nabbsy's parents were distinctly more hip. They had several Beatles singles; original issues which would be worth a fortune today if we hadn't scratched them all to way beyond redemption. We loved the sparky, R'n'B-flavoured I Feel Fine, which sounded even more sparky when serially abused at 78 rpm.

Actually, we had the most fun out of their copy of Shirley Bassey's Big Spender and something that I identified long afterwards as the dance number out of Zorba the Greek. Maybe it's a good thing we didn't know that you were supposed to smash glasses to it . . .

Let's face it, kids are suckers for novelty records, notable ones at the time being The Scaffold's Lily The Pink and (horror of horrors!!) Two Little Boys by Rolf Harris. Like I told you, I was only eight . . . And it's well worth remembering, when some patronising old bore starts to tell you that real music died with the Sixties, that dear old Rolf's infamous TLB was the last British Number One of the decade. The music died? With tunes like that, it probably did; without any help from Don Maclean.

My old man spent the Sixties grumbling that all pop music was rubbish and how they should all get their hair cut and do National Service. What's really scary about this is that he was only about 25 himself when The Beatles released She Loves You. Mind you, he was also one of those people who insist on building their own hi-fi and then have to buy a record to test it.

Under such adverse circumstances, I suppose it's no surprise that the only rock star I had discovered by the age of seven was Beethoven. Curiously, Beethoven actually was and is a massive rock star; he invented the whole trip about 150 years before anyone else. However I did manage to work out that Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da was crap, even if Macca did write it.

Rock'n'roll epiphany (with optional damnation) happened to me in 1972: Slade's Mama Weer All Crazee Now. The first time I heard that low-down growling boogie intro: Whoah! Something happened deep inside me. To this day, I always love a band who know how to beat a riff to death.

After that, it was all Glam Rock; Slade, T Rex, Bowie (or to be precise, Mick Ronson, whose guitar-playing I still adore). These days, I figure it's a good thing that I was never completely convinced by Gary Glitter. On reflection, some of them should have had their hair cut; not necessarily shorter, just better . . .

Meanwhile, unknown to me at the time, the possibility of Rod playing for T Rex had failed on height grounds, because they were all miniscule: "You're a bit, er, tall for our band, man." A bid to join weird folkie rockers Jethro Tull was similarly rendered still-born by lack of a beard. Who says obsession with image is a recent thing?

Soon after, I moved on to mainstream rock. I remember the five albums I bought with my first wages at 14: Led Zeppelin, Physical Graffiti; The Who, Tommy; Deep Purple, Machinehead; Wishbone Ash, There's The Rub; Queen, Night At The Opera. I've still got all of them except the Queen album, which seemed to be short of guitar tracks so I sold it and went off Queen generally.

In those days, kids didn't have personal stereos, there was just the family record player. Poor little buggers, they will never know the sheer full-blast satisfaction of persecuting their dad with his own stereo. And all to cries of "What's this rubbish?" and "They don't write tunes like they used to!". I suppose you could call it progress.