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The larger-than-life manager is one of my less-favoured pop archetypes: I think of Colonel Parker putting Elvis through the Hollywood mill, or Peter Grant fleecing Led Zeppelin fans who could only afford one 45 a week. Andrew Loog Oldham took some cues from Larry Parnes, but crucially based himself more on a fictional character - Johnny Jackson from Wolf Mankowitz's Expresso Bongo. Maybe this why the Rolling Stones he created, virtually from scratch, were so much more exciting and genuinely dangerous than the proto-corporate rock act they were from '68 onwards. All right. In his words, and his own capitals, say 'ello to ALO.

BS: Do you think that, like the Stones, you were “born in England, made in America”?
ALO: I WAS MADE BY AN AMERICAN. THE GENT I’M DOING THE E-BOOK WITH LOCATED A PHOTO OF MY FATHER’S (LT. ANDREW LOOG) GRAVE IN BELGIUM. HE WAS FROM LOUISIANA, SO IN SOME WAYS I WAS MADE IN AMERICA IN MORE WAYS THAN THE DIMMER TWINS.

It seems that when you started out working for the likes of Mark Wynter, you were more interested in the minders/managers than the artists, almost saw them as more romantic than their charges. Did you get to meet Brian Hyland, for instance, or form any opinion of him? Or was his “show-me-the-money Jerry Maguire via Damon Runyon” manager of far more interest to you?
THE MANAGER… THE MANAGER…. A GUY NAMED SAM GORDON, WHO WAS A BLACK SUITED AGENT FROM WILLIAM MORRIS SENT OVER TO MIND THE HYLAND STORE. BRIAN HYLAND WAS NICE ENOUGH IN A JIMMY CLANTON/MARK WYNTER SORT OF WAY, BUT IT WAS SAM GORDON THAT INTERESTED ME. PURE OFFICED UP TONY CURTIS IN “MR. CORY”

I think you met Joe Meek a couple of times (Tony Calder once told me that you went to Holloway Road in ’64 by which time he “didn’t look like a man who could buy you lunch”). How important do you think he was in early 60s UK pop? And did he attempt to make a move on you? (You don’t have to answer that last one).
HE WAS TERRIFYING. ALL THE HOMOSEXUALS I HAD MET THUS FAR HAD BEEN OBVIOUSLY INSANE BUT WELL-MANNERED. JOE WAS A LOOSE OOZI. I THINK HIS INFLUENCE IS OVERBLOWN. MAINLY BECAUSE HE’S BRITISH, NUTS AND DEAD,. IT’S REALLY “TELSTAR” AND “HAVE I THE RIGHT?” AS FAR AS HITS GO. THE JOHN LEYTON RECORDS WERE AWFUL. THEY WERE MADE HITS BY AN EARLY TRIANGULAR BRIT VELVET MAFIA. IF MEEK HAD LIVED ANTHONY HOPKINS COULD HAVE SOURCED HIM IN HIS HANNIBAL LECTER RESEARCH. WHAT HELPED HIM GET BLOWN OUT OF PROPORTION WAS THE END OF THE RECORD COMPANIES CD RUN, WHEN THEY ALL WENT BOX SET BALLISTIC. MY WORK, THANK GOD, IS PROTECTED BECAUSE IT WAS WITH THE ROLLING STONES.

How would you stack up Joe Meek’s contribution to record production alongside Phil Spector’s?
RECENTLY SOMEONE TOLD ME THAT, SHORTLY BEFORE HIS DEATH, JACK NITZSCHE WAS ASKED ABOUT PHIL’S CONTRIBUTION TO THE SONGS HE GOT A THIRD OF. NATCH THE MAJORITY OF FOLKS CHOSE TO BELIEVE THAT PHIL JUST TOOK A THIRD COZ HE COULD. I MEAN, HOW MUCH CAN YOU ADD TO GOFFIN & KING; MANN & WEIL; GREENWICH & BARRY? IT WOULD SEEM A LOT. JACK, TO HIS CREDIT, COZ HE WAS A BITTER SOD FOR SO MUCH OF HIS LIFE, LEFT NO DOUBT THAT WHEN PHIL PUT HIS MARK ON A SONG IT IMPROVED. THAT’S THE DIFFERENCE. A SONGMEISTER. AS REGARDS MEEK IT’S NOT EVEN CLOSE. THE IDEA IS TO BE UNIVERSAL…..

How would you rank Nik Cohn as a writer? (I think, at his best, there isn’t a better pop writer – he translates the sound of Rag Doll or Da Doo Ron Ron or The Last Time into prose). Do you still see him? Am I entirely wrong to think of you as kindred spirits?
I LOVE NIK COHN AND HIS WRITING. THE ESSAYS IN “20TH CENTURY DREAMS” AND “TRIKSTA” ARE BRILLIANT. “TRIKSTA” IS SO GOOD, SO DARING. HE REMINDS ME OF DUSTY SPRINGFIELD, A STRAIGHT AND JEWISH VERSION. I MEAN, HE CAME FROM IRELAND, DID HE NOT? OR LIKE PETER O’TOOLE DID HE REALLY COME FROM LEEDS? WHATEVER. HE CAME INTO OUR LIVES AT AN IMPORTANT TIME, AS AN IMPORTANT VOICE. I HAD TEA WITH HIM JUST OVER A YEAR AGO. WE WERE THINKING ABOUT TREADING THE BOARDS TOGETHER BUT NOBODY WOULD PAY FOR THE EXCESS BAGGAGE.

You talk about meeting Ken Hughes, who directed Gurney Slade. But what did you make of Anthony Newley? I’d have thought his career path – a London boy involved in music, acting, TV, working with Lionel Bart, marrying a film star, going to Hollywood – would have seemed quite a desirable blueprint to you.
ANTHONY NEWLEY WAS GREAT AUDITIONING TWINS, I ASK YOU. “IDOL ON PARADE” – LOVED IT. HELL, I EVEN LIKED MARTY WILDE IN “JET STORM” BECAUSE IT MEANT “POP PEOPLE” WERE GETTING A LEG UP ON THE OTHER SIDE. AWFUL FILM. STANLEY BAKER, SAW IT AT THE ESSOLDO KILBURN. I WANTED MY MONEY BACK. “BEAT GIRL” WITH ADAM FAITH AND MUSIC BY JOHN BARRY WAS THE GUV’NER. NEWLEY WAS STRANGE, I AM NOT SURE IF IT WAS WORK OR MARRIAGE (JOAN COLLINS?) THAT TOOK HIM TO HOLLYWOOD BUT HE NEVER HAD ANOTHER ORIGINAL THOUGHT. HIM AND DAVID HEMMINGS. THE LAST TIME I SAW HIM WAS WITH DON ARDEN. WE WENT UP TO LAS VEGAS TO SEE NEWLEY AND BURT BACHARACH. IT WAS A WONDERFUL NIGHT OF SONG. LISTEN, IF I’D BEEN BORN WHERE NEWLEY CAME FROM I MIGHT HAVE SAID YES TO HOLLYWOOD.

Were you jealous of Andrew Wickham following his surfer boy dream and going to work for Lou Adler? Kim Fowley describes him as a “genius” – would you agree? I have to say I’m impressed by an old Etonian signing Joni Mitchell and becoming head of Warners in Nashville. And he got to hang out with Michelle Phillips.
BEING DESCRIBED AS ANYTHING BY KIM FOWLEY IS DANGEROUS LET ALONE “GENIUS”. ONE, I NEVER WANTED TO SURF AND TWO, HE WORKED FOR ME. PLEASE! MY ENVY WAS ABSTRACT, LIKE ABOUT THE FACEL-VEGA I KNOW NOW I WILL NEVER HAVE. I DON’T THINK WE HAD ENVY IN THE 60′S; THAT ONE CAME WITH THE 70′S. ANDY’S SUCCESS I REGARD AS A CLUE TO HOW GOOD TONY CALDER WAS AT SPOTTING TALENT. I’M TOLD THEY NOW GO TO FUNERALS TOGETHER, TO SAY GOODBYE TO THE TALENT, I SUPPOSE. GOD BLESS HIS REIGN AT WARNERS – A GREAT ACHIEVEMENT AND THREE BALLS IN THE OCEAN FOR HIS LEAVING US AND FOLLOWING HIS DREAM.

Can you recall some of the times you spent with Pete Meaden? It sounds like he had a major effect on you. Were you fast friends, or did you see him later on in the 60s? He seems like a tragic figure to me, though I know he’s a hero to suburban mods.
PETER MEADEN. SOMEBODY HAS TO OPEN THE DOOR AND LET YOU IN. MARY QUANT AND HER PARTNERS, ALEXANDER PLUNKET GREENE AND ARCHIE MCNAIR DID THAT; RONNIE SCOTT AND PETE KING DID THAT AND SO DID PETER MEADEN. WE WERE FAST FRIENDS, HE HAD THE LOOK OF LUNACY I RECOGNIZED. WE FELL OUT ONCE I HAD THE STONES, OUR FRIENDSHIP DID NOT SURVIVE THAT. HE WAS NOT TRAGIC, HE JUST SAW TOO MUCH, TOOK TOO MUCH, TOO SOON. A MORE PERFECT FRIEND YOU COULD NOT IMAGINE. THE MIND, THE VISIONS, THE ENTHUSIASM. NOT TOO MANY GET TOUCHED BY THAT SPEED OF SPIRIT IN THEIR LIVES. HE BLESSED MINE. HE TOOK CARE OF ME, I WAS JUST A N.W.3 KID UNTIL PETER. HE TOOK ME INTO TOWN. WE HAD FUN.

How did you meet David Whitaker? I think As Tears Go By was literally the first arrangement he ever wrote.
DAVID DID NOT ARRANGE “AS TEARS GO BY” – MIKE LEANDER DID BOTH VERSIONS, MARIANNE AND THE STONES. DAVID DID A LOT OF THE ANDREW OLDHAM ORCHESTRA STUFF INCLUDING “THE LAST TIME” THAT THE VERVE TOOK AND TURNED INTO “BITTER SWEET SYMPHONY”. BRILLIANT MAN. HE ALSO WORKED WITH ME IN ITALY WITH FRANCESCO DI GREGORI AND ANNA OXA AT THE END OF THE 70′S.

In what way do you feel Marianne Faithfull “embarrassed” you? I’m surprised that you let her go so quickly, and let Tony Calder manage her, when she was such an obvious star.
PERHAPS EMBARRASSED IS TOO STRONG A WORD. I HAD DONE IT. I HAD HAD A HIT IN A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT STYLE THAN THE ROLLING STONES. I SAW NO POINT IN TRYING TO REPEAT IT WITH MARIANNE, SO I TURNED HER OVER TO CALDER WHO HAD TWO HITS WITH “COME AND STAY WITH ME” AND “THIS LITTLE BIRD”. I GOT BORED. NOT HER FAULT, NOT ANYBODY’S.

I like the description of Tony Calder as having “slot machine” eyes. Was he as much of a caricature East Ender as he sounds? Do you still see him? Are either of you still thinking of remaking Expresso Bongo?
ACTUALLY TONY WAS FROM SOUTHAMPTON, HE JUST ENDED UP WORKING IN THE EAST END FOR JIMMY SAVILE. YES, I STILL SEE HIM. HE TELLS ME ALL ABOUT THE FUNERALS HE AND ANDY WICKHAM GO TO. IT’S SO PINTER. JET HARRIS WAS A BIG ONE. I HAVE WRITTEN THE FIRST EPISODE OF A FOUR-PARTER TV THING THAT IS “EXPRESSO BONGO” WRITTEN IN A WAY THAT ADDRESSES STUFF THAT WAS BOUND NOT TO BE DEALT WITH IN 1956. IT’S MORE VIOLENT, SEXUAL, MORE KNOWING AND MORE MUSICAL. I JUST HAVE NOT LEFT HOME ENOUGH TO DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT AND I PROBABLY WON’T.

Vashti Bunyan got you in “quite a flutter”, but she remembers having to paint the walls of the Immediate office. What do you remember of her?
WE HAVE JUST WORKED TOGETHER AGAIN. SHE HAS DONE A GREAT VERSION OF “BITTER SWEET SYMPHONY” FOR MY “ANDREW OLDHAM ORCHESTRA & FRIENDS PLAY THE ROLLING STONES SONGBOOK VOLUME 2″. VOLUME ONE WAS IN ’66. THE FUSION GUITARIST GARY LUCAS DID THE TRACK FOR IT IN BOGOTA. I’M MASTERING THE WHOLE THING IN VANCOUVER NEXT WEEK. SO, AS FOR THEN, I REMEMBER HER NOW.

I think The Poets are possibly the most underrated British group of the 60s. I like what you say about the Scottish drone sensibility. Did you feel shafted when Spencer Davis’s Keep On Running got to number one after pinching the bassline from That’s The way It’s Gotta Be?
NEVER KNEW THEY HAD NICKED IT. GUESS THE STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS HAS RUN OUT ON THAT ONE. SHAME I CANNOT CALL ALLEN KLEIN……

You say that Brian Jones’s voice “shared none of the joy and mirth of the rest of the group”. Do you recall him ever trying to write songs to ‘fit in’?
“LORD OF THE FLIES” – THE MUSICAL VERSION. I PUT BRIAN IN A HOTEL ROOM WITH GENE PITNEY, WHOM AS YOU KNOW WAS A GREAT WRITER, TO TRY AND DRAG SOME OF THE SONGS OUT OF BRIAN THAT HE HAD BEEN MOANING HE HAD IN HIM. THEY WERE AWFUL. THE THING WITH POP OR ROCK IS THAT YOU CANNOT WRITE DOWN TO THE PUBLIC, YOU HAVE TO BE AT ONE WITH THE PUBLIC. THEY CAN SMELL IT WHEN YOU ARE NO LONGER ONE OF THEM, AND THAT’S WHEN YOUR RUN IS OVER. BRIAN NEVER STARTED A RUN, HE LOOKED DOWN ON POP WHILST WANTING TO BE AS BIG AS THE BEATLES.

Did it always feel like you and Mick were looking for the same thing with the Stones? It seems to me, through the changing productions, that you were constantly pushing forward looking for something new; I’m wondering if he was.
IN ENGLAND, APART FROM “NOT FADE AWAY”, RECORDING IN ENGLAND STILL HAD THEM JOINED AT THE HIP TO THE R’N'B THING. YOU MUST REMEMBER THEY STARTED OUT THINKING THAT WHITE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS KIDS DID NOT WRITE THE BLUES, LET ALONE SONGS. IT WAS AMERICA THAT SET US FREE. FIRST CHESS STUDIOS , THEN RCA IN HOLLYWOOD. I CANNOT SAY ENOUGH ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTIONS JACK NITZSCHE AND DAVE HASSINGER (ENGINEER) MADE AND IAN STEWART CONTINUED TO MAKE. WHAT DID I PUSH? AMBITION, STYLE, ATTITUDE, RECKLESSNESS, INDEPEPENDENCE. THE SONGS MICK & KEITH CAME UP WITH WERE WHAT GOT SERVED. I NEVER EXPECTED AN “AFTERMATH” OR “BETWEEN THE BUTTONS”. THE LATTER WAS ALMOST A COLLISION WITH RAY DAVIES. IF YOU IMAGINE HEARING SOME OF THE SONGS JUST ON ACOUSTIC GUITAR. IN THAT IT WAS ABOUT ENGLAND, DISPOSABLE INCOME, THE LUXURY OF DISPOSABLE GIRLS, FIRST LOVES, WISING UP… THE WHOLE SCHMEER. I THINK THAT, YES, MICK AND I WERE LOOKING FOR THE SAME THING. I GUESS IT WAS ALMOST ELVIS & THE COLONEL. I’VE NEVER HAD THAT THOUGHT BEFORE. MICK CONCENTRATED ON THE STAGE, I CONCENTRATED ON BACK STAGE. KEITH WAS KIND OF THE IN BETWEEN RUNNER, HE WANTED TO PLAY IN BOTH WORLDS. HE WOULD WANT THE STUDIO, THE ROAD, AND HE’D STILL WANT TO GO CHECK OUT SONNY & CHER AT THE DORCHESTER. MICK WAS ABOUT BEING MICK AND WE GOT ALONG UNTIL I COULD NOT SERVICE THAT PARTICULAR MICK.
FRANK SINATRA USED TO SWIM A LOT; I WONDER WHETHER HE TOOK THE RUG OFF. BUT HE USED TO SWIM TO BUILD UP HIS LUNGS AND POWER AND CONTROL OF HIS VOICE ON STAGE. A FRIEND OF MINE ONCE WENT INTO MY OFFICE BATHROOM IN BAKER STREET IN ’65 AND MICK WAS THERE PRACTICING HIS MOVES FOR THAT NIGHT’S “READY, STEADY, GO!”. THAT IS WHAT SINGERS DO. I DO NOT CARE HOW MANY TIMES HE STRAPS ON THE GUITAR, HE’S A SINGER. AND ONE OF THE GREATEST INTEPRETERS IN THE WORLD. DO NOT LET THE APPEARANCE FOOL YOU. THE VOCALS WERE ACE. FROM ’64-66 THEY WERE A POP BAND – SURE, R’N'B/ BLUES UNDERPINNINGS, BUT A POP BAND. SAME AS THE BEATLES WERE A POP BAND WITH CLUB/CABARET LEGS. DURING THAT TIME MICK, KEITH AND I WERE A CONSPIRACY. I TOOK HIM TO SEE NICHOLAS RAY ONCE ABOUT DIRECTING A MOVIE. RAY WAS BURNT OUT, ALL HE COULD TALK ABOUT WAS JAMES DEAN. THAT DID NOT SUIT MICK. AS WE LEFT AND WALKED TO MARBLE ARCH IN THE RAIN MICK SAID TO ME “DON’T EVER PUT ME THROUGH THAT AGAIN”.
THE NEXT PERIOD, THE THIRD VERSION OF THE 60′S , I JUST DID NOT BELONG TO. THE PUBLIC WERE NOW TAKING DRUGS. SO WAS THE BUSINESS. JOHN PEEL RULED. FOR A WHILE IT WAS ALL ABOUT THE ALBUM. I’M A THREE MINUTE MAN. BUT THOSE RECORDINGS SPOKE FOR SO MANY AND SOME OF THEM STILL PUT CUCUMBER SANDWICHES AND TEA ON MY FAMILY TABLE. DRUGS, DEAR. IT WAS THE NEXT STAGE OF THE REBELLION. THE AUDIENCE LOVED SEEING THE STONES AS STONED OR MORE STONED THAN THEY WERE.

I’m wondering which Immediate record you are proudest of. And also, whether signing Amen Corner was a purely commercial decision (I love If Paradise Is Half As Nice, but they do stick out as an overtly straight “pop” act).
THE FIRST ONE, “HANG ON SLOOPY” BY THE MCCOYS. WE PAID $500 OR $2000 TO BERT BERNS, ONE OF THE GREAT RECORD MEN OF ALL TIME, AND GOT A NUMBER ONE RECORD. THAT SAYS IT ALL. THE REST OF IT WAS DOWNHILL. YES, IT WAS NICE HAVING THOSE HITS WITH THE SMALL FACES, BUT APART FROM STEVE THEY WERE ALL MOANERS. AMEN CORNER WERE WORSE, IT WAS LIKE MANAGING TRADESMEN. STEVE WAS AS NEUROTIC AS BRIAN JONES, EXCEPT HE WAS A LEAD SINGER. HE HAD THE KILL FACTOR AND THAT’S WHAT SAVED HIM… FOR A WHILE. IMMEDIATE IS AS OVERBLOWN AS JOE MEEK. IT WAS MY WAY OF STAYING ALIVE AFTER I LEFT THE STONES.

What can you remember of Duncan Browne? I know next to nothing about him – I love his Immediate album.
I LOVED DUNCAN BROWNE. I OFTEN SAY THE JOB OF A PRODUCER IS TO HELP THE ARTIST FILL UP SPACE CORRECTLY. IT WAS A PLEASURE TO WATCH DUNCAN FILL UP THAT SPACE. SON OF A NORTHERN R.A.F FAMILY. NICELY CALCULATED, TALENTED, WHIMSICAL HIPPY. PLAYED EVERYTHING EXCEPT THE BASS AND DRUMS ON HIS RECORD. A PLEASURE TO OPEN THE DOOR FOR.

It seems in retrospect that you and Immediate bailed out at a crucial time in pop history, around the same time Nik Cohn wrote Awopbopaloobop, when humour and flash were pushed aside by heaviness and overt sincerity. When you tried to get back on the horse in the Glam era with Brett Smiley, did it feel as exciting?
NO, IT WAS AWFUL. THE WORLD HAD CHANGED. WE ENTERED THE FIRST TIME SPAN OF THE RECORD EXECUTIVES GETTING CASUAL AND DECIDING THEY KNEW MORE ABOUT THE MUSIC THAN THEIR ACTS. OF COURSE THERE WERE EXCEPTIONS – CHRIS BLACKWELL AND BOB KRASNOW IMMEDIATELY COME TO MIND. I HAD BEEN SPOILT, SO HAD THE STONES. WE WERE BORN INTO A TIME WHERE NOBODY KNEW WHAT THEY WERE DOING, EVERYBODY WANTED TO DO IT ANYWAY, AND WE WERE GIVEN A CHANCE TO LEARN ON THE JOB. A CHANCE GIVEN BY BOTH THE BIZ AND THE PUBLIC. THEN WE BLEW IT BY BECOMING EXPERTS.

It's the ultimate fairground anthem, the first record you'd look for on a Wurlitzer jukebox in a forgotten suburban caff. Del Shannon's Runaway is all energy and mystery, from the densely thrummed opening chords through its falsetto hook ("wah-wah-wonder") to the eerie, space-organ solo. The lyric is beyond melancholy - it is harrowing, filled with dread and paranoia; the runaway girl may not even be alive. David Lynch is surely a fan.

It was the kind of record you could build a career on and Del Shannon didn't disappoint. The existential angst of Runaway became a template that he was still using at the far end of the decade on the ghostlike Colorado Rain. He couldn't write any other way - the fear and the demons in Shannon's music echoed the mind of its maker.

In the beginning he was Charles Westover and he was from Battle Creek, Michigan. Two events shaped his future: when he bought his first electric guitar he practised in the bathroom, amp perched on the toilet lid, and discovered he liked the rumbling acoustics; a little later he asked a girl called Karen to the high school prom, but she dumped him for another guy. Del was so cut up that he would still talk about this years later. He was drafted in the mid-fifties, married Shirley, got a job in a carpet store, renamed himself Del Shannon in honour of a local wrestler. By night he played rock'n'roll covers in The Big Little Show Band at Battle Creek.

So far, so small town. Shannon was already in his mid-twenties when a college kid from Kalamazoo called Max Crook joined the band. Crook brought with him a home-made, three-legged proto-synth that he called a "musitron". Straight away, they began writing great songs. One was called Runaway, the lyric penned by Shannon on the sly while working at the carpet store. It exploded in spring 1961, and became an international number one. In the anodyne Bobby Rydell/Craig Douglas era, the intense, square-jawed Shannon cut a heroic figure, and was swiftly elevated to the level of Roy Orbison, Dion and Gene Pitney - rock solid names, built to last.

Invigorated by stardom he followed Runaway with two fabulously nasty rockers. Hats Off To Larry again featured a Max Crook solo, but this was a spiteful riposte to an ex who has been ditched by her new beau. So Long Baby was possibly the most relentless, tuneless Top 10 hit of the early sixties, fuelled entirely by bitter glee - "I've got news for you, I was untrue too!" Crook had left to make a solo single (the deathless Twistin' Ghost; check his phenomenal Meek-like The Snake, released under the name Maximilian) and his musitron was replaced on So Long Baby by what sounds like a giant electronic kazoo. While his profile dipped in the States, Del's hits in Europe continued unabated. The loopy Swiss Maid (Question: Will she ever find true love, yodel-lay? Answer: No.) reached number 2 in the UK but failed to even make the Hot 100 in '62; Little Town Flirt was big enough here to have been a prime influence on Merseybeat (imagine The Searchers singing it); Cry Myself To Sleep was unsubtly re-written by Elton John as Crocodile Rock.

All these hits, all the strength in that lumberjack voice, and still Shannon was riddled with insecurities. Musically this manifested itself in lame soundalike sequels (Two Kinds Of Teardrops, too jolly by half; Kelly on the flipside was far better) or songs that clearly aped his contemporaries. Sue's Gonna Be Mine is The Four Seasons' Sherry, and Dion would surely have sued had Shannon's Mary Jane sold in quantity. These singles came in an eighteen month barren patch which coincided with the first beat boom - Del may well have been the first act to chart with a Lennon/McCartney song (From Me To You) in the US, but he felt the chill wind from the Mersey in '63 and '64 like pretty much every other American act. He sought solace in whisky.

And that might have been that had he not ditched the covers (Handy Man, Do You Wanna Dance), worked out why Runaway was so original and successful, and rediscovered his groove with Keep Searchin' at the end of '64. "Gotta find a place to hide with my baby by my side" - the lyric was even bleaker and more oblique than Runaway, the sound newly toughened by the Brit beat influence. The cry of the fugitive, a possible abductor with his (underage?) girl who's "been hurt so much, they treat her mean and cruel", Keep Searchin' ends with a desperate, beautiful falsetto wail of release. It is quite possibly his best record and a deserved Transatlantic top tenner.

From this point on, Shannon rarely stumbled until his semi-retirement as a performer in '69. Keep Searchin' begat an even more paranoiac sequel in Stranger In Town where a private detective, or maybe a hitman, gets thrown into the equation. On Break Up in '65 he's so wracked and tortured that he can't even convey his fears in words, resigning himself to losing his girl - though he seems to have zero evidence this is about to happen. The single was a flop (Stranger In Town turned out to be his last UK hit) and Del was devastated. He took boxes of the single and threw them angrily into a Michigan river.

The toughness of singles like Break Up and the tinnitus-inducing Move It On Over betrayed a Stones influence. Coincidentally, Shannon was a heavy hero to Andrew Loog Oldham and the two got together for the Home And Away album in '67. A record of full baroque beauty, it was shelved at the time, probably because none of its accompanying singles were hits. Aided by Immediate stalwarts Billy Nichols and Twice As Much, and with Oldham pulling every Spectorian stunt from the box, songs like Cut And Come Again and He Cheated recast Del as a black orchid for the flower generation. It's a truly wonderful record which was finally released as a stand-alone album a few years back on Zonophone. The Further Adventures Of Charles Westover from the following year is almost as good - deeper and eerier, with the gorgeous single Gemini ("Oh, how I'd love to understand you") showing how Del felt locked out of the love-in, detached from the sunshine people while still producing masterful records that they would most likely love if they ever heard them.

Radio and press, though, would barely touch an oldie like Del Shannon and by 1969 he was working more as a producer. Most successfully he revived Bacharach and David's bluest hit, the Shirelles' Baby It's You, for a group called Smith and scored a US Top 10 hit in '69. A couple of solo singles on Dunhill were taken from a half-finished album, issued in its entirety on a Bear Family box set in 2004. One, Colorado Rain, formed a neat circle in its tale of a runaway hippie girl who flits into Shannon's life via a sinister piano motif, only to leave again just as unexpectedly.

The Bear Family set contained a bountifully illustrated book and eight discs to tell the Del Shannon story and, truthfully, it's more than most people would need. Mid-sixties albums like Total Commitment and This Is My Bag (great but misleading titles) are one-take, hits-of-the-day compilations that barely reflect the quality of Shannon's singles. The two discs of demos and home recordings, though, are fascinating: evidently he turned to country (Hank Williams in particular) in the way that Elvis turned to gospel once he was out of the spotlight.

The story can be condensed inside three minutes: if Runaway is too played out for you, try That's The Way Love Is, a flop single from late '63. It comes on like a conventional love song, with girlie back-ups straight off a Paris Sisters session. Then Del starts to remember his misery, starts to tear chunks out of it. Before the end he's shaking, smashing things, putting his fist threw doors and still the pain won't go away. Even Elvis and the Big O couldn't cut you this deeply. And Del Shannon was truly in their league, a heavyweight who should be remembered with the same awe.

Something that was lost in the CD revolution thirty years ago was the beauty of the record label. Pye, Decca, Vertigo, Polydor, true design classics. Think of the Beatles and you think of black paper labels with a Parlophone pound-sign logo and the big 45 on the right to denote you hadn't just bought a shrunken 78. Blondie's Heart Of Glass could only ever be on the powder blue Chrysalis label with a butterfly flapping effetely in the corner.

Between the ages of seven and fourteen, though, the only label that counted for me was a murky brown colour with two white curvy lines, something that no one could mistake for the work of Barnett Newman or Peter Saville. It was the K-Tel label, home of the hits, usually 20 but sometimes as many as 24. For a boy on 20p a week pocket money, K-Tel was the only label that could give me any hope of keeping up with the kids at school whose dads bought them a hit single or two (usually on flashy labels like Bell or RAK) every saturday. So every three months or so, a new K-Tel compilation would appear with a snappy generic title - Music Power, Disco Rocket, Star Party - and for around three quid my collection would be bolstered with anything from Cockney Rebel and Pilot to War's Low Rider (cool) or Pussycat's Mississippi (not so). Philly soul, novelty, hard rock or whatever David Dundas was meant to be, it was all pop music to K-Tel. They were the kings, they dictated my record collection. Aged 12, more than anything in the world, I wanted to work for K-Tel.

The man whose job I coveted was Don Reedman, an Australian who was in at the beginning and later made himself wealthy with the Classic Rock and Hooked On Classics series. "From 1972 we were doing an album every couple of weeks" he remembers. "I was allowed to do what I wanted. I genuinely liked everything I did - Gladys Knight, Perry Como, I loved them all. We were kids having fun." So it really was as much fun as I'd imagined. I don't tell him that I used to invent compilations of my own and send them in to K-Tel hoping to steal his job. But, with a limited knowledge of non-hits, I could never have conceived Reedman's personal pride and joy: "Kenny Everett's World's Worst Record Show was a great one. We pressed it on brown vinyl. It looked like sick."

The company name doesn't quite have the home counties ring of His Master's Voice, and its roots, unsurprisingly, are in north America. The 'K' in K-Tel is one Philip Kives, a Winnipeg salesman of the Coloner Parker school. He began hawking kitchenware on the boardwalk in Atlantic City. "It was tough. I thought there had to be an easier way of earning a living. I came back to Winnipeg and Teflon pans had just come out, I bought some TV time on the local channel so I could demonstrate to a whole world of people at one time. I put the product in a department store. People saw the commercial and came to see me at the store."

The amiable Kives makes K-Tel's success sound so simple and entirely random. "I used to demonstrate at fairs. And some Australian people came up to me once and told me how nice their country was - I said 'Gee whizz, I've always wanted to go to Australia anyhow.' So when the fair was over I put five gross of knives on the airplane. Ten days later I was on TV in Newcastle, Australia, and it just took off. Five months later I'd sold a million knives and I made a dollar a knife."

His cutlery supplier, jealous of his success, "told me I was getting too big and cut me off - Seymour Popeil was his name, king of the kitchen gadgets. No more knives, slicers, choppers... I was born on a farm and I knew country music. I had to do something else, I thought why not do a music album? I thought it'd be a one-off. Everybody said 'that won't work.' Now all the major labels do compilation albums, but mine was the first."

It is forty years since Kives gave the world 25 Great Country Artists Singing Their Original Hits - the title was unwieldy but it was the first ever TV record and, in Winnipeg, it sold like billy-o.

Kives first hit Britain at the start of the seventies and used the same technique, taking an ad "on a local TV station in the north" - possibly Border - announcing that the Miracle Brush was on sale in the local Woolworths and Co-Op. Again, it sold out in hours the day after the advert. Now Kives decided to set up a British arm of K-Tel Records. Don Reedman had a twin brother who ran the label in Australia, which seemed a good enough reason to put Don in charge of the London office. His first project was 20 Dynamic Hits: it had the trademark, eye-stinging K-Tel cover with cut-out monochrome pictures of the artistes surrounded by multi-coloured circles. It looked like it had been put together by a kid with the full range of Letraset and four Caran Dache felt-tips. For me at least, this was part of the appeal. My dad bought 20 Dynamic Hits. So did three million other people. Out of the box, K-Tel UK outsold T Rex, Bowie, Carole King and Lieutenant Pigeon - they had 1972's best-selling album bar none.

Ask anyone involved with the label what their favourite K-Tel record is and they will reply, unswervingly, "the one that sold the most." Colin Ashby, the company's sales manager in the late seventies, had "come from the food industry. We were marketeers who happened to be marketing black plastic.There was no desire to win prizes or ad campaign of the year awards, no desire at all."
Ashby was with the company when ITV was taken off the air by industrial action in 1979. "Our TV spend in the seventies was as big as Heinz. The strike was from August to October. We lost money, it was disastrous, cut off our arms and legs. Funny thing was Heinz beans and Crosse And Blackwell Beans' sales weren't affected at all, and they came to a gentlemen's agreement that neither would do beans ads anymore."

Selling records like tins of beans was, astonishingly, beneath the major labels in the seventies. These days, Now That's What I Call Musicis single-handedly keeping the industry afloat - in K-Tel's heyday they were there for artist development, high culture, prog rock. It seems unbelievable now that they would license their biggest hits to an entrepreneurial company on the fume-choked Western Avenue and watch them sell a million records every time. "Oh, it was pure snobbery" says Colin Ashby. Rather than dirty their hands in what was called secondary marketing, "the labels took a 16% royalty on the retail price. We were seen as a necessary evil."

The TV ads were the ultimate hard sell - they would always cry "out now on K-Tel!" Thus the label cornered the baby boomer market, the six-albums-a-year buyers who also owned Bridge Over Troubled Water, something by Neil Diamond, and a Music Of Greece/Spain/package holiday souvenir album. It became a name that everybody recognised. "At every party I went to for years, as soon as I said I worked for K-Tel that was it. Everybody's got an idea for a compilation" groans Ashby. "'Why don't you do a brass band album?' they'd say. 'I'd buy it!'"

In North America, meanwhile, Philip Kives was still recording and starring in his own commercials as he had back in Winnipeg in 1962, a live shoot with a hands-on demonstration of the product. He would appear with the artist holding the record. Some acts were more fun to work with than others.
"Elton John, he was nice to do business with. And the singing barber, Perry Como - very, very nice. Liberace took to me to his house and made dinner for me and my wife. Then you turned around and had to deal with a guy like Sammy Davis Junior. He could only see in one eye. Did you know that? I didn't know that. He was talking to me but looking elsewhere and I thought he must have been talking to somebody else. And he screamed at me 'I'm TALKING to you! ANSWER ME!' Gee. He was tough."

K-Tel's boom years came to an abrupt halt in 1983. Richard Branson had more of the barrow boy about him than his major label rivals. He came up with the first Now That's What I Call Music, spent a pound per sale on promotion (K-tel aimed at around 15p a record) and created a brand. K-Tel just couldn't compete. Janie Webber joined the company at its peak in 1979: "I remember, it was our weekly meeting and someone brought in this record sleeve with a pig on it and I thought, 'What the fuck is that?" Colin Ashby: "Now That's What I Call Music? I thought wowee, that's a big title. We'd never have taken a chance on a title as long as that."

Squeezed out, K-Tel had ceased making records by the late eighties, and reverted to its original purpose - selling kitchen gadgets. Janie Webber oversaw its rennaissance from an industrial estate in Greenford, placing £3.99 cd's in supermarket dump bins and doing quite nicely on impulse purchases. Cutely, she joined the company because she was obsessed with making home-made compilations as a child. "I had a sign on my bedroom door that said 'Keep out - recording in progress.' Now I run the company. I feel a bit like Victor Kayam."

When you get right down to it, pop is pop and K-Tel were purest pop: Ultravox may still whine about the injustice of Vienna being kept off the top by Shaddap You Face, but when you are sandwiched between Racey and the Gibson Brothers on a K-Tel comp there's no place for pretension or revisionism. It may not be Motown but Philip Kives' K-Tel inadvertently produced dozens of perfectly formed time machines. Your local charity shop is waiting to transport you.

Bowie was an ex-Anthony Newley impersonator. Bolan had been dealing in Tyrranosaurus Rex's fairytale whimsy for years. For the cynic it must have seemed that rock's new order of the early seventies was nothing more than cast-offs from the previous decade: Slade, Sweet and Mud had all frantically plugged failed 45s in 1968. 10cc had more form than any of them - singer Eric Stewart had previously served time with The Mindbenders, while Graham Gouldman and Kevin Godley enjoyed a hit-free career as two of The Mockingbirds.

Gouldman, though, was different. The Mockingbirds may not have taken flight, but as a songwriter for others he'd been astonishingly successful: For Your Love, Bus Stop, Look Through Any Window, No Milk Today and Heart Full Of Soul were stone classics in anyone's book. "The ones I gave away were hits, the ones we kept were misses. I'd always wanted to play guitar in a band, but I became resigned to the idea of being a writer. And then we started 10cc and that satisfied every aspect for me, everything I'd ever wanted to do."

In the garden of the Spaniards Inn, Hampstead, his trademark curls a little greyer, Graham Gouldman is telling me about his pre-10CC 1968 curio The Graham Gouldman Thing. Most of the songs on it had already been hits for the likes of The Yardbirds, Hollies, Hermans Hermits and Wayne Fontana - melancholy miniatures of life at bus shelters, evenings in bedsits, rainy romances that celebrated the magic of the every day as sure-footedly as John Betjeman or Ray Davies.

"Some things worked beautifully, especially Bus Stop. Listening to it now, the first thing I notice is how good it is to hear real instruments. (Arranger) John Paul Jones loved strings and woodwind - you hardly ever hear woodwind anymore." It sounds like Jones had been listening an awful lot to Bach and Eleanor Rigby. Thing's baroque majesty, though, must have seemed a little out of step with 1968's calls to arms - Street Fighting Man et al - and it "got nice reviews but didn't set the world on fire." In Britain, it wasn't even released.

Gouldman had been obsessed with music since he was seven, "and my parents encouraged me - the fact I was crap at school helped. My uncle bought me a radio so I could listen to Radio Luxemburg and I remember going to bed with it stuck in my ear. So I was learning in my sleep, the way you learn a language. I'd wake up with it half strangling me."

He started to write songs while working in the back room of Bargains Unlimited, a clothes shop in Salford, unusually favouring minor chords which he found "more soulful. Major chords seemed pale and white. We used to go to the synagogue which must have had some sort of influence, the melodies there were very beautiful, mournful and aching." Gouldman met drummer Kevin Godley while rehearsing at the Jewish Lads Brigade in north Manchester and they formed The Mockingbirds - playing Gouldman's melancholy songs they soon earnt a deal with Columbia in 1964. One song Columbia rejected, For Your Love, was picked up by The Yardbirds, sold two million, and Gouldman the songwriter was on his way.

Hours spent in railway carriages between London and Manchester -"they had separate compartments then, a great environment for writing" - inspired songs like Look Through Any Window. But the greatest influence on Gouldman's mid sixties golden era was his father, Hymie.
"My father was a songwriter. No Milk Today was one of his titles. He used to call himself the mechanic - I'd bring him a broken lyric and he'd go 'D'you write them son? Ttcchh! Come back at five o'clock.' He used to say 'art for arts sake, money for God's sake.' I nicked that off him, too."

Just as The Graham Gouldman Thing was released, the hits suddenly dried up. "You're like a conduit when that magic happens. You think, how did I do that? What happened there? In 1968 I was still doing what I did, but I was out of sync with what has happening." After a short spell in The Mindbenders, Gouldman moved to New York and hooked up with the Kassenetz/Katz hit factory, responsible for timeless trash like Simon Says and Yummy Yummy Yummy.

"They wanted to legitimise themselves, find writers with more cred. It was pretty horrible." The final nail in the coffin was a song he wrote for Freddie And The Dreamers in 1969 called Susan's Tuba. "It was like The Producers - let's write the worst piece of shit imaginable!" The record sold a million in France. "I couldn't believe it. Where did we go right?" With the Graham Gouldman Thing and his sanity fast becoming a distant memory, a call came through from ex-Mindbender Eric Stewart who was setting up Strawberry Studios in Stockport. Still only 23, Gouldman boarded the next plane home, to join the ultra-successful band he'd always dreamt of.

In 1968 David Essex was offered the chance to record a song called Build Me Up Buttercup - he turned it down and it became a million seller for The Foundations. At this point, he already had four years of flops behind him dating back to 1965's And The Tears Came Tumbling Down. Mostly they were mediocre blue-eyed soul; the best song he cut in these lean years, So Called Loving, sat unreleased in Decca's archive until it was dug up to capitalise on his fame in the seventies. Partially his run of eight flop 45s in the sixties was down to bad luck, partially it was down to picking weaker songs than Build Me Up Buttercup as A-sides, but largely it was because the young David Essex didn't sound much like David Essex, the cockney sage of his later, golden years.
"It was before I was a writer. I suppose I was doing a second-hand Tom Jones effort. I did one single about mini-skirts called Thigh High."
Any good?
"Shocking."

If Thigh High had been a novelty hit maybe he'd only have be remembered as Canning Town's answer to Leapy Lee, a sixties one hit wonder pining for his days as a West Ham apprentice. Luckily for all concerned, Essex didn't score until his first self-written single came out in 1973.

Rock On was a masterpiece of minimalism, seemingly made up of nothing but echoes, rumbles, and spectral atmosphere. Today it still sounds like nothing else, as avant garde as any of Roxy or Bowie's contemporaneous tunes. It was part of the soundtrack to That'll Be The Day, a film that made for a three-day-week flavoured UK counterpart to the soda-pop nostalgia of American Graffiti. A grimy look at late fifties Britain and the nascent rock boom, it starred Essex as a bit of a bastard called Jim McLaine, shagging his way through life after dropping out of school and becoming a fairground grease monkey. Along with Slade In Flame, it was a lament for a lost pop era shot in Get Carter's long shadow. "We were shooting on the Isle Of Wight for seven weeks. Not exotic but big fun, amazing. I could tell you some stories, especially about the all night shoots" he teases, but of course he doesn't.

Rock On is as much about the confusion of early seventies Britain as it is with the hardness and desperate Gaumont pop of the pre-Beatles era. Everything that Bowie's Pin-Ups struggled to get across - a nervous farewell-cum-tribute to the early rock era, clothed in the gladrags of '73 - was encapsulated in Rock On's three and a half minutes. "Where do we go from here? Which is the way that's clear?"

"I'm glad Rock On did it, 'cause you just went anywhere you wanted after that, it was so unusual." And that's what David Essex did. The follow-up hit, Lamplight, featured a middle eight that sounded like the soundtrack to a Josephine Baker routine; his first album also included the dry, driving Streetfight, a pop precis of A Clockwork Orange that was later sampled by Massive Attack.

In 1974 came the Jim McLaine sequel Stardust, in which the anti-hero becomes a rock star: "It was really difficult because so much of what I was fictionalising was actually happening. I'd walk off the set into exactly the same situation."

At one point, superstar McLaine lives in a Moorish castle. "Me and Adam Faith (his manager in the film) made enquiries into buying the place. But there were troglodytes living underneath it and I had visions of them coming up to the castle with flaming torches - 'we want more cattle!' And us pouring boiling oil on them. It was very strange. Bit of an identity crisis going on. At least making Stardust taught me not to be a recluse and not to commit suicide live on worldwide TV, little things like that."

As Mike Leander's sparse and startling productions worked miracles for Gary Glitter, David Essex had the lab-coated Jeff Wayne to thank:"We used to try and be as experimental as we could in the studio. There's a fire extinguisher on Lamplight. For Stardust we had a bath filled up with water, and a gong which we whacked then dropped in so it went *bo-whoa-whoa*. It sounded great! If you listen to the track you can hear this drip-drip-drip as we take it out of the bath. The studio was flooded.

What with his gong-soaking antics and being "drawn towards Dr John", the NME and the heavy press loved Essex at first: "they saw me as a Lou Reed of England if you like. Then the Jackie magazine thing took hold - I hadn't changed musically but they dropped me like a ton of bricks." This kind of press reaction has inspired some dreadful self-pity over the years, epitomised by Stereophonics' bilious Mr Writer. "The cutting edge media response was 'Oh no, he's David Cassidy after all!' Essex responded with the self-effacing Gonna Make You A Star and scored another number one.

Thirty-odd years on from his Jackie period, he divvies up his time as Patron of the Gypsy Council ("an honour I gladly accepted"), member of Amnesty International ("playing Che in Evita was very important, the South American thing intrigues me, the people who disappear in the middle of the night") and West Ham season ticket holder. His dream of visting Cuba and meeting Fidel Castro came true a few years back. "It's an emotionally important place for me."

His back catalogue has been slowly re-appearing in full out on Demon and Cherry Red over the last few years. The recent appearance of Coming Home on this year's '76 TOTP re-runs sent me back to its parent album, the largely forgotten Out On The Street. Produced by Jeff Wayne and engineered by Martin Rushent, its eight, mostly lengthy, tracks make up an urban psychodrama that again bears comparison with Bowie - Diamond Dogs in this case. It lacks that album's over-cooked dramatics (none of 1984's goggle-eyed "into the woods I have to go"), and is advantaged by the '68-in-'76 vogue for the multipart epic (think 10CC's I'm Mandy Fly Me, the Four Seasons' Silver Star). The single City Lights was even released as a 12" to accomodate it's full 6.48 running time without compressing the sound too much (for better or worse, it is also the musical start point for Jeff Wayne's War Of The Worlds). It sounded like a Top 3 hit all the way, but stalled at 24, as did Coming Home, while the whispered al dente funk of Ooh Love didn't even reach the Top 50. Out On The Street, like Essex himself, is still largely underrated by the rock media. He knows he's not super hip. It hardly seems to bother him; after The River and EastEnders, he understands why the Mojo cover is some way off.

"I suppose I've done some funny things along the way like A Winter's Tale, you know, which... errm... OK, I've just done 'em!"

Walk around parts of the city of London and you stumble across them - strange walkways, stair wells and bridges, all seemingly heading nowhere. Like something from a brutalist CS Lewis novel, they are forgotten concrete portals to a vision of London that foundered in the Thatcher years. Now as mysterious and eerie as urban stone circles, these are the remnants of the abandoned Pedway scheme.

Its story is one of London's stranger secrets: planned obliteration not by the Luftwaffe or terrorists but by the GLC. The general idea was to wipe out central London as we know it and replace it with a massive road network at ground level, with pedestrians, shops, homes and offices at first floor level. Pretty Doctor Who you're thinking, but take a look at the Barbican, the most intact section of Pedway, and you'll get an idea of how the City fathers and the GLC envisaged a brand new London. I love the Barbican like a concrete brother, but I think I might miss the Temple, Leadenhall Market, and Newman Passage if they were all replaced by mile long corridors and rain-streaked pebbledash.

Steering pedestrians away from the stinky, overcrowded streets of London has been on the planning agenda since the nineteenth century. Back then, Holborn Viaduct and Tower Bridge in the city, and Rosebery Avenue and Clerkenwell Road to the north carried passengers along airy platforms away from the soot and grime. Charles Holden, of Piccadilly line station fame, and planner William Holford came up with a blueprint for rebuilding post-war London's financial centre in May '47; it included an eye-catching chapter called Pedestrian Ways which were to be "as fit for the traffic it carries as any of the main streets." Soon plans were drawn up for the Barbican and Paternoster Square developments which included towers, podiums and walkways, a modernist way around plot ratio and daylighting controls. The City Of London Corporation, usually the most conservative of bodies, was very taken. By 1965 an obscure corporation document, sinisterly named Drawing 3400B, made specific mention of the 'Pedway' for the first time - a thirty mile network from Liverpool Street to the Thames, from Fleet Street to the Tower. Within a couple of years, developers had to provide walkways - dedicated public rights of way - as a condition for planning consent. The future would be created by stealth, without the public knowing.

Straight away, the Pedway encountered problems. The fire brigade was struggling to find equipment suitable for the walkways having experimented unsuccessfully with some Austrian appliances. The police were unsure of their legal powers on the Pedway. Maintenance, cleaning and lighting bills for the corporation soared.

The biggest, and ultimately insurmountable, problem for the Pedway was the growth of the conservation lobby. Ironically, its seat of power was in the Barbican development, and its activists the very occupants of the one successfully completed network of "highwalks." They didn't object to the Pedway system itself (they hardly could when they weren't aware of its existence), but the networks of service roads and loading bays springing up at street level in anticipation of its completion. In 1971 eight conservation areas were devised for the city, a number which grew until the mid eighties when, scared of business emigrating to the Docklands, the city's conservation gave way to rampant redevelopment. Even air rights were sold - Terry Farrell's clunky Albangate scheme obliterated the spaciousness of London Wall, another Pedway jigsaw piece.

Tracing the remaining parts of the Pedway today is surprisingly easy, in spite of the City's mania for security. Large stretches of the 1976 minimum network - when the idea was largely abandoned - remain. Starting at Barbican station, the only listed part of the Pedway network takes you past the flats on Seddon Highwalk to the Museum Of London. The point at which concrete walls give way to tiles delineates the border of the listed area and the London Wall development. Passing through Albangate you reach a 1969 adjunct to the Pedway plan: kiosks, built to encourage pedestrians off the streets and onto the walkways. A green marble building - now the Young Bin restaurant - was originally a Midland Bank; nearby is a row of tailor's shops and an empty pub with the telltale name The Podium. The trail runs cold at Moorgate, though until this year grey/brown abutments for a never-built bridge left a curious hole above the station; the building was recently demolished. Bridges across Wormwood Street lead to amazing alleys that weave in and out of office blocks - all public space. But it's disappearing fast. Other Pedway pieces survive on Upper Thames Street, Leadenhall Street and around the stock exchange - now fenced off for security reasons. Gradually, chunks are disappearing as the building stock of the sixties is replaced.

The remaining Pedway provides a fair idea of how it could have worked. It is surprisingly bright with a great sense of space in the most densely built-up part of the city, especially when you consider private developers constructed most of it against their will. The air on the walkways is noticeably cleaner, too. Only the semi-abandoned stairwells feel claustrophobic.

How the walkways would have worked in other parts of London is more questionable (in 1967 the plan was expanded as far west as Soho and south to Elephant and Castle), and the planners' dreams of wholesale demolition and a pedestrian network to rival the quays of Paris now seems faintly embarrassing. Chicago and Hong Kong may have completed the job with marble, steel and glass: the London Pedway exists only as a concrete folly.

first photo copyright www.flickr.com/photos/darrenlewis
second photo copyright Smoke: A London Peculiar
many thanks to Elain Harwood

It wasn't Punk (necessarily). It wasn't Post Punk (too many angular/Joy Division/semi-Goth connotations). But the DIY record boom, which operated in tandem between 1977 and 1982, was one of the most influential scenes in the British pop saga. One of the most underrated too. It took rabid American and Japanese collectors to remind us in Britain, the home of DIY, that it ever happened. Names like The Petticoats, Thin Yogurts, Take It, Tronics, and Puritan Guitars barely figured in record collecting price guides until the last few years, let alone on nostalgia radio. But from C86 indie, to jungle/drum'n'bass white labels, to electronica innovators like City Centre Offices, their influence is wide and the debt is deep.

The sound was art school mirth. A kind of urban British folk inspired by Vivian Stanshall, music hall, and Dada. It was rickety, semi-musical, anyone could do it - it related to punk in the way skiffle had to rock'n'roll. DIY archivist Johan Kugelberg describes it as "the wild enthusiasm of being seventeen and discovering Alfred Jarry and the beauty of children's drawings." Strange, redundant keyboards were a common feature, as punk had laid waste to anything outside the guitar/bass/drums set-up and this old gear was going cheap (Martin O'Cuthbert's Vocal Vigilante EP lists a Dubreq Stylophone and a Crumar Performer as his instruments, both highly desirable now but obsolete technology in the post-punk heat of Feb '78).

The look was monochrome, handmade, an A4 photocopied sleeve wrapped around a hand-stamped seven inch single. Photos of the bands were rare. Grinder were an exception - their sleeve shows four blokes, three with moustaches, the other with a Rocky Horror tee shirt. DIY had no time for poseurs. Pseudonyms abounded, most probably so the dole office wouldn't get wind - after all, some of these records were selling thousands of copies, and you wouldn't want the DHSS to confuse you with a professional musician. Bearing this in mind, the sleeve to the sole EP by Hornchurch's What Is Oil?, on the Oof Potato Enterprises label, has the band members listed as Dunk, Mike, German, Stuntman, Falsk, Stoat, and - playing "toast with cheese" - Dungheap.

How and why the DIY craze happened is unclear, but the prize for being first out of the blocks goes to Desperate Bicycles' Smokescreen, released in the spring of '77. The band were formed "specifically for the purpose of recording and releasing a single on their own label." Their second release, The Medium Was Tedium, railed against the industry ("Just another commercial venture!") with as much righteous anger and ur-English humour as Anarchy In The UK, only the drums were cardboard, and Steve Jones' guitar had been replaced with Nicky Stephens' Winfield Farfisa. "It was easy, it was cheap, go and do it" ran the chorus and the sleeve boasted that the complete cost of recording and pressing a few hundred copies of Smokescreen was 153. "If you can understand, go and join a band." The floodgates opened.

Like the folk revival of a few years before, DIY was fiercely localised. One of the genre's most directly emotional singles was by Hornsey At War. Then there was The Good Missionaries' Deranged In Hastings, and Wickford's So Boring by the moustachioed Grinder. These were truly private projects. No one expected their records to reach beyond their home town's boundaries so contact addresses rarely appeared on the sleeve. It was far more common to find a list of pressing plants, printers and costs worked out to the penny - the Desperate Bicycles' £153 was the real benchmark of DIY. Competition over who could function on the smallest budget was intense. Johan Kugelberg: "Distributors like Rough Trade and Small Wonder couldn't get enough of these records. Punk was global. Buyers were hurting for records. There were at least 900 made in that window of opportunity between '79 and '81." In reality, these records left Hastings or Hornsey and, via the eager distributors, some copies ended up in Stockholm, San Francisco, Tokyo. The result was chaotic 45s like Do You Wanna Dance by The Silver, a band from Finland aged 12.

The Instant Automatons from North Lincolnshire are a classic DIY tale. Originally there were two schoolmates, Mark and Protag (aka Martin Neish). They decided to form a band but were held back by the fact they couldn't play, had no instruments, and didn't have a clue how to get a record deal. These were the rules of rock - in 1974 there was no alternative. Mark: "Like many teenagers I was painfully aware of my own mortality, so I started off writing poetry." Next they dabbled with signal generators and amps in the physics lab, pleased with their ability to approximate the German pulsebeats of Can and Kraftwerk. Then two major events happened - they left school and the Sex Pistols happened. "It's difficult to convey the sense of freedom that came with the rise of independent record labels and the bands that founded them. I suppose it was akin to witnessing the demolition of the Berlin Wall." Liberated, Mark and Protag got themselves a home-made synthesiser and a drum machine. They wrote various words on bits of paper, put them in a hat, pulled out "instant" and "automaton" and found a name. They called their label Deleted. Their first release was a C90 called Radio Silence - The Art Of Human Error and they advertised it in the music press. To get a copy you just had to send them a blank tape and an SAE. This was a first.

Like other one chord wonders, the Instant Automatons recorded at a London studio called Street Level. It was run by one Keith Dobson, known as Kif Kif Le Batteur, a former member of art hippies Here And Now who also worked for the still functioning International Times. Inspired by the Automatons, Kif Kif started his own cassette label - Fuck Off Records - and put together the Bad Music Festival at the Acklam Hall under the Westway in 1980 featuring bands from the cassette scene. Between 40 and 60 copies of Fuck Off cassettes were produced, most now lost or taped over. Danny And The Dressmakers recorded a box set of three C90s called 200 Cancellations. Johan Kugelberg is "utterly charmed by its total redundancy. Naive art school music, barely one chord, as subtle as Riesling." Distribution for Fuck Off and other cassettes duplicated by Kif Kif was provided by Better Badges, a company on the floor above the Street Level studio. NME and Sounds had weekly columns on cassette albums. This was a genuinely underground scene, about as far removed from corporate rock as you could ever get.

It began to wind down when the leading bands either got writers block (The Instant Automatons) or became musically proficient (Scritti Politti). "Most musicians are careerists" reasons Kugelberg, "their music becomes more professional, the distributors and journalists respond. Between '81 and '83 there was more of a focus on dance rhythms, the music was closing in on the mainstream." Bristol's avant screechers The Pop Group provide a case study as they splintered in 1980 producing a batch of new groups, all heavily rhythmic - The Mafia, Maximum Joy, Pig Bag, and Rip Rig And Panic whose singer, Neneh Cherry, completed the process by becoming a star at the end of the decade. How to get from the Rough Trade shop to Buffalo Stance in three easy stages.

If you can find them, DIY records are extraordinary artefacts, the last hurrah of the Angry Brigade, good hippy aesthetics, and the punk/situationist interface. And most are still relatively cheap (The Medium Was Tedium is thought to have sold 12,000 copies). If you can't find them, then the Messthetics series of CDs (available from www.hyped2death.com) provides an in. This was the sound of the underground; the hiss of the tape, the amateur pressing, the sloppiness and the sheer sense of glee, the feeling of liberty. To quote Hornsey At War, "They won't play this on the radio because it poses a threat."

Many thanks to Johan Kugelberg, Geoffrey Weiss, and Dan Fox at Frieze.

"I said to this priest 'Am I expected to believe that if I went out and had an affair that God was really going to be upset? If no one is any the wiser what the hell difference does it make?' He was lovely. He told me the Commandments were laid down for a lot of guys living in the desert."

Collective memory suggests that the early fifties was an era smeared with boredom, with Billy Cotton on the wireless and rationed gruel for dinner. In a country where everyone mucked in to muddle through, and where the blitz spirit meant that Vera Lynn could still score a number one hit as late as 1954, Diana Dors' beauty and easy charm must have seemed like an insult.

New York gave us Veronica Lake, Swindon gave us Diana Dors. For recent generations, the one-time Diana Fluck is best remembered, if at all, for appearing as a fairy godmother in an Adam And The Ants video. My first memories of her are as an overweight woman advertising her kiss-and-tell stories in the News Of The World; with no knowledge of her fifties heyday, I found her faintly repellent. "There is something a bit rubbish about her" says biographer Damon Wise, "rubbishy and British."

Like G-plan, for post-war Britain that was enough. By Hollywood standards she was a little plump, and she wasn't exactly pretty, but this didn't matter. Bursting onto UK cinema screens in all her curvaceous splendour, Diana Dors was the definition of a glamourpuss; she also looked like a whole heap of fun and a sack load of trouble. American stars were on another planet, but girls in Dewsbury knew they could be her, boys in Dartford knew they could meet her.

At five she had elocution lessons, quickly losing her West Country burr. At twelve, she was hanging out with GI's at a nearby army base. Most of the time, Dors was in the local Roxy, and at school she filled exercise books with the name of every movie star she could think of. She dreamed of having a cream telephone - an unimaginable luxury in forties Swindon. Dors attended LAMDA with classmates Christopher Lee, Pete Murray, and fellow pin-up Sandra Dorne, and soon landed some minor roles. But it was on meeting her first husband, Dennis Hamilton, that she created the Diana Dors legend. Hamilton encouraged her to live beyond her means - driving a Rolls Royce, wearing a mink, all on borrowed money - and suddenly, in the monochrome austerity years, the press couldn't get enough of her. "The problem with British films in the fifties is the lack of emotion" says NFT curator Jo Botting. "They de-sexualised women. But Diana Dors just looked fabulous, really. She looked dangerous."

Diamond City was Dors' first starring role in 1949 (her first line: "You shut up!"). She played barmaid Dora Bracken in a South African diamond mining town in the 1870's. It was an attempt at a British western, though the starchy David Farrar - a cut-price Stewart Granger - is no kind of hero. Instantly typecast, Dors is fighting for the attention of Farrar with bible-bashing Honor Blackman in a real battle of the busts. The two actresses end up in a saloon catfight, Dors finally decking Blackman with her diamond-encrusted fist. Still brown-haired, just seventeen, Dors often turned up on set without sleeping, having been up all night with the Chelsea set. "The make-up man had the devil's own job with my eyes, which grew baggier and smaller as the weeks went by" she later recalled.

Dors is frequently referenced as Britain's 'answer' to Marilyn Monroe, but her fifties films show an actress with a decidedly English sass. She didn't feel the need to be caught reading Sartre, or marrying playwrights, and was more than happy to play the party girl - it suited her demeanour, and on-screen she was closer to Mae West than Marilyn. If she became typecast as the knowing innocent or the sexual predator it didn't bother her, and her saucy roles were unique in post-war British cinema. As model Dolores August in Lady Godiva Rides Again, she claims to have met a pair of suitors at the Festival of Britain - "I picked them up in the Dome Of Discovery" - while her startling cameo as an actress in 1956's As Long As They're Happy leads Jack Buchanan to "capture her for posterity". "You leave my posterity out of this" she winks back.

The films were frequently smaller than her presence. Released on a BFI DVD last year, My Wife's Lodger (1952) has a script riddled with puns so weak ("Have you been creating a career for yourself in Korea?", "No, I was committing suicide in Suez") you'd think jokes were being rationed. An odd mix of Three Stooges slapstick and pre-war music hall, it is an intriguing curio, but Dors - playing a girl called, with characteristic British glamour, Eunice - cuts through the austerity fug with a jitterbugging exhibition. The main reason for her appearances in such minor movies (she was making an average of four a year in the fifties) was her husband and agent Dennis Hamilton. Down from Luton, he was a failed actor and was working as a door-to-door salesman when he spotted his golden ticket and wowed her with huge bouquets of flowers. Off camera, he initiated Dors into the world of sex parties and two-way mirrors; he also stunted her career like an ungodly mix of Colonel Tom Parker and Simon Cowell by guiding her away from serious roles, roaring "to hell with all that acting rubbish!" Light entertainment, as ever, was where the money was.

Is Your Honeymoon Really Necessary (1953) was fresher, and captures her on the brink of stardom. While Britain gave her second billing to bumbling ur-Englishman David Tomlinson, the French poster was topped by the legend "la ravissante Diana Dors", and in Italy the rest of the cast weren't even mentioned - the poster featured Diana alone, perched on a cloud in a slinky blue gown. Candy Markham was the perfect role for her; the script was undemanding, a bedroom farce with a few good lines, but she sashays assuredly through every scene knocking men aside like bowling pins. Britain had never seen anything quite like this. After Is Your Honeymoon Really Necessary, she would never play a character called Eunice again.

Meanwhile in 1953, Marilyn Monroe was shooting the film that made her an international phenomenon, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. There was no reason to suppose, prior to this, that Monroe was anything other than healthy competition for a shapely blonde, but from '53 onwards Dors was walking in her shadow.

Nonetheless, she looked spectacular in Value For Money (1955) which found her in a succession of gorgeous gowns and swimsuits. Platinum-blonde and rid of her puppy fat, she is the only reason to watch this drowsy comedy about a tight-fisted Yorkshireman (John Gregson) who meets a gold-digging showgirl in London. "She'll throw our money around like confetti" warns Gregson's father, "it'll roll off every curve of her sinful body!" It was a fun farce, but not a patch on Yield To The Night (1956). This was her best role, and also her least glamorous. It is loosely based, like Dance With A Stranger, on the Ruth Ellis case, and Dors as Ellis spends much of the film in a cell awaiting execution. Director J Lee Thompson (Woman In A Dressing Gown, No Trees On The Street, Tiger Bay) had previously found the best of Dors in another prison drama, 1953's The Weak And The Wicked. "Putting glamour and serious acting into separate compartments" she said at the time "makes me sick."

By now a huge star at home, a spell in Hollywood proved her undoing. At a housewarming party with a guest list including Tony Curtis, Lana Turner, Doris Day, Eddie Fisher and Gregory Peck, Dors was dunked in the swimming pool by a photographer. Dennis Hamilton went nuts and kicked the photographer senseless, earning a National Enquirer headline "Go home Diana - and take Mr Dors with you." She was nicknamed Marilyn Bovril and given a couple of tired, obvious roles (The Unholy Wife and I Married A Woman) and did a 1960 Vegas cabaret stint before returning home.

The sixties were not Diana Dors' era. The second Julie Christie appeared on screen in Billy Liar, the game was up: Diana Dors was pre-Beatles. Still she maintained her fame while her Rank starlet contemporaries - Sandra Dorne, Christine Norden, Carol Leslie - drifted into obscurity. Like Brigitte Bardot, Dors made some exquisite records as her acting career tailed off. Pick of the bunch are the Morrissey-approved So Little Time (1964), urgent and sexual as hell, and Garry (1966), a breathy British take on Phil Spector. Both sound homegrown, a little gauche, but therein lies the appeal.

Diana Dors knew her limitations, pushed bare-faced cheek to the limit, and never played the tragedy queen. When she was broke between films in the fifties, she went round Hertfordshire with Dennis Hamilton selling water softeners - an episode which ended with the pair climbling down knotted sheets to avoid paying the hotel bill. Later on, as a "diet buster" agony aunt on TV AM, she would be weighed with all her jewellery on, then remove it in the toilet to miraculously lose weight by the end of the programme. Her choice of friends (Freddie Starr, PJ Proby, 'Dandy Kim' Waterfield) was unfortunate, her husbands (Hamilton, who died of syphilis, the depressive drunk Alan Lake) worse. A relentless self-documentarist, books like Swingin' Dors are feisty, but have a wistful quality. In a way, she seemed genuinely innocent. "Nobody ever had a bad word to say about her" says Damon Wise.

In many ways her talent was under-developed - her real life lines were funnier and saucier than most she was given by scriptwriters. In 1964 she sat on a Juke Box Jury panel next to Rolling Stones manager Andrew Oldham, who'd had a boyhood crush on her. As he nervously picked up a glass of water it spilt all over Diana's lap - "My my", she purred off mike, "you couldn't wait." You can't imagine Marilyn coming up with a line like that, let alone the wobbly Jayne Mansfield. Diana Dors was knowing, effortless, mischief personified. Leaning on a bar in My Wife's Lodger she sighs "I don't know what to drink - I'm so hot." "Lady", says the wag next to her, "you said it."

In The Midnight Bell, his first great novel, Patrick Hamilton paints a picture of the pub at one minute to five: "a faint bustle of preparation in the other bars, but deep silence in the saloon. The governor had now reached the door. He slid back the upper bolt... a sharp click, a grunt of achievement, and The Midnight Bell was open." The similarity to the hush of anticipation before a theatre curtain goes up is intentional - to Hamilton, the pub (most likely The Prince Of Wales' Feathers on Warren Street, Fitzrovia) was his theatre. Same characters but a different performance every night, and he rarely missed a show.

Peter Ackroyd has called Patrick Hamilton one of London's great voices. Born into a reasonably wealthy Sussex family in 1904, he fell disastrously in love at 23 with a West End prostitute called Lily. While moping after her he spent much time in saloon bars, lounge bars, public bars, hanging out with small-time crooks, broken bar staff, fascist sympathisers, and other misfits and losers. According to his brother Bruce, it played havoc with his complexion and hairline, but gave him an ear for a turn of phrase and a talent for finding gold in the everyday. It also catapulted him from minor writer into the role of critics' choice when The Midnight Bell was published in 1929.

Yet neither The Midnight Bell nor 1941's grimly terrifying Hangover Square are what Hamilton is best remembered for. In 1929 he also wrote a play called Rope; ten years later he wrote another called Gaslight. Both were enormously successful, running for years around the world, and both were turned into Hollywood films. Separating art and commerce, he considered Rope "a thriller, nothing but a thriller" but his plays made him a fortune at a time when writing stage melodramas was still, in the early days of cinema, a viable career. Even so, he thought of them as popular entertainments, and almost entirely unrelated to his novels.

Compared to The Midnight Bell, Rope was a strange, stilted thing. It concerned two students of Nietzsche who attempt the 'perfect' murder purely for kicks, and was based around a gimmick: centre stage throughout the play was a trunk containing the victim's body. The story seemed to be based on the case of Leopold and Loeb, two rich, smart American kids who kidnapped and killed 14-year old Bobby Franks. Brandon, the more manipulative killer, is one of the thoroughly heartless types who crop up in most of Hamilton's work - whether it is Netta, the bitchy actress in Hangover Square, or Ralph Ernest Gorse, the clinical anti-hero of a post-war trilogy.

Alfred Hitchcock's 1948 film of Rope is best remembered for being shot in a sequence of eight minute takes. It also played up the Leopold and Loeb link, inferring the killers were gay (Loeb was killed in prison after making advances to another inmate) which was enough to see the film banned in Chicago, Seattle and Memphis. The tension of the script, though, is dissipated by both Hitchcock's experimentation - you can't for a second forget that the takes are v-e-r-y long - and Farley Granger's continuous darting around the screen like a sweaty chicken. His performance couldn't be further from Hamilton's cold, clipped script. The author was unimpressed, describing the film as "sordid and practically meaningless balls."

Gaslight was a different story. By 1938 Hamilton was a confirmed Marxist, and the grisly greed of the evil Gregory, quite happy to spend years driving his wife to madness in order to gain some jewels, reflected his belief that capitalism - accelerated by the rise of the Nazis - was coming to an end. The British film from 1940, directed by Thorold Dickinson is desperately claustrophobic with Gregory (Anton Walbrook) marked out as Bella's (Diana Wynyard) persecutor from the off. Everywhere there is melancholy and menace. "A dirty evening for a stroll, sir" remarks a policeman. "There are a lot of dirty things in London" replies Gregory.

George Cukor's 1944 slow-burning remake finds a lambent Ingrid Bergman cast as Bella, rather than the ageing spinster Hamilton envisaged. Charles Boyer, away from his usual matinee idol roles, is well cast as a more insidious Gregory than Walbrook's. Still, amidst the gloss there is plenty of room for Hamilton's casual English banter; on a train journey, a woman offers Bella a digestive biscuit - "unpleasant name, isn't it? I always call them diggy biscuits!" When the maid Nancy (a slatternly Angela Lansbury in her debut film) first appears, Gregory asks "I hope you're not a flighty girl."
"I don't think so, sir" she replies, with a sly air that Hamilton must have been quite familiar with.

The only novel that made it to the big screen was Fox's 1945 take on Hangover Square. Suffice to say that in place of the novel's alcohol-drenched pre-war paranoia is a period drama about a bunch of fancy Edwardians who live in Hangover Square, Fulham. It really is that crass. A fine, forgotten actor called Laird Cregar (also in This Gun For Hire with Veronica Lake) loved the book and persuaded Fox to make the film only to see it bowdlerised beyond recognition - as George Henry Bone, the principal character, he was probably more embarrassed by the results than even Patrick Hamilton and died of heart failure, aged just 28, before the film was released. All Hangover Square has to recommend it beyond Cregar's browbeaten performance is the quite beautiful Linda Darnell (Rex Harrison's wife in Preston Surges' Unfaithfully Yours) as Netta, and an early Bernard Herrmann score that anticipates his Hitchcock work.

The BBC chose Hamilton's best early work for their 2005 adaptation, Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky, a trilogy in which Hamilton captured the whole rootless population of London by focusing on just a few characters, and one setting - The Midnight Bell. Bob and Ella work behind the bar. He is young and handsome, but drinks heavily, and fatally falls for a prostitute called Jenny who slowly tears his life to shreds; Ella, secretly in love with Bob, watches helplessly.

Oddly, it is filmed in an impure monochrome, like a colourised film that has been left in a damp cellar: once you get used to it, the relentless greys, greens and browns of thirtiess Fitzrovia look all the glummer for it. This is just about the only liberty taken - the screenplay adheres to Hamilton's dialogue without missing a beat. Which puts a lot of pressure on the performances. Zoe Tapper's Jenny is as dizzyingly pretty, blonde and coquettish as she is blank, a combination intriguing enough to ensnare Bob beyond all reason. When he proudly points out that Dickens used to live on the same street as her, Jenny giggles "Dickens! Silly old bugger, ain't he?"

Ella is clearly warm-hearted but, rejected by Bob, can find no outlet for her genorosity. The doe-eyed Sally Hawkins, fresh from Fingersmith, has a permanently melancholy expression that betrays Ella's endless disappointments. Still, her stoicism can't prepare her for the leech-like attentions of Mr Ernest Eccles (Phil Davis): his family are "army" he keeps reminding her; he's a "good catch" everyone else chips in. You can smell his rotten teeth, his stale port and stilton breath. He is horrid. The only real flat note is Bryan Dick's Bob: streetwise and smirking, flat cap fixed at a rakish angle, he seems far too savvy to fall for gauche Jenny's looks alone. Hamilton's creation was surely more bookish. While Jenny's daft comment on Dickens should ruin the learned Bob's whole evening, here he just rolls his eyes as if it to say "Women, eh?" We never really understand his intentions - why he doesn't just slip her a tenner and get it over with.

It's hard to fault the settings (recognisably Fitzrovia) or the score (think Pennies From Heaven), though, and the attention to detail in a BBC period drama is something to be treasured after catastrophes like their make-over jobs on Casanova and Beau Brummel. The final episode - with Ella fending off the grisly, grasping Eccles - is particularly claustrophobic, engrained with sooty black humour. No small feat: this is the first time anyone can claim to have captured the real fug and fog of Hamilton's novels.

Hamilton naively believed that the end of the war would lead to a bright new Britain and he became quite disillusioned, seeking solace in the sauce more than ever. "Even Marx was the victim of the same pathetic illusion" he wrote to his brother. "He could see the bloody struggle ahead. What he failed to see was that the bloody struggle was so horribly distant." The contentious character that grew from Hamilton's increasing misanthropy was Ernest Ralph Gorse, a thoroughly believable monster who gently, ruthlessly destroyed everybody around him before moving on, from Brighton to Henley to some other town full of willing victims. There is no love and precious few sympathetic characters in the Gorse trilogy (loosely adapted in the eighties by ITV as The Charmer) which was poorly received at the time. Today Gorse's inscrutable evil feels blackly convincing. He is a man cut from the same cloth as fifties petty crims turned killers like George Smith, John "Acid Bath" Haigh and Neville Heath. Far too nihilistic to be filmed, he may be Hamilton's strongest, if most elusive, creation.

In the end, Patrick Hamilton's true life's work was unfilmable. While his plays invariably ended with truth and justice emerging victorious, the hours he spent in gin palaces, chasing hopeless romances and wasting small fortunes, were worked into deeply atmospheric novels of great humanity and obliterating darkness. With little hope of redemption to be found in the bottom of a bottle, Hollywood turned away.

"This is a serious message", it begins. "Peace and love", it says at least once too often. Ringo Starr's weird trashing of his own reputation, first on his website and then all over on Youtube in 2008, made for painful and hilarious viewing. To give him credit, the man has attempted to sign everything he's been sent by fans since 1963; he was almost 70 and wanted to tell the world he couldn't keep up. Of course, it might have helped if he hadn't added that all future fanmail "will be tossed", or delivered this minor news item with the scary line "I'm warning you with peace and love."

Ringo probably wouldn't have been the people's candidate for favourite Beatle before this outburst, not because of any other ill-advised Youtube postings, or for any animosity towards Thomas The Tank Engine, but simply because he was the fourth member of a group that featured three of the most talented singer-songwriters of his generation.

In spite of their oneness, and the inability of anyone outside Britain to tell them apart in 1964, everyone tends to have a favourite Beatle. At various points in their career and afterlife the world seems to have had a collective favourite. In the eighties, after his death, it was undoubtedly John Lennon; when Oasis and the Anthology series brought their music back to the Britpop table in the nineties, John was still regarded as the most innovative, the most significant, the sharpest Beatle.

George was the underdog, the indie Beatle. It might be something to do with the recent folk boom, or the general feeling of achievement by understatement in the most lauded pop (Fleet Foxes, Animal Collective) of the last few years, but a straw poll amongst friends, colleagues and musicians places George at the top of the table in 2011.

Of course, favourite Beatle and best Beatle aren't the same thing. "It's a peculiar testament" says Todd Rundgren, whose links to the group are a public spat in the NME with Lennon in the seventies and played in Ringo's All Starr Band two decades back. "'Favourite' used to just mean the cutest, or the funniest. Now each has his own body of work it's different."

Ringo could probably have claimed the crown when the Beatles first broke in the States, a time when they - and Ringo especially - were regarded as some new breed of being: half human, half haircut. "I did several tours with Ringo and he was terrific to work with" says Rundgren. "Briefly I worked with him pre AA, on a Jerry Lewis Telethon in the late seventies, and he wasn't at all like John Lennon on the rampage, he was... a little more jovial. It was the first time I'd had any dialogue with Ringo and he must have remembered it fondly because he called me up years later. He was always level headed and easy to deal with. It was the other crazies in the All Starr Band I had to look out for! Half the band were in AA and the other half needed to be. But Ringo was terrific. He just enjoys playing music, it's obvious."

Gem Archer's own Beatles obsession began when he was fed tapes by his cousin from the age of 8. "I remember hiding The Beatles At The Hollywood Bowl in the schoolyard. Punk was happening and people thought they were poofs, because they wore ties and stuff. Some kid came to my door and sold me his sister's copy of Imagine for 50p. I was known as the Beatles fan in the village."

Lennon was his favourite, "of course. It was a journey with him. It still is, man. He's still there with all of us. He was perfect - the Rickenbacker, the hair, the boots - but he was imperfect. Completely human. He let his hair down on all of us."

The odd thing about John Lennon, the most anti-establishment Beatle, is that he is now the one with an airport named after him, the one who wrote the cosy, fathomless, unofficial world anthem Imagine, the one who created proto-Live Aid 'event pop' with All You Need Is Love, and thus, in 2011, the most revered by the establishment. Gem Archer's wife "is a teacher, and they teach him now: Recent History, year 5. It's because he grew up in the war, and then he preached peace. And of course there's no danger of him spoiling it by shooting some granny now."

In the days before every Beatles-related event meant blanket media coverage, a small film like The Birth Of The Beatles could sneak out on the BBC almost unnoticed. Forgotten by many, it can now only be found on pirated dvds. The kid with the quiff playing Hamburg-era George was John Altman, who would define small screen infamy a few years later when he first appeared in Albert Square as Nick Cotton. His favourite "was always George. He was a Pisces, like me, and I thought I looked a bit like him. Similar ears. I think that's one of the reasons I got the part in Birth Of The Beatles. This kid used to flick my ears from behind in the playground, you know what kids are like. My mum said don't worry, Clark Gable had ears like that and he was a pin-up. So that made me feel better. I wonder if George got stick for it at school."

Altman's first taste of the Beatles "was Please Please Me, on the radio in the wintertime. I'd never heard that sound before. It was a bit like the first time I heard Hendrix, exciting and vibrant. The next stage in my Beatles habit was getting Please Please Me, the album, for Christmas. I left it on the Dansette record player, and it warped. I remember desperately trying to iron it flat on an ironing board with a damp towel on top. A sad end."

As he grew up with the band Altman would "listen out for George's contributions, the songs on Rubber Soul and Revolver, like Taxman. They were quite special. And they built up to All Things Must Pass - every musician has an apex and I think that was his."

They never met. "Pete Best was the technical advisor on Birth Of The Beatles, and he was the only Beatle I met. The only quote I heard from any of them about the film was that Ringo found it quite amusing." Altman still sounds slightly disappointed by this.

George's allure could also be down to his vagueness, which allows fans to fill in the blanks any way they wish. John and Paul are open books, foibles exposed, but if George had a dating profile it would be of the one photo, one-liner variety, mystique unquestionably enhanced. He was the only Beatle without an obvious role. "Paul was the cute one" recalls Todd Rundgren, "John was the smart one; each had a bailiwick they were in charge of. Ringo was the cuddly one. The short, homely, cuddly one. Girls liked Ringo, at least girls who thought Paul was out of reach, too cute by half."

Rundgren's favourite is also George. "For me, his contribution was to elevate guitar to a special status. I'm unaware of anyone using the expression 'lead guitar' before The Beatles, and that was a position highlighted by George Harrison. It drew guitar players into taking their playing more seriously. Solos on records could've been anything - a saxophone, an ocarina - but on Beatles records I'd always look forward to how that little interlude would be filled by lead guitar. In the case of George Harrison it was concise, accessible, a bit clever. It was also short and accessible enough for most guitarists to work out, even without George's finesse."

In the early eighties, while he was still Orange Juice's singer, Edwyn Collins had his My Top Ten list printed in Record Mirror. Alongside entries by Al Green and George McCrae was The Beatles' She Said She Said - Edwyn wrote that he particularly liked "George's astringent guitar". I was a huge Orange Juice fan - I remember having to look up "astringent".

When Edwyn Collins met his partner Grace Maxwell he told her his "favourite guitarists were John Fogerty and George Harrison. When people say they don't like The Beatles, they may as well say they don't like fresh air. 'I hate fresh air!' It's ridiculous."

After Collins had a stroke in 2005, lying in a hospital bed, he didn't want to hear any music. Three years before, he had written a song called The Beatles, which managed to lyrically condense their career inside four minutes. "After nine or ten weeks Grace brought in an old tape I'd made, a compilation. The first track, I remember, was Promised Land by Johnnie Allen, and the second had me in tears."
"Tears?" laughs Grace, "You were in floods! You were bawling."
The song was Photograph, sung by Ringo Starr, and written by George Harrison.

Mojo has featured some combination of Beatles on their cover more than a dozen times in just under 200 issues. Editor Phil Alexander reckons there are still plenty of untold, or at least unexplored, stories to make them newsworthy. He has noted George's ascent to the summit. "You can see why people say George now - he was the coolest. Not acerbic like Lennon, not thumbs aloft, and he wasn't playing the Ringo good guy role. He was mystical and cool. He's the fashionable choice. Stupid as it might sound, I think the unsung hero of The Beatles today is Paul."

If favourite Beatle and best Beatle are not the same thing, it could be true that Paul McCartney - the most successful songwriter in British pop history - is undervalued. "It's just deeply unfashionable to say Paul is your favourite" says Alexander. "It sounds callous to wonder how people would feel if he died tomorrow because it might just happen, and I don't mean to use death as a barometer, but it's true - I think they'd say he was the best Beatle. After John Lennon died, Paul said that his exterior had been a front, and I sometimes wonder how he views his own exterior. The way he often says 'we were a pretty good little group', that kind of false modesty, can be irritating, but if he believed everything people said about him he'd go mental. To have survived what he survived, you have to respect him."

As a teenager, Anneliese Midgley worked in Liverpool's Beatles Shop on Mathew Street. "People would ring up and say 'Can I speak to The Beatles?' We got a bundle of letters for them every day. Not everyone was a loony, some were just asking for mugs, or fridge magnets, or where Paul lived, but quite a few would say 'I LOVE YOU' in scrawly capital letters. Paul got the most, definitely. George? No. He was really the outsider, not like today. He was not as fashionable."

In her nineties stint at the shop, Anneliese met all three surviving Beatles - Paul left the greatest impression on her. "I was 14 and I'd got a Saturday job there. It was just before he did the Liverpool Oratorio. He was rehearsing at the Philharmonic one week, and me and my best friend waited outside. His crew were really nice - they could tell we were just kids, not crazy fans. We went most days, and Paul would come out and say hello. It must have been easter, 'cos one day he brought us all creme eggs."

Up in Glasgow, Grace Maxwell had to use her imagination for a Beatle fix. "You know the metal poles that hold up clothes lines? There were four in our back garden. We'd make each one a Beatle. You'd run over, snog the clothes pole, and say which Beatle it was. Mine was Paul. Does that sound weird?"

"Paul is the best Beatle" reckons Anneliese. "It's obvious. Take Double Fantasy and McCartney II, made in the same year (1980). I heard Front Parlour (from McCartney II) in a club in Shoreditch a few years ago, and everybody was asking what it was, everyone thought it was some German electronic group. Paul was thinking of the future, how the eighties would be. On Double Fantasy, John was going back to his roots, again. Boring, really. Paul still makes a real effort, and maybe that's just not fashionable."

Phil Alexander is inclined to agree. "John's crusading mentailty made him a cult figure, compounded by his passing. He was the bravest - the records he made with Yoko are still controversial, so ahead of their time, but Paul still wants to do new things even to this day. The last Fireman record was really musical and brave, despite the bizarre, politician aura around him."

Todd Rundgren, possibly keen to start another spat with a Beatle in the British press, feels a little differently. "George peaked around the Bangladesh concert. Ringo did Photograph, that was a good song. John's career was healthy because of album oriented radio, he wasn't played so much on AM. But Paul was getting regular Top 40 attention, even if it was a crappy piece of junk like Silly Love Songs. He's so erratic. He pulled it off with Band On The Run. But the stuff with Michael Jackson - Say Say Say and The Girl Is Mine? Dreck! It's weird. He's too willing to do anything. When he thinks he's not on AM radio enough he makes an attempt to do it and it comes out embarrassing, back to his baby talk again. He doesn't realise how much things have changed."

A compilation of tracks from the last five McCartney studio albums would, I reckon, be enough to cement his legend. They contain songs that are at least equal to any of his post-Beatles output, and good enough for the thumbs aloft, 'good little band' persona to be forgotten: The End Of The End is quite possibly the saddest, and most elegant song written by any sexagenarian pop star.

The Beatles' reach goes beyond just their music. "If anybody was going to make the sixties explode it was John Lennon" says Gem Archer. "It wasn't David Crosby. It certainly wasn't Elvis. And Dylan didn't put himself up for it, did he?"

And Ringo? His comments about Liverpool on the Jonathan Ross show have to be seen as tongue in cheek, his fanmail comment the outburst of a grouchy 69-year old having a bad day. Anneliese Midgley, who has only had to field a fraction of the questions from Beatles nuts that overworked Ringo has, nails the conundrum.

"My favourite Beatle is The Beatles. They're like four quarters that make up a circle. They're inseparable."

When Dion signed to Columbia Records in 1962, a year after Bob Dylan, he was already a wealthy and very famous singer: The Wanderer, A Teenager In Love, Runaround Sue, and - most angsty of all - (I Was) Born To Cry had made him the teen idol most loved by American girls, most admired by American boys. Columbia must have thought they knew what they were getting, and it wasn't someone who, with a New York accent as heavy as Al Pacino-on-rye, would say things like "the blues is the naked cry of the human heart, like someone waiting to be in union with God."

What happened after his run of hits was four years of heroin addiction, and a total immersion in New York's folk and blues scenes. This was the start of a slow-burning process that led to a Grammy nomination for 2006's Bronx In Blue, an album of Hank Williams, Howlin' Wolf and Jimmy Reed covers. Personally, I think it should have gone to the record that brought Dion back from the teen idol graveyard in 1968 - it was originally called Dion but is usually given the title of the hit single taken from it, the delicate Abraham Martin And John.

"Lemme tell you about that record" he begins, a practised storyteller. "After Martin Luther King was shot, Bobby Kennedy was at his coffin and he said 'Who'll be the next victim of a senseless act of violence?' And three months later he was assassinated. The record came out of a frustration. These guys are reaching for a state of love. People are cutting them down but we're not going to give up. The song was trying to be part of a solution."

The song exploded, a Top 5 hit. It had a soulful humanity that people hadn't heard from Dion Di Mucci before. And it coincided with a relocation - in the old tradition - from New York to Florida.

"I'd just moved here and I'd just sobered up. What could you say? The mid sixties was kind of a lost time for me. Musically I was woodshedding but, y'know, drugs can take their toll and kill your ambition. So I'd come down to Miami to get away from myself. Lo and behold, I came along with me. I got down here, went to a church, got on my knees and said a prayer and I haven't had a drink or drug since. April the first, 1968. And a few weeks later this song came along. To me, it was like it dropped out of heaven."

"The album was done, and all the arrangements, within a week. They were songs I sang around the house. I just went in with my little nylon string guitar. John Abbott from Staten Island did the arrangements. He was a beautiful guy. He always had some french fries. He'd lead the band with a french fried potato."

It includes woodwind-borne, blue sky renditions of Leonard Cohen's Sisters Of Mercy, Dylan's Tomorrow Is A Long Time, and, most intriguingly, Jimi Hendrix's Purple Haze alongside the originals. The album brought Dion in from the cold, and re-united him with Laurie Records, the New York indie that had realised most of his monster hits. The Columbia deal, signed in '62, had started sweetly enough with Ruby Baby, one of his best and biggest 45s. "Then (A&R man) John Hammond played me Robert Johnson's Preachin' Blues that he was putting on a compilation. I realised that this music was probably the undercurrent to everything I did in my life."

After Drip Drop was a Top 10 hit in early '64, Dion began to release singles like Hoochie Coochie Man, Willie Dixon's Spoonful and his own folk-blues The Road I'm On. The latter made it onto the young Marc Bolan's setlist but Dion's teenage fans were more than a little confused: a few months later they'd be lapping up imported versions of the same songs by the Stones, Yardbirds and Pretty Things.

"There was a guy called Buddy Lucas, he played sax for me on The Wanderer, a 300 pound guy. Big guy. He recruited a bunch of guys from the Apollo Theatre. Blues were their roots and they supported me, tried to help me out. I was experimenting." Columbia, who were hoping he'd become a "legitimate" singer like Bobby Darin, were in no mood for experiments. Among the finest, and rarest, of his Columbia 45s is the folk rock stormer Tomorrow Won't Bring The Rain - teeth-clenched, ringing like the bells of Rhymney, it's a match for any Byrds or Dylan 45. Its rarity suggests just what Columbia thought of it.

"I had to leave! They didn't know what I was doing! Tom Wilson, my producer, he encouraged me. And I sat in on a couple of Bob Dylan sessions. But they'd signed a popular rock 'n' roll artist, not a guy who hung out in the Village with Tim Hardin and Richie Havens."

The label let a few singles dribble out, but the full force of Dion's folk-blues revelation could only be felt on Wonder Where I'm Bound, a 1969 album Columbia issued to cash in on the success of Abraham Martin & John; these recordings were firmly in the collectors-only camp until a couple of Sony cds (The Road I'm On and Bronx Blues) were released in the nineties. In 1968, after six years away, Laurie welcomed the returning prodigal who could do no wrong for them, more than happy to release a whole album. Abraham Martin And John "came from sitting in my little back yard, under a tree, and there was a little canal back there, sitting there with my guitar and a pitcher of lemonade. Am I right? Doesn't it sound like that?"

Yes it does. Looking back, Dion's career - and his forays into folk, blues, soft rock and doo wop - makes a lot more sense than it would have done to Columbia in 1964. There is a love of American music in Dion that he shares with Dylan: few other singers could pull off an album as diverse and delightful as Abraham Martin And John. Maybe the pick of the whole set is a heartfelt version of the Motown-written Loving You Is Sweeter Than Ever.

"That was a Four Tops songs. How did I end up recording it? Probably they were playing it the night before in a saloon or something!

"The way I explain it is I don't sing white and I don't sing black. I sing like Bronx. I don't know exactly what that is, but it's definitely black music filtered through an Italian neighbourhood. It comes out with an attitude."

This is an interview I did with Basil Kirchin in 2002, three years before his death. Please bear this in mind when I refer to dates. Since I wrote it, Jonny Trunk has done a superb job of sorting and issuing the Kirchin archive, much of which had never been given a commercial release, a favourite of mine being Charcoal Sketches. Oh, and I should say that Basil was more obsessed with music than anyone I have ever met.

Basil Kirchin's home may be in Hull, but he spends most of his time in a place most of us are hardly aware of, in "the 834th of a second before thought comes rushing in. In a state of alert inactivity. I spend 90 per cent of my time there so the other reality, keeping a roof over my head, has to make it on the remaining 10 per cent. Which gets pretty difficult at times. The key is, you have to try and act before there's time to think."

Very charming, very intense, Basil Kirchin, 76, has spent the past 40 years sculpting music from "sounds never before heard by human ears, music from another dimension". His reputation rests on a series of works called Worlds Within Worlds, parts of which surfaced on two albums in the early Seventies and which have remained out of print but highly prized ever since. Brian Eno cites them as a primary influence on his ambient music. At the other extreme, he is praised by industrialists such as Coil and Nurse with Wound. He is one of the great innovators in postwar British music, and he remains - very much against his wishes - a well-kept secret.

This should change with Quantum, the first in a series of reissues from Kirchin's startling catalogue. It's jazz, of a sort. Hornbills replace bassists, a bassoon and some geese overlap until you can't tell which is which. There are guitars, amplified insects, saxophones, trams, lions and the voices of autistic children.

It's thrilling, sometimes terrifying, and - though over 30 years old - feels very new.

Kirchin joined his father's big band, aged 13, as a drummer in 1941. "When the war started, I'd come home from school and my old man used to let me play with the band. I was eaten up with it. For two and a half years I slept in Warren Street station and played thirteen and a half sessions every two weeks. One afternoon off - in which I played with the relief band for free. Insane." After the war, Kirchin played with Harry Roy and Ted Heath before taking over the leadership of the Kirchin Band in the mid-Fifties. They acquired famous fans - Sean Connery, Elizabeth Taylor - while Billy Eckstein and Sarah Vaughan would tour Britain only if the Kirchin Band backed them. "I was the loudest drummer in the world. I was known as the Fall of Tobruk."

Uniquely, the Kirchin Band owned a PA system, which enabled Kirchin to record every show. They broke attendance records and starred in Melody Maker polls, but by 1957 skiffle and rock'n'roll were hitting the band's popularity and in any case Kirchin "realised it wasn't enough, because you're a prisoner of rhythm. And I was fed up playing other people's music."

He chucked it all in and escaped to India, where he spent five months in the Ramakrishna Temple on the Ganges. His next stop was Sydney, where disaster struck.

As his luggage was being taken from the ship, something snapped and it all fell into Sydney harbour. All Basil's tapes of the Kirchin Band, basically his whole life, was lost. It still distresses him.

In 1961 Kirchin returned to Britain to work on a "music that was individual". He stayed with his parents in Hull and worked with a local lad called Keith Herd on electronic music. He made some fabulous music for the De Wolfe library, all with odd time signatures, a Kirchin trademark: highlights were the flute and harpsichord suite Abstractions Of The Industrial North (a perfect, self-descriptive library title) and Mind On The Run, which sounds like an alternative Avengers soundtrack. Film work naturally followed; The Shuttered Room, The Abominable Dr Phibes, and an incredibly beautiful, fragile score for I Start Counting, a Jenny Agutter thriller set in freshly built Bracknell new town.

But it was experimentation with tapes and sound manipulation that created Kirchin's big breakthrough. "There is no such thing as a long note," he explains.

"If you take the human voice and slow it down five octaves, immediately everything you can hear drops away. Take birdsong, all those harmonics you can't hear are brought down -sounds that human ears have never heard before. Little boulders of sound. In 1964 it was hard to capture. There was only reel to reel tape, and it took eight or nine years of my life. It was long and hard and painful. Now with the new technology you can hear these boulders of sound without changing the pitch, which is miraculous!"

On and off through the Sixties and Seventies, Kirchin stayed in an autistic community at Schurmatt in Switzerland. "These autistic children, the sounds they make when they try to communicate are unbelievable. They jabber away and of course it's gibberish and meaningless. But if you record it and apply the techniques I've mentioned...trust me, you can hear what they're trying to convey. There's a lot of them in Quantum."

Since the two Worlds Within Worlds albums, Kirchin has written 40 pieces, 12 of which have been recorded but none released. He's now very ill, but is "still working, still roaring, even if it is three months at a time. People of any age should know never to give up. I'm still young, I can't help it if my body's falling apart." This is the first time he's visited London in 15 years, and he seems genuinely delighted that people want to talk to him about his music.

"I'm only good for two things in this world. One is music and the other is this knowledge. It sounds so pretentious, man, my toes are curling, but I have to say it. I want to try and leave something for young people who are starting in music and looking for something as I've been looking all my life. The challenge is, you have to make your life meaningful. Because life is meaningless, the universe is meaningless. It's hilarious really."

If anything symbolised the insanity of the Beatles' Apple set-up, and its dadaist approach to running a business, it was a 1968 single called King of Fuh by the New Jersey-born Brute Force. George Harrison thought Brute had "a lovely voice and a beautiful record", and radio programmers would surely have been bowled over by the London Symphony Orchestra's sumptuous backing, but there was a small problem with the chorus: "All hail the Fuh king."

Born Stephen Friedland in 1940, Brute Force became a member of the Tokens* in the early sixties, soon after they had scored a US #1hit with The Lion Sleeps Tonight. As part of the Tokens' Bright Tunes writing and production team, he used his unexplained nom de plume to write three minute psychodramas that few, Shadow Morton aside, could equal: Del Shannon's She Still Remembers Tony and the Bitter Sweets' What A Lonely Way To Start The Summertime were two of the best, both super-intense, end-of-romance wrist slashers.

And then there's the Chiffons' Nobody Knows What's Going On In My Mind But Me from 1965, an insight into a teenage girl's unhinged but meticulously controlled mind-state. It is at once garbled, triumphant, and - like the Bitter Sweets' single - on the verge of completely losing it. Nobody Knows... is one of the ultimate late-period Girl Group 45s and a rare (though fragile) show of female defiance in the genre. It eventually became a hit of sorts, on the dancefloor at Wigan Casino, via Tammy St John's clattery cover.

The full Force of what was going on in Friedland's mind was eventually revealed in 1966 on an album called Confections of Love. Recorded with Leonard Cohen in attendance, it featured song titles such as To Sit on a Sandwich and Tapeworm of Love. The Chiffons didn't record any of these songs, as far as I know.

Out of the Tokens and sore from the failure of Confections, Force made an attempt to swim the Bering Strait in 1968, from Alaska to Russia, to focus world attention on the closeness of East and West at the height of the Cold War. He made it halfway, to Little Diomede Island. The Inuits took pictures, Life magazine ran a feature - he may have an odd name, they thought, but the kid's all right. Then came King of Fuh.

A Brute Force show could open with him lying on his back, panting like a dog for four minutes - his Extemporaneous album, released in 1969, captured his whacked-out philosophical improv. Still performing, he remains ecologically concerned, politically involved and satisfyingly odd. When Extemporaneous was re-issued by Rev-Ola in 2004 he played a few shows in Britain with Brummie eccentrics Misty's Big Adventure: while he was over he played a one-off show for a horse, the thoroughbred mare Premier Bid (the horse's owners named a foal Special Bru in his honour). If you've seen the documentary The Battle For Brooklyn, you won't be surprised to hear that Brute, now 70, played a show at the re-opened Freddy's Bar, with its original prohibition-era fixtures and fittings re-located from the building that had made way for the barely legal Atlantic Yards development. Brute still picks his battles well.

Director Ben Steinbauer (Winnebago Man) is apparently working on a documentary. Brute's daughter - calling herself, with obvious pride, Daughter Of Force - has been playing shows in Brooklyn. A little while back her dad's website announced the "same sex marriage of Stephen Friedland to his trademark, Brute Force. Both are male. In lieu of a gift, please send a contribution to your favourite charity."

*The Tokens' own BT Puppy label is, in its own way, as odd as Apple. Some of its releases were in such tiny numbers they are almost impossible to find, including the Tokens' own album Intercourse: if you ever want to hear a harmony pop album with songs of haiku length, humorous-stroke-suicidal lyrics, and odd animal noises, then look no further.

Elvis would have been 77 today. As he only lived to be 42 we were spared that 1986 album, produced by Bob Clearmountain and wrecked by gated reverb; also his ill-advised cover of With Or Without You; and of course his late 90s Rick Rubin album, with Elvis sounding lethargic, barely awake, as he is cattle-prodded through All Apologies. Sadly we also missed his recording of Feels Like I'm In Love (written for him by Mungo Jerry's Ray Dorset, and later a no.1 for Kelly Marie. Sound unlikely? Imagine it in the style of Burning Love).

We are reduced to imagining what might have happened as his real life story has been combed over incessantly for the last 35 years. Elvis has been treasured and traduced in equal measure - the ever-expanding library now stretches from Peter Guralnick's two exhaustive volumes, Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love, to the film Schmelvis: In Search of the King's Jewish Roots and re-prints of his cookbook.   Finding new material to celebrate rock's all-time golden boy is tough. A few years back the 1968 Comeback Special was given the triple DVD treatment - you want to see (or, at least, hear) Elvis split his pants doing a karate workout? You got it. Along with half a dozen takes of If I Can Dream (mesmerising) and Darlene Love shaking a tambourine for 20 minutes (less so).   

Astonishingly, however, it is still possible to find hidden nuggets in his back catalogue. Elvis's career of mighty peaks and dramatic troughs means a lot of fine recordings have been almost forgotten.   Here are a bunch of songs which oldies stations tend to skip that capture his voice, humour, plentitude and pathos.   Some of them you may well now, but if any of them aren't familiar you're in for a treat. Happy birthday Elvis.

Blue Moon (1954)

Recorded for Sun but unreleased for a couple of years, this is one of the eeriest recordings to ever reach the UK Top 10. A muted, clip-clop backing, rather like a Radiophonic Workshop evocation of sepia Americana, is a bed for echo-drenched Elvis to toy with Rodgers and Hart's classic. He sets the sad mood - "Blue moon, you saw me standing alone, without a dream in my heart, without a love of my own" - and then repeats the line, abandoning the happy denouement and replacing it with a ghostly wordless falsetto. Right at the start of his career, he already sounds like a spectre returning to haunt America's pop culture party.

Lonesome Cowboy (1957)

The first of several Elvis recordings with "lonesome" in the title. From the film Loving You, here was a real indicator of how far he was willing to deviate from straight R&R. Who is this channeling? Mario Lanza? Hank Williams? Frankie Laine? Revisiting the ghostly atmosphere of Blue Moon, this oddity was dwarfed by the other songs on the Loving You soundtrack (the title track, Mean Woman Blues, Teddy Bear) but deserves a moment in the high noon sun.

Doin' the Best I Can (1961)

A commercial monster after the so-so success of Elvis is Back!, GI Blues is sometimes seen as the beginning of the end. Yet there are some excellent songs on the soundtrack: Pocketful of Rainbows' unfettered joy, the driving rocker Shoppin' Around, and this Pomus/Shuman ballad of infinite sadness, the cuckolded Elvis singing "You know I was the kind who'd run anytime you called/ I guess I was the only one who didn't mind at all." The Japanese had the good taste to extract it from the score as a 45 - we got Wooden Heart instead.  

That's Someone You Never Forget (1962)
A rare co-write for Elvis on this spooked love song that sounds a lot like a eulogy - possibly to his mother. It was included on the Pot Luck album which had artwork that looked like a thrown-together hack-job but included the considerable Suspicion, the wedding-bell weepie Something Blue, and the only song the King wrote on his own, a Begin the Beguine knock-off called You'll Be Gone.  

Tender Feeling (1964)
"I'd like to make one good film before I leave. I know this town's laughing at me." - Elvis to co-star Marilyn Mason on the set of The Trouble With Girls

By now the films were getting sillier, more slapdash and more frequent (three in '64 alone), and the music sounded flatter as if there was some essence missing from the recording process - like soul. Most of his soundtrack albums featured one exception to the rule. Tender Feeling (from Kissin' Cousins, with Elvis in a bloody awful blonde wig) is picture postcard pretty, with a lovely celeste motif; singing high, Elvis wrings all he can from this early sixties rock-a-ballad. Part of his greatness was that he always had the ability to make a song seem better than it was.  

It Hurts Me (1964)
A lyric dripping with unrequited love, scorn and indignation gave Elvis something to get his teeth into, and he turned in a towering, angry performance that presaged his late-Sixties rebirth. Unsurprisingly, then, he revived It Hurts Me for the 1968 TV special - apart from hardcore fans, most had missed it first time around as the B-side of the daffy title song from Kissin' Cousins.  

Animal Instinct (1966)

Flirtatious flute, a bottomless bass riff, and the session drummer Ken Buttrey's fancy fills make this a potential club hit (Martin Green has been known to give it a whirl). Elvis is a panther in Valentino garb in this highlight from the Harem Scarem score. He often walked out of the Hollywood sessions, disgusted at the material chosen on his behalf (I like Do Not Disturb more than he did, but it's hard to question his commitment given real dreck like Yoga is as Yoga Does or Old Macdonald). With a cheeky number like Animal Instinct, Elvis at least sounded energised - I'd like to think he was even having fun.  

Please Don't Stop Loving Me (1966)
The closest he got to a deep soul record, originally on the Frankie and Johnny soundtrack, this has all the hallmarks: funereal pace, subtle Steve Cropper like guitar inflections, the feeling it could burst out of its skin with emotion at any given moment. Like 1962's Suspicion, this is sensuous and paranoiac, and the vocal is a faultless exercise in restraint.

Down in the Alley (1966)

While recording the How Great Thou Art album, Elvis cut loose with this secular screamer, first recorded by the Clovers in the 1950s. Starting with a nutso "changity changity" vocal hook, Down in the Alley features metallic guitar, shrill organ, honking sax and wailing harp. Lascivious is the word. It's loud and rude enough to have been a substantial hit, but RCA sat on it for two years before tacking it on to the Clambake soundtrack.  

Tomorrow is a Long Time (1966)
Recorded at the same session, this Dylan cover met a similar sad fate when it could have single-handedly changed the public's perception of mid-Sixties Presley.   Sparse and lonesome ("I can't remember the sound of my own name"), it features a beautiful fade with the fugitive Elvis humming to himself as he walks off into the sunset. Dylan rated it the best adaptation of any of his songs.  

Edge of Reality (1969)
From Live a Little, Love a Little, a film that was also home to A Little Less Conversation, Edge of Reality's claim to fame is that it soundtracked a psychedelic dream sequence, not an everyday happening in Elvis movies. Dark and wordy, black and brooding, the brass bruises the singer as he hears "strange voices echo, laughing with mockery".  

I'm Leavin' (1971)

The 1970s were clogged with self-pitying ballads - blame Elvis and Priscilla's separation. This forgotten single, a UK no.23 in a year in which he scored five Top 10 hits, is something else: intense and wholly despairing, Elvis is perfectly balanced with the subtle orchestration as he breaks into the chorus ("tried so hard, so hard, and I just can't take it"), ending it with the title sung in a fragile falsetto.

If I Get Home on Christmas Day (1971)
Elvis's second Christmas album is usually dismissed, apart from lip service paid to the endless blues chugger Merry Christmas Baby. Much more in keeping with the magic of Yuletide is this bittersweet song written by the British hit machine Tony Macaulay (Build Me Up Buttercup, Don't Give Up On Us, Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes). You can picture Elvis as the Wichita Lineman in deep December, presents in the back his truck as he ploughs home through snow storms. With the feeling he injects into it, and the choir of angels at the climax, you know he'll make it back by dawn.  

Good Time Charlie's Got the Blues (1974)
"I'm not a kid at 33" - the retired playboy's admission of his own mortality. This wistful, country piece was as good as it got with late period Elvis, and it would have slotted neatly into Atlantic City, The Last Picture Show or Fat City; visions of a stumbling, lost America, mirrored by the pitiful decline of her greatest living icon. "Play around, you'll lose your wife," sings Elvis - on stage he'd grin and say, "I already did that." After the next line about losing your life, he'd add, "I almost did that already too."

Unchained Melody (1977)

His body was about to give out, and his between song patter on stage was rambling and sometimes embarrassing, but Elvis's voice rarely let him down. If he felt the song, he was as effective as ever. This is a man on the brink, fighting the odds (which include the song's ubiquity) - you will him on, pounding the piano, sweat rolling off him. And he wins. It's astonishing. A few weeks later, he was gone.

The Byrds, hailed in the beginning as the American Beatles, turned out to be as fractious and egotistical as their UK counterparts were tight, gang-like and grounded. Possibly for this reason, the Byrd deemed to be the heart, the driving force of their rich music, has shifted over the years: initially it was Roger McGuinn, architect of their jet-age jangle, and it stayed this way during the group's lifetime; the spotlight shifted to the smug hippydom of David Crosby in the Seventies afterburn; and then on to Gram Parsons, somehow deemed the most 'authentic' Byrd in the country rock-obsessed Eighties.

Sweet Gene Clark. How sad and typical of his ill luck that he died in 1991, just as the consensus swung his way.

He had been the most handsome Byrd and their finest and most prolific songwriter, but on stage he was sidelined as tambourine player, a proto-Davy Jones. Fear of flying meant he would leave and rejoin the group on several occasions - it also hindered the promotion of any subsequent Clark projects. For decades, ludicrously, he remained a well-kept muso/fanboy secret.

No Other, a dark, baroque album is central to Gene Clark's critical rebirth. The artwork is a giveaway, a collage of Twenties glories with Anita Loos and other sexy flapper chums at its heart. Hollywood Babylon revisited. On the back, rugged Gene appears in mascara and billowing drag. He looks quite terrifying. Drawing parallels between the decadence of the Twenties and the coke-addled extravagance of the mid-Seventies, Clark fashioned a suite of songs that was a pure, personalised Americana, a distillation of all he had seen and learnt from his childhood in Missouri and his adult years in LA. Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks had talked of their aborted Smile album being "a Gothic American trip"; likewise, Clark's fellow country rock traveller Gram Parsons once expressed a dream of creating Cosmic American Music. No Other was the real thing.

Aside from his mastery of melancholy, there had been few clues in Gene Clark's back pages that he would deliver something this wild and dark - his last fully realised album had been the beautiful but spartan White Light in 1971. The turning point was meeting the producer Thomas Jefferson Kaye, a Steely Dan acolyte and one-time colleague of the wunderkind producer Curt Boettcher. Their shared love of Zen Buddhism, booze and drugs took them to the Village Recorder studios in west LA in March 1974 with $100,000 from Asylum Records burning a hole in Kaye's pocket.

He had just massively overspent on a Bobby Neuwirth album and now saw No Other as "my Brian Wilson extravaganza". As for Clark, the record was "all about soul searching". Eight songs in six months suggest that there was plenty of that.

Life's Greatest Fool is a misleading opener, being an exercise in fine country rock with only the gospel harmonies and cautionary philosophy there to cause a stir. The gothic undertow of Silver Raven, all "darkened waters" and "troubled sky", veers into Johnny Cash territory. The title track is where things take a wholly different turn, a hypnotic almost funky piece which occupies the same niggling darkness as David Bowie's Golden Years. Apparently it took a week before the musicians got their first take and you can sense the numbness, the intoxication.

Strength of Strings is the album's centrepiece. The brief Clark set himself was to convey the subconscious way in which music is created, how it can be so magical, spiritual, overwhelming. No less. He pulls it off with a slow-burning intro of near-oriental harmonies, almost treading on Crosby, Stills and Nash's toes, while Kaye adds layers of ghostly church voices until the whole thing explodes with Clark's tearful tones - "In my life the piano sings, brings me words that are not the strength of strings." Side 2's opener, From a Silver Phial, is almost light relief, though its lyric - criss-crossing between the tale of a cocaine casualty and a sensual master-servant saga from the old South (or is it Hollywood?) - is as much the opaque heart of No Other's mystique as Strength Of Strings' grandeur.

The eight-minute Some Misunderstanding came to Clark in a dream which he dictated to his wife in the middle of the night. Its vagueness is its beauty, beginning as a meditation on how to take a relationship forward then ruminating on the recent death of Gram Parsons - "We all need a fix, but at times like this, doesn't it feel good to stay alive?" It soars and floats over pedal-steel and organ interplay (the cream of LA session players, anyone you care to name) and hangs eerily in the air, unresolved. Passing through The True One, another country-rock interlude, we reach the climactic Lady of the North, "like silver on the ocean shore". Clark sounds awed, lovestruck, and never sang better, reaching from rumbling baritone to near-falsetto (think of the middle eight of Elvis's Any Day Now and you're close). Dense and hypnotic, his voice weaves in and out of the piano, cello and electric violin - when the shimmering coda arrives it is pure release.

Over the years No Other has been lauded by some but frequently criticised for over-ambition (David Geffen at Asylum concurred and put no promo effort in - it consequently sold zip). This is conservatism on a par with Mike Love's criticism of Pet Sounds. Recorded in a stultifying era of newly-minted and consequently too-cosy singer-songwriters, the result of Gene Clark's search for America's dark heart seems all the more impressive. And it sounds deeper and stronger with each passing year. What a terrible pity he isn't around to receive his standing ovation.

On New Year's Eve 1989, I was in a pub in Manchester, talking pop with a bunch of friends. We reflected on two English singers who had illuminated the previous decade with great originality but no commercial success. Obvious star quality and wild eccentricity, it seemed, were no match for fickle fate. Fame would elude them. One was Pulp's Jarvis Cocker, the other was Lawrence from Felt.

In a decade of fey make-up boys and the gated snare, Felt's approach to record making had seemed positively antique - sumptuous, sculptured guitar melodies housed in sleeves that owed more to Barnett Newman than Gary Numan. Their first album was called Crumbling The Antiseptic Beauty, a statement of intent in itself.

Felt had a rare air of mystery. Gigs were infrequent, some were in virtual darkness. As the decade wore on, odd stories about Lawrence snuck out. Apparently he was obsessively clean. A friend once stayed in his Birmingham apartment and woke up at 3am to hear scratching noises under the bed. Expecting to see a mouse he was shocked to see Lawrence with a dustpan and brush. Pete Becker of fellow West Midlanders Eyeless In Gaza claimed that, when Lawrence took him to gigs, he always drove in second gear. He was deadpan, dead pale, and once claimed he would become the first person in the world to die of boredom. All my girlfriends were in love with him.

Lawrence spent his teens in the Birmingham overspill of Water Orton. In 1980 he made a cacophonic DIY single as Felt called Index, a solo performance of clanging chords that sounded like it was recorded on a cassette at home - "after that I decided to form the greatest band in England." In spite of his ambitions, he couldn't tune or re-string his guitar. "I used to wait until I met someone who could do it for me. Sometimes it took ages." He'd often seen Maurice Deebank walk through Water Orton with a classical guitar on his way to have lessons, "so one day I got him round and he tuned my guitar in three seconds. I was in shock. Then he played a song, it was Mr Tambourine Man. I said 'I don't believe it, you're a genius'. We were only 16 or 17 and at that time I'd never seen anyone play that fast. It still went clunky when I went from one chord to another."

Deebank became a part of Felt. "I thought, God, I could really go somewhere with this kid. Ride on his back to the top, that's how I saw it." Initially, there were constant arguments. "They were always about clothes and drinking. I told him he would have to change his entire wardrobe. Sometimes he'd get drunk and go off down motorways, disappear for two days. Or he'd go round this big mental hospital with this other kid, after they'd been in the pub. One of those dark Victorian things. When you were a kid you lived in fear that someone would escape and break into your bedroom. Deebank used to go there and walk around the wards at night for a dare. He'd come back from those trips and every time I'd say 'we're finished, you're not serious about this.'"

What Lawrence wanted to create was something brand new - Crumbling The Antiseptic Beauty (released in January 1982) was both beautiful and very odd, with Lawrence's near-asthmatic, heavily reverbed voice and Deebank's crystal clear guitar lines underpinned by what sound like red Indian tribal drums. Lyrics were largely indecipherable. The songs - just the six - all clocked in around the five minute mark. "The music had to be something I'd never heard before. A new kind of music. Long guitar solos, like something that Hank Marvin would do but extended." The result was closer to Tyrannosaurus Rex playing Marquee Moon in a barn. Truly, it sounded - and still sounds - uniquely atmospheric. "I wanted the first album to be the best English album ever released, in the history of music. We wanted the kind of impact The Stone Roses had later - the way they were a group, the way they cared about what they wore."

A critical hit - Sounds' 5 star review was enough to get me to buy it without hearing a note - Crumbling The Antiseptic Beauty instead created a small but dedicated core of Felt fans which would grow incrementally over the decade. In 1987, Lawrence found his image in a Smash Hits sticker collection. Suicidally, he chose to capitalise on this good fortune with an album of instrumentals called Let The Snakes Crinkle Their Heads To Death. "I remember taking the album artwork to Creation, really confidently, and Bobby Gillespie (of Primal Scream) was there. He said 'You're not really going to call it that are you?' I said yeah, it's a great title. He said 'Crinkle? What the hell's crinkle?' I realised I'd made the worst mistake. It was the worst title in the world."

Now, as then, Lawrence is childlike in his enthusiasm, and meticulous in his planning, even if genuine stardom seems as far away as it did in 1982. "I thought we could invent a new form of music. I really believed we could. Now I know it's practically impossible, but that was the kind of ambition we had."

October 2004 was a grim month for pop obsessives and record collectors, especially those who had come of age in the seventies and eighties. In the space of ten days we lost three great navigators of the backroads, byways and ditches: John Peel, Dave Godin - the man who coined the term Northern Soul - and, Stateside, Greg Shaw. Some philanthropist should have corralled their collections and pop ephemera and created one beautiful library.

Shaw was, in his way, just as important as Peel. He was a fanboy with means. To precis his CV, he created the first pop fanzine (Mojo Navigator, later Who Put The Bomp), put Lester Bangs and Greil Marcus on the printed page for the first time, started the Pebbles compilation series, and was America's premier salesman for Glam, Punk and Powerpop - a genre he named. He created an independent label and distribution company in the seventies - Bomp - giving succour to the Ramones, and a home to Iggy Pop and the Flamin' Groovies. He also knew his parameters. When Michael Stipe showed up with his tape looking for a deal, Shaw sent him away, telling him to go to a major - Bomp wasn't right for him.

Who Put The Bomp, even now, is a great source for forgotten 45s (Shaw's format of choice). He would review British pop singles like Warwick's Let's Get The Party Going when they first appeared and were dismissed as worthless bubblegum by pretty much everyone else - the Warwick single wouldn't be revisited until the late nineties Junk Shop Glam boom, but Shaw's recommendation was enough for me to pick one up when I saw it. His publications have since been compiled in a hardback by ex-wife Suzy Shaw. When Mojo Navigator first appeared in 1966, pop nerds barely existed, and the ones that did were most likely unaware of each other. Likewise, rock 'n' roll record collecting rarely stretched beyond buying records to play at parties, after having first scrawled your name on the sleeve and label to make sure they also came home with you. Mojo Navigator was *the* first music rag by fans, for fans. Shaw was a cheerleader, not a chinstroker, and would always value the directness of Wild Thing or You Really Got Me over, say, the Grateful Dead. Time, it's safe to say, proved him correct. Greil Marcus says that Shaw put on paper "the irreducible thrill of hearing the secret before everybody else did, and the irresistible thrill of passing it on."

Still, Greg Shaw was no saint. Bomp's accounting system, for starters, was a little wayward. Suzy Shaw remembers one of the Dead Kennedys handcuffing himself to Greg's desk to get a check - it bounced. Another time their car was smashed to bits. There were threats of arson, after which a baseball bat was bought for the office. Asked to contribute to the book, Kim Fowley said "I'm not going to glorify Greg Shaw because he was a thief and a pig in regards to paying me money. I always liked the idea of BOMP and the idea of Greg Shaw; he was a great historian but a bad executive and a disaster in accounting to his artists and producers."

While Greg's record collection was rumoured to number a million items, Suzy reckons "I knew the size well, as it was I who had the shelves built for them and arranged for the space in the warehouse. There were probably a maximum of about 150,000. He often just wanted the record and had no particular interest in whether it could be played or not." Taking up almost as much room was an index card system that listed "every rock record that he owned, heard about, or suspected existed. He was a historian first and foremost, and wanted it to be a life's work that would survive as a reference for generations to come. It was his obsession and although few people know it, the project probably took up more of his life than any other venture in terms of sheer hours."

Shaw was an outrageous womanizer, with four marriages and innumerable girlfriends. Pretty soon, each starry-eyed lover realised they were no match for the index cards - most of them came to the conclusion that if they could get rid of the cards, they could have Greg all to themselves. The one constant was Suzy Shaw: "I became accustomed to the frantic, late-night calls from Greg: "Help! Suzy! Get over here, she's got matches and she's going for the cards!" Police would be called, tears would be shed, the girlfriends would leave, but the cards survived." It's a minor tragedy that the digital age has rendered them little more than a curio.

Beyond the printed word, he was behind the Legendary Masters series of compilations, produced during a stint at United Artists - Shaw was as conversant in Fats Domino and Ricky Nelson as he was in Ramones and Raspberries. Then in the early eighties he was the secret compiler of the multi-volume Pebbles series, sonically imperfect bootlegs of obscure 60s garage punk which unearthed now-open secrets like the Litter's Action Woman for the first time. In look and feel, Pebbles was widely imitated on series like Highs In The Mid Sixties and Back From The Grave; the lo-grade pressings inadvertently galvanized new re-issue labels such as Bam Caruso, who issued the Craig's R&B freakout I Must Be Mad on their first Rubble album in pristine quality, eighteen months after Shaw had alerted the world to its primitive power. As he had with Who Put The Bomp, Greg Shaw started a whole underground industry.

The vast record collection Shaw amassed has been split up since his death between friends and collectors. One beneficiary - though not of the index cards - was Geoffrey Weiss, a sagely A&R man at Hollywood Records. "I always thought his biggest achievement was convincing people that popular music that wasn't successful could be great, that the guy up the street could be John Lennon for at least two minutes and forty five seconds."

In Las Vegas, 1969, you had the choice of witnessing either Elvis Presley, Tom Jones or Bobbie Gentry putting on the style. All were star attractions. Yet while the King became immortal and Jones The Voice went on to continually re-invent his crimplene soul, Bobbie Gentry has vanished from sight. She hasn't given an interview in over thirty years and has barely entered a recording studio since releasing Patchwork in 1971, the last of her half dozen albums.

She was born Roberta Lee Streeter on July 27th 1944 to Portuguese parents in Chickasaw County, Mississippi. Her parents divorced when she was a toddler, and it was left to her grandparents to raise her. They lived on a farm in Chickasaw County - Mississippi Delta country. "We didn't have electricity, and I didn't have many play things," Bobbie recalled. "My Granddaddy liked possum stew, so whenever he caught one, he'd cut off the tail for me to play with."

Her Grandmother provided a toy that had a more long lasting impact when she traded a milk cow for a neighbour's piano. Bobbie taught herself to play by listening in church, and precociously had her first song in the bag by the time she was seven: My Dog Sergeant Is A Good Dog was later wheeled out as part of her nightclub act and survives on a BBC TV show. The rest of her oeuvre would be hugely influenced by her dirt poor, woodland community upbringing.

After grade school in Greenwood, Mississippi, where her father lived, Bobbie moved to California in 1957 to live with her mother. She attended school in Arcadia for two years before the family moved to Palm Springs, by which time she had taught herself to play the guitar, banjo, bass, and vibes. One afternoon, she caught the King Vidor movie Ruby Gentry in which Jennifer Jones plays a Southern girl from the wrong side of the tracks who falls for local land owner Charlton Heston. It was melodramatic fare, but also undeniably sensual for a 1952 Hollywood movie. Bobbie was so impressed she decided to change her name.

At 15, Bobbie Gentry was performing in a local country club, an act which was caught - and apparently encouraged - by Bob Hope and Hoagy Carmichael. Straight out of high school, she worked in Las Vegas as part of a nightclub review called Folies Bergere to raise a little cash, which then saw her through a degree in philosophy at UCLA. Transferring to the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music she studied guitar, majoring in theory and composition. All this time, Bobbie was playing in local venues, scrabbling for cash, some of the time as part of Hawaiian musician Johnny Ukulele's troupe of girls. Her only known recordings from the period were Ode To Love and Stranger In The Mirror, two 1964 duets with singer Jody Reynolds, who had scored a hit in 1958 with the death disc Endless Sleep.

Early in 1967, Bobbie made a demo which came to the attention of Capitol Records producer Kelly Gordon. He liked the songs immensely, especially one called Ode To Billie Joe. The song was around seven minutes long, and it's eerie, mossy, swamp-country atmosphere was unlike anything Gordon had heard before. With support from Capitol's number one producer David Axelrod, he was able to sign Bobbie. Her first single was one of the other songs on the demo, Mississippi Delta, but pretty quickly DJs picked up on the flip side.

Ode To Billie Joe, truncated to four minutes and made eerier yet by Jimmy Haskell's string arrangement, entered the Billboard Hot 100 on August 5th 1967. Two weeks later it was in the top ten: a week after that it was number one, dislodging the Beatles' utopian All You Need Is Love. No other debut single had made the top faster. No question, it was a unique record, and even the flower-waving underground had to be riveted by the narrative. Elliptically evocative, loaded with mysterious place names like Choctaw Ridge and the Tallahatchie Bridge, this smalltown apocalypse came across like The Waltons in reverse. It sounded entirely believable, autobiographical even. The central mystery of the song - probably lost in the edit - was what exactly the young couple threw from the bridge. After much discussion in the press, in cafes and pubs (it made the UK Top 20 in the autumn), the least controversial conclusion was an engagement ring.

Overnight, this unknown country folk singer, her hair piled up like a downhome Priscilla Presley, had crossed the tracks just like namesake Ruby. True to the movie script, she had also begun an affair with Kelly Gordon, who left his wife and kids for his protogee. The two quickly amassed tracks for an album named after the hit, all original material. It hardly sounds thrown together. Mississippee Delta, the rejected A-side, is gritty, and would give Tony Joe White a run for his money in the southern stew stakes; Sunday Best and Papa Won'tcha Let Me Go To Town were sepia prints of a south that probably didn't exist by 1967 but surely did in Bobbie's childhood. The follow up to Ode was ill advised, though - I Saw An Angel Die was kaleidoscopic, vague, and quite beautiful, but it was way too unstructured for radio and bombed completely.

This didn't affect the huge sales of the album, or the year-end impact of her number one single: after selling 3 million copies it won Bobbie three Grammy awards, including Best New Artist (she was the first country singer to win in this category); Billboard, Cashbox, and Record World nominated her most promising new vocalist; and Nashville's Country Music Association asked her to co-host their awards show with Sonny James. Life magazine even ran a feature on her grandparents' farm - the money she'd made from the hit had enabled Bobbie to buy them new trucks.

Next came The Delta Sweete. This took the Ode album on a step - it was a segued, multi-textural album about the south, and maybe her best record. Standouts were Courtyard, a delicately terrifying morality tale of wish fulfillment, and Morning Glory, cheeky and playful, with Bobbie's voice at its breathiest and most sensuous. Dotted around the album were choice covers - quite obvious, but still flavoursome - of Tobacco Road, Parchman Farm, and Louisiana Man. The oak-aged Okolona River Bottom Band had presaged the album as a November '67 single, but only reached 54; Louisiana Man, backed by Courtyard, fared even worse and spent a solitary week at number 100.

Capitol took swift action - they weren't about to let such a hot property slip off the map, and Bobbie had two more albums out by the year's end. Local Gentry compromised some of her best songs (the saucy Sittin' Pretty, and deceptively airy, black-humoured Casket Vignette) with a bunch of more contemporary covers, including Fool On The Hill which became another flop single. There was also a definitive, curled-up-in-a-cosy-cabin take on Kenny Rankin's Peaceful. The striking red trouser suit and confident stance on the cover must have shifted a few copies of Local Gentry, too. Stanley Dorfman at the BBC was certainly impressed and offered Bobbie her own series, with guests including The Hollies and Donovan. Hits or no, at home she also regularly featured on TV. Something of a good luck charm, she was the maiden guest on Glen Campbell, Johnny Cash, and Bobby Darin's variety shows.

Towards 1968's end, Bobbie was teamed up with Capitol's other top country-pop crossover act, Glen Campbell. Somehow their album of duets rarely sounded more than perfunctory, in spite of great arrangers and another eye-catching cover. No matter, a version of Mornin' Glory - nowhere near as good as the Delta Sweete version - charted, and Let It Be Me, the old Everly Brothers hit, went to 14 on the country chart and restored Bobbie to the Top 40 for the first time in a year.

The Gentry live show was by all accounts more of a rocking affair than her records let on, and the 1969 album Touch 'Em With Love certainly shifted up a gear. The polished brass of the title track failed to chart as a single, but a version of Bacharach and David's I'll Never Fall In Love Again - with Bobbie's voice straining in an endearingly high register - charted all over Europe, making it all the way to number one in Britain. This was followed by the Top 3 All I Have To Do Is Dream, another Everlys-originated duet with Glen Campbell. Back home, Bobbie got hitched to casino magnate William F. Harrah - she was 25 and he was 58. It lasted three months. According to Mojo magazine Harrah, who was none too impressed with his young wife heading out on tour, followed her to a theatre and caught her in flagrante backstage. Maybe he should have listened to Courtyard before he signed the wedding contract*.

All of which made Fancy, her last single of 1969, seem more than a little autobigraphical: "Just be nice to the gentlemen, Fancy, and they'll be nice to you." Produced by Rick Hall at Muscle Shoals, it made the US Top 40 but felt bigger. Reba McEntire scored hugely with it in 1991, and apparently the film rights have since been doing the rounds for the story of a girl who "might have been born just plain white trash but Fancy was my name ... and I ain't done bad." Bobbie certainly hadn't. With the smarts as well as the sass, she set up her own publishing company, Super Darlin Publishing, and television production, Gentry Limited. Her purchase of a percentage of The Phoenix Suns basketball team in 1969, as well as vast tracks of land in California, made her a wealthy woman. Somehow, she also found time to record a stack of songs that remained unreleased, including Show Off, Donovan's Skipalong Sam, and the exquisite Smoke, unavailable until recently and all recommended.

In 1970 Johnny Cash introduced her on TV, singing Fancy, as "our Mississippi River Delta Queen, Bobbie Gentry." Internationally, she had now consolidated after her first instant rush of fame and was a genuine star. In Vegas she had a million dollar contract. "I write and arrange all the music, design the costumes, do the choreography, the whole thing," she said. "I'm completely responsible for it. It's totally my own from inception to performance. I originally produced Ode To Billie Joe and most of my other records, but a woman doesn't stand much chance in a recording studio. A staff producer's name was nearly always put on the records." Fame doesn't get more glamorous than aftershow parties with Elvis, yet a melancholy single called Apartment 21 that summer suggested she was beginning to feel trapped by it.

These feelings were made more explicit on her final album, 1971's Patchwork. Written and produced by Bobbie (this time, with full credits), it featured southern characters like Benjamin, Billy The Kid and Belinda who hadn't been around since The Delta Sweete, as well as Miss Clara and Your Number One Fan, both flapper skits, the latter aimed at her more dottily devoted supporters. Marigolds And Tangerines betrayed a yearning for a simpler, sweeter life; Somebody Like Me had a soulful strut; Lookin' In was effectively a resignation letter from the world of pop. Bobbie has since said that, of all her records, she is most proud of Patchwork and it's not hard see why.

It's hard to believe that Bobbie couldn't have found a new recording contract if she'd wanted to - we just have to assume she considered that she'd left her mark and wanted to move on. A compilation called The Sounds Of Christmas featured her renditions of Scarlet Ribbons and Away In A Manger, and EMI released two budget albums Sittin' Pretty and Tobacco Road. Otherwise, Bobbie was quiet until the summer of 1974 when she launched The Bobbie Gentry Happiness Hour on CBS. It ran for four episodes, and a single called Another Place Another Time (the theme for Max Baer's film Macon County Line) slipped out at the same time. A couple of years later Baer made a movie based on Ode To Billie Joe (re-spelt Billy Joe for some reason) and Bobbie re-recorded the song. Both the new and original versions charted in the summer of '76. Another shortlived marriage, to Jim 'Spiders And Snakes' Stafford, resulted in a son called Tyler. On Christmas Eve 1978, she was a
guest on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Since then Bobbie Gentry has never performed, sung, or given an interview.

From the very beginning, Roberta Lee Streeter seemed to know exactly what she wanted, and had the charm, skill, and talent to get it. Five years of recording took her from a Mississippi farm to Vegas and riches beyond most people's dreams. Then, simply, she got bored, poured her artistic ambitions into one last album, and quit while she was still at the top. Her catalogue is almost faultless. As a blueprint for ambitious feminists, the Bobbie Gentry story is hard to trump.

Supermarket sightings are frequent enough these days. Starstruck fans report that her raven mane is still unmistakable. She's no hermit**. It's just that Bobbie Gentry knows exactly how to keep her legend bottled, her image unruffled, and her music timeless.

* It is often assumed that Bobbie managed to retire a wealthy woman after she divorced Harrah, receiving a $3.5 million settlement. Accusations of gold-digging are derailed by the fact she made over $3,000,000 in royalties from Capitol alone. Bobbie also made millions from her Vegas stints which lasted on and off until 1980, and an alleged $4,000,000 when Warner Brothers optioned Ode To Billie Joe.

**Here is a comment on a Bobbie Gentry thread from Tom Ewing's Popular blog: "I heard a touching story about Bobbie from the 1980′s. A couple years after her retirement, one of her Vegas male dancers became ill with AIDS. His lover told me they were penniless and about to be evicted from their home. Even though she was raising a newborn son as a single mother, she stepped in paid the bills and got her friend the medical care he needed. In an era when some people would not touch somone with AIDS she came to the hospital, held his hand and comforted him. She even paid the funeral expenses and made a terrible situation a little more tolerable for a dear friend. "

The Beatles visited Paris for the first time in January 1964. With the distaff population of Britain - even the Queen - in their pocket, they assumed the land of Bardot would be easily conquered. Some shock, then, when the opening night crowd at the Olympia had an unusually high percentage of excitable boys. "We had visions of French girls, ooh la la and all that" sulked George. Paul to this day is convinced that most of the audience was gay. It never crossed their minds that the kids were there to see the headliner that night, France's fastest rising star - Miss Sylvie Vartan.

If female pop singers were regarded as such an insignificant novelty in the sixties, it was ten times harder for female musicians to be taken seriously. Oddly this hadn't been a problem in blues circles where guitarists Memphis Minnie and Sister Rosetta Tharpe had been treated as equals. Likewise with folk, where Joan Baez, then Joni Mitchell, encouraged just as many women to pick up a guitar as Bob Dylan.

But rock 'n' roll was something else. The early sixties saw the huge boom in Girl Groups, propagated by the work of Phil Spector via The Crystals, Paris Sisters, and Ronettes: three girls singing in harmony, with a cavernous drum sound and a pair of castanets, was the du jour American sound of '63 - The Shirelles, Chiffons and Shangri La's racked up scores of hits. Ultimately, there were The Supremes. The records were often written for young women by young women (Carole King, Ellie Greenwich and Cynthia Weil), but the musicians were very rarely female; 90% of these records were played and produced by men.

The Beatles may not have gone a bundle on Sylvie Vartan, but Stateside they caused an explosion in the number of guitars bought by teenagers, plenty of whom were girls. In Boston, the Pandoras formed because they thought being in a band was, with a neat sideways logic, the easiest way for them to get to meet The Beatles. In Los Angeles, the classically educated Sandoval Sisters swapped their violins for Fender Jaguars and Rickenbackers after seeing the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show, and changed their name, with devastatingly naive arrogance, to the Girls (right). Their debut single, the Mann/Weil-written Chico's Girl, is a post Shangri La's bad-boy-good-girl melodrama which ranks as one of the dozen finest 45s of the Girl Group genre - and they actually played on it.

Pre-Beatles there had been a few maverick girls with guitars. Country singer Wanda Jackson was surrounded by older men telling her what to wear, what to say and what to sing until she crossed paths with hillbilly singer Elvis Presley in 1955. He convinced her that she had the voice for rock 'n' roll and Wanda duly obliged with gale-force rockers like Fujiyama Mama and Honey Bop. She painted her name on her acoustic. Off came the fringed suede jacket, too. Her new raunchy, heavy-lidded, high-heeled image went down particularly badly when she played Nashville's Grand Ole Opry where country bruiser Ernest Tubb insisted she couldn't show her shoulders. Wanda was so angry she could hardly sing.

On the rhythm and blues side Bo Diddley, a paternal, philanthropic rocker, assumed correctly that most people would rather watch musicians with accentuated femininity than a bunch of paunchy blokes; to this end he tutored a string of women to play guitar alongside him. The greatest was Norma-Jean Wofford, his amazonian half-sister (at least that's what told male admirers to keep them at bay) - she was renamed the Duchess (left). For good measure, the Bo-ettes provided backing vocals for Diddley. Footage of them on pop exploitation film The TAMI Show from 1964 shows just how mesmerising they were on stage, and makes their fellow performers - the full flower of mid-sixties pop from the Stones to the Beach Boys to the Supremes - look like so much less fun.

It says a lot that lead guitarist with the Beatles' Capitol label-mates the Girls, Rosemary Sandoval, was completely unaware of either the Duchess or Wanda Jackson when her own band started in '64. "We only ever came across one other all-girl band. There weren't many. In New York we met a group called The Female Beatles." The Girls' career path was typical of the period: signed by agency, plenty of local shows for reasonable money, the occasional Hollywood party, virtually no recording. "We played at a party for Bob Dylan once. Everyone was there. I remember one of the Yardbirds touched my guitar and I went 'Oh my gosh!' I was so excited."

Another common fate for girls with guitars was a trip to Vietnam to give the troops a shot in the arm. "We were there four weeks" remembers Rosemary, "and our dad, who was our manager, was very protective. Afterwards he admitted we'd been in quite a bit of danger, and places we'd played got mortared." Detroit's Pleasure Seekers (right), featuring 17-year old guitarist Suzi Quatro, played the same tour with a stop-over in Guam, site of the US military hospitals. "They asked us to play for a corridor full of wounded soldiers" Suzi recalled, "and it was horrible. They were 18-year old boys... legs missing, arms missing, eyeballs missing."

Gigs closer to home could be almost as bloody. The Girls, unarmed, had to deal with the mob frequently muscling in, not to mention over-amorous male fans and less than appreciative women. Rosemary Sandoval and her sisters wore "black tops, black tight pants and boots. The Midwest was not prepared for that look - too wild. We'd walk on stage in some clubs and straight away there was a certain buzz, then name-calling. And looks from some of the women, like 'what are they?' They thought we were going to steal their guys."

Respect from male bands seemed to come relatively easily - The Girls played with the Byrds, Lovin' Spoonful and Young Rascals, and they were "always super-nice. They carried our amps for us! Usually they didn't think we were serious but their attitude changed when we played."

If there were only a few scattered all-girl bands in the States, the UK was almost entirely barren. The Liverbirds were the only femme Merseybeat band to record, and they had to go to Germany to do it, where they became regulars on TV show Beat Club. Sally And The Alleycats grew out of the all-female Ivy Benson Big Band but cut just the one single. The Honeycombs had a girl drummer, Honey Lantree, who told reporters that she made tea for the boys. Guitar strumming heroine Twinkle had a hit with the doomed biker epic Terry, but had her career squashed by her record company Decca - they couldn't take a smart, attractive, woman guitarist who wrote her own songs. Homely Cilla and be-gowned Dusty were so much safer.

Oddly, the one girl group who did make it here in the sixties were imported Americans: Goldie And The Gingerbreads were brought to London by Animals' manager Mike Jeffries who had seen them at New York's Wagon Wheel club. It's saying something that the best known all-girl band of the era had just one Top 30 hit (Can't You Hear My Heartbeat in 1965), but they enjoyed a high profile in their two year stay. Frequent performances on Ready Steady Go, and tours with the Kinks, Stones, Yardbirds and Hollies, were augmented by drummer Ginger Bianco's ad work for Premier drums, guitarist Carol MacDonald's songwriting for Madeline Bell, and organist Margo Crocitto's session work for the Pretty Things; there were no troop-rallying chores for the Gingerbreads.

Gingerbread Margo, somewhat neatly, played keyboards in the last line-up of Bo Diddley's band. The Girls, after having kids and drifting apart, got back together forty years on with the rather startling new addition of electric violins. In the wake of more recent role models - the Runaways, Dolly Mixture, Kenickie - it's now a hell of a lot easier for girl bands to be taken seriously than it was in 1966. "There weren't too many heroines in the sixties, that's for sure" sighs Rosemary Sandoval. Thanks to her and a handful of others, shoulder-baring is no longer a sackable offence.

The more time goes by, the more it seems to me that Gene Vincent has the strongest claim to be the ultimate 50s rocker. Certainly he was the biker's choice. For a start he had the tortured, twisted look, the ever-greasy collapsing pompadour. He seemed shy but overloaded with pent-up aggression, and the only way he could find release was in hard liquor and harsh, chain-swinging songs about gals in red blue jeans. This was the image; you don't hear many stories to suggest it wasn't close to the truth.

Originally he was Eugene Vincent Craddock, a native of Norfolk, Virginia who didn't seem to like much beyond motorbikes and girls, and whose life was entirely unremarkable until the summer of 1955 when two events changed it forever. In July he was involved in a bike crash, one so bad that his left leg was almost severed below the knee. Then in September, with his whole leg in plaster, Gene went to see Elvis Presley play in Norfolk and had his mind blown. Elvis literally had his clothes torn off by rabid fans that night. Gene went home, picked up his guitar, and wrote Be Bop A Lula which he debuted at local radio station WCMS's talent show in January '56. By July it was a US Top Ten hit and Vincent was in demand, criss-crossing the States with his band the Blue Caps. His short life was suddenly mapped out for him.

Vincent's Blue Caps rocked raw, more desperately than anyone - listen again to Cliff Gallup's outrageous solos on the over-familiar Be Bop A Lula. It's an incredibly sexy record - Buddy Holly had melodic, romantic nous and Little Richard had balls-on-the-line freak energy, but neither made a record that was as intense and panting as Be Bop A Lula. Gene can't wait to tell us about what he's got. She's the gal in the red blue jeans, queen of all the teens, clearly a looker, then he sings "she's the woman that I know". From gal to woman in one verse. With that carnal clue, the song pauses, followed by an untamed, unplanned shriek from the drummer. This and the prophetic, breakneck Race With The Devil were both recorded at Vincent's debut studio session; unsociable and ferocious, these early recordings are very hard to beat.

And, truthfully, Gene Vincent never bettered them, though that's no reason to ignore the rest of his career. While the Blue Caps Mark One rapidly disintegrated, later line-ups still cut hard rocking classics; Lotta Lovin', Cat Man, Who Slapped John, the delirious B-I-Bickey-Bi-Bo-Bo-Boo, the slo-mo menace of Baby Blue. Live they were a very tough act; Gene's pose rarely changed, legs apart, gripping the microphone stand as if he might collapse, always looking at some imaginary saviour in the balcony. Footage survives of Tex Ritter's Town Hall Party TV show, and the Blue Caps - with Johnny Meeks now on lead guitar - look magnificent in pink peg slacks, perfectly bequiffed; the pace at which they play was probably down to the diet pills Gene lived on. They also appeared in a film called Hot Rod Gang (1958) about a drag racer who joins a rock 'n' roll band (with assistance from Gene in a brief, not too embarrassing, acting role) to make enough money to race. But in spite of Hot Rod Gang and incessant touring, record sales were constantly declining and by the end of the decade Gene Vincent's career seemed washed up.

Now you may think all this was a lot of activity for a man who had nearly lost his leg, and you'd be right. During a season in Las Vegas he threw himself around so much on stage that he had to have a metal plate permanently inserted. Pretty soon, his finances were in equally bad shape and, midway through one tour, he absconded to Alaska with all the band's money.

Jack Good, the TV impresario who gave us Oh Boy! and basically invented Pop TV as we know it, was Gene's saviour. At a time when most had dismissed him as a one hit wonder, Good understood that he was a true great and brought him to Britain in '59. He loved the singer's outsider image and convinced him to lose his natty threads, decking him out in black leather. But when Gene appeared on ITV's Boy Meets Girls he hid his leg injury well, much to Good's chagrin - from the wings he was heard to shout "Limp, you bugger, limp!"

On a British tour with Eddie Cochran in 1960, Vincent played the hapless older brother to Cochran's cocksure pin-up. After one show they dived into a car as fans tore at them - it was only after they'd been travelling a while that Gene, hunched in the back seat, whispered "Eddie... Eddie... they got my pants."

It was also on this tour that Vincent was involved in a car crash near Chippenham, Wiltshire; he survived, but it caused more damage to his twisted leg. A local policeman, PC David Harman, was the first to the scene, where he discovered the crash had killed Cochran, Vincent's co-star and best friend. Unbelievably, the tour continued. In Glasgow he was in terrible pain and rubbed his left shoulder throughout the show before collapsing - doctors then discovered he'd broken his collar bone in the crash. To get out of the rest of the tour, Vincent forged a telegram that said his daughter Melody had died of pneumonia. By the time the promoters found she was alive and well, Vincent was back in the States.

Touring income aside, Jack Good provided a new string of Abbey Road-produced UK hits - Pistol Packin' Mama, I'm Goin' Home To See My Baby, She She Little Sheila; with Joe Moretti on guitar (Shakin' All Over, Brand New Cadillac) and Georgie Fame on piano, they were punchy, fizzy, and outshone pretty much all the early sixties UK competition. By the time he recorded Ivor Raymonde's dire Humpity Dumpity in '63, though, the spark was gone from Vincent's UK career too. Always one to make his life as complex as possible, he had fallen into Don Arden's management clutches, and an ill thought out quickie divorce added to his trouble. With all this, no hits on the horizon and an unpaid tax bill looming, he bailed out of Britain in 1965.

His late sixties recordings were a mixed bag, often underwhelming, but an album cut in '66 - only released in the UK on the London label, and simply called Gene Vincent - is a real gem. It was recorded at Sunset Sound Recorders in Los Angeles, where he now lived in a duplex with South African singer Jackie Frisco (right). The Wrecking Crew are all present - Hal Blaine on drums, Al Casey and Glen Campbell on guitar, and Larry Knechtel providing the wailing harmonica that kicks off Bird Doggin', his best single in years. The autobiographical Born To Be A Rolling Stone, the gorgeous Lonely Street, and chiming folk-rocker Love Is A Bird (written by Jimmy Seals, formerly of the Champs, later of Seals & Crofts) are up with his very best. PC David Harman, meanwhile, had by now changed his name to Dave Dee and given up the day job - he was scoring his first Top 10 hit, Hold Tight, with Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich, while Gene's fierce garage rocker Bird Doggin' failed to make any headway.

Another obscurity worth digging out, as you fight your way past Be Bop A Lula '62 and Be Bop A Lula '69, is Our Souls (try saying it fast) from his final album, apparently written by his father-in-law. Always the lonesome fugitive, it was Vincent's kiss-off to a world that he must felt had it in for him.
In 1961 he had fallen down thirty concrete steps at a theatre in Newcastle and knocked himself unconscious; in '66 doctors in New Mexico decided to amputate his bad leg, but he fled the hospital in his pyjamas; in '69 he was mugged in his Paris hotel room.

Also in 1969 John Peel signed Vincent to his newly formed Dandelion label - incongruously he became a labelmate of Bridget St John and Medicine Head: sessions produced by Kim Fowley were disappointing, though a duet of Scarlet Ribbons with Linda Ronstadt stands out for its weirdness. He performed at the John and Yoko-sponsored Toronto Rock'n'Roll Festival, backed the Alice Cooper band, in September '69. Heavy drinking made for a shambolic show. At the end of the year he was back in Britain, touring dance halls which were appreciative but mostly small time. His backing group by now was a Croydon rock revivalist act called the Wild Angels and the BBC caught the first few days - including fumbling rehearsals in a pub basement, walls lined with used mattresses, Gene very patient with his amateurish young charges - on a beautiful but melancholy documentary.

He was broke again: at one point in the film Gene has to explain to a hotel receptionist that he is sharing a room with his roadie. On the backstage stairs of a venue in Ryde on the Isle of Wight, he stands exhausted, barely able to catch his breath after one last encore. He comes across as noble, sweet, but entirely defeated. Ravaged by booze, pills and his run of near-fatal accidents, he finally died of a perforated ulcer eighteen months later.

An interview with Andrew Loog Oldham

An appreciation of Del Shannon

K-Tel: 40 Dynamic Years

Afternoon tea with Graham Gouldman

Backstage with David Essex

The Pedway: London on the first floor

DIY: "It was easy. It was cheap. Go and do it."

Diana Dors: Lady Godiva Rides Again

At the movies with Patrick Hamilton

My favourite Beatle

"Can you tell me where he's gone?": Dion in 1968

Worlds Within Worlds: Basil Kirchin

An introduction to Brute Force

Happy birthday Elvis

Gene Clark: No Other

30 years on: Felt's Crumbling The Antiseptic Beauty

Greg Shaw spreads the word

The mystery of Bobbie Gentry

The Girls, and other girls with guitars

Gene Vincent: the road is rocky