Part One

Just as the 1950s were exhaling their dreary last, so did one of the decade's more colourful progeny come of age. This was the rock'n roll tour, which saw a galaxy of the latest stars travel the length and breadth of the country, injecting high-decibel vitality into the normally tedious lives of British small-town youth.

The shows often played in the enormous cinemas that were typical of the time, and Aylesbury Granada was a venue made to perfection. Now, my mother was a rather timid, self-effacing woman, painfully lacking in self-esteem at times. Still, there was no way she was going to pass up on this one. During those two or three halcyon years, she would trip off to the Granada after tea with me in happy tow, ready for an evening of raising hell.

Marty Wilde and the Wild Cats, Billy Fury. Screaming Lord Sutch; Wee Willie Harris, Jo Brown and the Bruvvers. Eden Kane, about ten feet tall in a bright cream suit; even Cliff Richard, when he was still a rocker. We saw them all. It was at the end of the Billy Fury concert that my sister mysteriously disappeared, sending my mum into total panic. No worries. Following the lead of all the swooning teenage girls, she had rushed the stage to get closer to the star of the evening. She was four at the time.

This was all hugely enjoyable - even Cliff Richard. There was just one thing, though. Rock'n roll was supposed to be the cutting edge; risky, dangerous. Most of its exponents were anything but. Marty Wilde was as wild and frenzied as the Tory Party Annual Conference. While Billy Fury had given up danger and rage in favour of looking neat, slick, and cool for the girls. The rock'n roll scene was in danger of turning into a damp squib. But then he came along.....

Part Two

Gene Vincent                                                                  Gene Vincent. We saw him twice. The first time, the great rocker turned up in trademark black leather jacket and thigh-clinging black trousers. Pale and gaunt, his bug eyes almost popping out of his skull, he crouched over the microphone, intoning songs in sounds which seemed to emanate from a source off-planet. Every pore in his body oozed menace, seduction, danger, darkness. I was in awe.

The second time Gene Vincent terrorized the Aylesbury Granada, he forsook the black leather in favour of a skintight green outfit. He was quite badly ill with flu, but went on anyway. Even from our seats near the back of the auditorium I could see the sweat pouring down his face as he writhed on top of the grand piano.

It was an infant initiation into one of the ancient Greek mysteries. Dionysus had turned up big-time, and elected his Prince of Darkness to spread the word. Into a world numbed by a collective post-war trauma, a depth charge had been dropped. Life would never be the same again. Not mine, at any rate.

Gene Vincent was God's leather-clad prototype, an early experiment. The fully-fledged product was to be unleashed on the youth of the planet some six or so years later, in the form of one James Douglas Morrison.

Part Three

The other wild thing was the girls. The screaming girls. They were the crazed ones, not the pop stars. They got steadily wilder, noisier, more hysterical, through to the mid-1960s. Straight, conventional office girls, or sixth from schoolgirls. Leading completely straight, conventional lives until they got a whiff of a pop star, when they turned into maenads, frenzied, beyond control crazy, out to rip their latest hero into pieces limb from limb.

It seemed bizarre in the extreme, but I suppose it comes down to basic psychology. The return of the repressed. For years, the great god Dionysus had failed to get much of a look-in. But you can't keep a good god down forever. And when he's been forced underground for so long, he comes back in weird, weird ways.

Part Four

"We've never had it so good" boasted Prime Minister Harold MacMillan in 1957. I begged to differ.

Sure, economically, materially, things were looking up. Our family participated fully in the bonanza: over the course of a few short years we acquired our first car, our first television set, our first gramophone player, a bigger, better house, complete with bigger, better garden and indoor toilet, and a multitude of things for the kitchen, which possessed marginal significance personally. All good. But for the rest.....

Thirty years down the line, in their tribute to the (then) recently-deceased Andy Warhol, his former disciples Lou Reed and John Cale recorded a song called 'Smalltown'. "There's only one good thing about a smalltown/ You know that you want to get out..... There's only one good use for a smalltown/You hate it and you know you have to leave.'

Late 1950s Britain seemed like one big smalltown to me. Conformist, conventional, hugely uninteresting: such was my modest infant verdict on most of the adult life surrounding me. Parents partially excepted.

Maybe it was a post-war thing. Those still alive were only too happy to get on with life the way they were supposed to: get a job, buy a little house with a little mortgage, have a couple of kids, do all the same stuff, think all the same thoughts, just like everyone else. Nowadays I could use more fancy words like 'staid' and 'stuffy'; back then, it just came over as uninteresting, unstimulating, and unimpressive. Surely, there had to be another way.

The war. Nobody spoke about the war. It was only just over a decade down the road, but it was as if it never happened. My mum mentioned it occasionally. How she could watch Coventry burning in the night from her Oxfordshire house some twenty-five miles away. And how she felt uneasy when hazy details eventually began to emerge of the gratuitous bombing of Dresden near the end of the war. But other than that - zilch. Let's go to work, paint the living room, take our summer holiday by the sea. We'd never had it so good....