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producer. He was quite the brain but wasn’t at all sure about his son’s sensibilities when he
announced that he was leaving a career at BOAC, the forerunner of British Airways to go to Chicago
to manage a rock band called Shakey Jake! More about that later.

My Mother and my Grandmother were the musical influences I absorbed as a boy and to some
degree as a teenager. Mum was a housewife for the most part but took some part-time secretarial
work from time to time. My Nan came to live with us after her husband had passed a couple of
years before I was born. She and I were very close (she saved my skin from a couple of
misdemeanors) and we shared a similar sense of humour. Both of them lived long lives into their

late 90s!

Dad had no interest in music at all. Mum and Nan often gathered at a piano, sang old standards of
their youth and of the day, punctuated by quite a few songs that would have been popular in
wartime. My Mother also loved swing and big band music. Artie Shaw, Count Basie and Glenn
Miller; singers like Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, The Andrews Sisters, Ray Charles and Bing Crosby. She
had a small but great collection of records that were listened to regularly.

In Dallas and then back in the UK my peers and I all listened to the pop artists of
the day on the radio – our local stations in Dallas were KBOX and KLIF—but
the US had TV shows like Freddie Cannon’s “Where The Action Is”,
Shindig, The Ed Sullivan Show and even Paul Revere & The Raiders had
a show. We hadn’t really seen music TV like that before, but it was in
full bloom when we returned to the UK with shows like Top Of The

Pops, Thank Your Lucky Stars and Juke Box Jury. The UK didn’t have
very much to watch even then and so radio was really the daily medium Mike Raven
of choice.

I had a little ALBA transistor radio with a single earpiece and lay
awake at night searching through the frequencies to find radio
stations all over Europe that played music. I remember American DJ

Emperor Roscoe on Radio Luxembourg – he played the more
popular hits, but later we had all the “Pirate Radio Stations” like
Radio Caroline, Radio North Sea and Radio London that broadcast
from ships anchored just outside British territorial waters. Their John Peel
legacy lives on today and many great DJs started their careers on the
ships. One in particular was the late John Peel who probably did more
to educate British youth in new and progressive music than any other DJ.

His eclectic show was required listening on a Sunday afternoon.

After his show was Mike Raven’s R&B show. Again, required listening! The first hour was old school
R&B – Tamla, Stax and the other relevant labels – the second hour was blues and quite the treat. We
heard artists and songs that we couldn’t even find in record shops. Legend has it that Mike would
persuade sailors working a passage to the US to bring back the recordings. Paul Jones, former lead
singer for Manfred Mann and leader of The Blues Band carried on that mantle at the BBC for many

years and we should be grateful to him for his commitment to blues and exposing so many fine
blues artists to listeners worldwide.

I was about 15 or 16 when I bought my first record player and started a modest collection. We didn’t
have a lot of money, so my purchases were dependent on an allowance and weekend jobs. I had
bought a few Beatles singles and some other 45s in Dallas and added to the 45 collection here and