A day or so agoI was chuntering about how old I am, having in early childhood played such records as I possessed (Danny Kaye’s Sparky’s Magic Piano was among them) on a wind-up gramophone. By contrast, a radio programme broadcast earlier this week reminded me how young I was when I started going to pop concerts, which were not then known by what has always struck me as the rather silly word, ‘gigs’.

The programme was Radio 2’s Wish You Were There? The new series invites ‘celebrities’, so called, to imagine what it was like to be at a famous one-of-the-aforementioned by talking to those that were. First up was one Cerys Matthews (me neither), formerly of Catatonia. She wished she had been at the Finsbury Park Astoria (later the Rainbow, now a weird church) for the Stax/Volt Revue in 1967.

My interest in this was that I did see the tour. This was not in London when it began in March but the following month when the package had reached into the Midlands. I travelled to Leicester – Granby Halls, I think, though it could possibly have been the De Montford Hall. (I’d have known at once five years ago . . . fading memories.) One thing is for sure, though, and that was that I was only 15 at the time. This seems rather a youthful age now, as I look back, to be charging across the country, fag in mouth, pint in hand, with a lot of sharp-suited, pill-popping mods (“Double blues, anyone?”) fearful lest our latest Crombie overcoats would be damaged in punch-ups with rockers, aka greasers.

I think we grew up earlier then, perhaps. Certainly our musical taste appears to have matured early. I feel privileged to have been part of a generation that discovered not only progressive pop – Pink Floyd, Blind Faith, The Nice and the like – but also the soul music that we in Britain had come to appreciate rather earlier, it would seem, than many did in America. I first saw The Nice, incidentally, as part of line-up in which both musical styles were fused – as the backing group for P. P. Arnold.

One of the interesting points made in Wish You Were There? was that Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, Arthur Conley Booker T. and other Stax ‘stars’ (as they didn’t yet think themselves) were astonished to be feted by both The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. From nowhere, to the very top, it seemed.

Playing a big part in this acclaim, no doubt, was recognition of their amazing musicianship. In an era when Stones’ and Beatles’ covers were two a penny, the virtuosity of Redding’s Day Tripper and Satisfaction, for instance, shone above the rest in a way that could not be missed.

Redding, tragically, would not live to experience his greatest fame.

(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay, his first record to make the top ten (at No 3) was recorded weeks before his death in an aircrash in December 1967.

In a month of much ballyhoo about the 50th anniversary of the crash that killed music legend Buddy Holly, it is good to rememember another one.