AT first, I confess, I laughed. When a contact at Oxford’s New Theatre asked if I wanted to interview a member of 70s doo-wop band Showaddywaddy, I thought she was taking the mickey.

For one thing, I was amazed they were not only still together, but alive.

Having established that they were, my next question was, who on earth would pay to see them? Even at the time they were a bit of a joke, weren’t they, with those lurid teddy boy coast and radio-friendly versions of some already-seriously old rock & roll tunes? And who alive can utter the band’s name without also visualising the ghastly wide-eyed form of Jimmy Savile, cigar aloft, announcing them on Top of The Pops? But four decades on, surely not even our nostalgic love of 70s kitsch can save this relic from the decade that taste forgot?

How wrong I was.

Cut through the prejudice and here is a great band; pop survivors who have worked their way up the hard way. How else could they have racked up 22 hit singles? And 10 of those have dented the Top 10. Some 32 years since the release of their last charting single (1982’s Who Put the Bomp (in the Bomp-a-Bomp-a-Bomp), they are working harder than ever.

Original drummer Romeo Challenger (real name) is now 64, but has more energy and drive than most 20-somethings. He has passion and, importantly, belief – belief that his band and his music still rock! And they do.

I couldn’t make it to their Saturday night show. If you went, I’d love to hear what you thought. I bet it was good – and hugely enjoyable; more fun, I’m sure, better than most of the young skinny-jeaned indie-bands I’ve seen gracing stages in Cowley Road and any number of music festivals this year. Now this is not going to be a paean in praise of golden oldies. To limit oneself to the treasures of the past is to deny oneself the glories of what is being created now and tomorrow. But I’m sure I’m not alone in being all too ready to dismiss an artist, and their creative endeavour, simply because they, or it, is ‘old’.

Proof of the folly of such thinking came, today, in the form of a list of children’s favourite bedtime stories.

Now, if there’s anyone who should be ‘all about’ the new, it’s kids. Or so you would think. But no, of the Top 10 titles, chosen by under-10s, only three (Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler’s top-rated The Gruffalo, Donaldson and Axel Scheffler’s Room on the Broom, and J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone) were published within the past 30 years. The rest are older even than Showaddywaddy, one of them – Susan Coolidge’s What Katy Did – being more than 140 years old. Most were around 60 years old.

It seems that despite our fascination with all things new, if you want quality, you’ve got to go back to the classics. Even if they do look a bit daft in those bright teddy boy outfits.