Nik Cohn

Ireland was where I had grown up, and rock the main reason I had left.

Had my first glimpse of sex, and danger, and secret magic. And I had never been healthy since

Irresistible, in fact. For a ten-year-old weakling, class clown, mamma’s boy, and all-around loser, it offered nothing less than a second coming

Suddenly, instead of a passport to oblivion, being a teenage fuck-up was the hottest ticket in town. So one day I was your British Rail

stay true to rock as a doomed romance, a passionate beating against the tides, a moment

Mostly, pop boiled down to electric guitars

It’s one of the clichéd laws of showbiz that entertainment gets sloppy when times get tough and, what with the depression, the war and its aftermath, times had gotten very tough indeed

There’d be occasional novelties, cute comedies, but basically teenagers had to put up with the same songs that their parents liked

Sinatra was the first singer to join them, that’s all.

As a prototype for

The old country blues, raw and ragged and often wildly emotional, had been increasingly replaced by rowdy big city blues, by electric guitars and saxes and, right through the forties and early fifties