Pop concerts this real gone daddy would love to have attended

Taunton? Yes, Taunton. Wherever, I bet it was fun (although I might have given Vince Eager a miss). Cochran, 21 at the time, was to die following a car crash in Chippenham two months later...

If you love Sixties US pop music, you’re a fan of drummer Hal Blaine – whether you’ve heard of him or not

No, honestly - Hal Blaine was so brilliant, so versatile and so ubiquitous, I guarantee that you know and love dozens of the records he played on. Elvis, the Beach Boys, Mamas and Papas, The Byrds, Frank Sinatra, Simon & Garfunkel, Sam Cooke, anything produced by Phil Spector, Johnny Rivers, Roy Orbison, Johnny Rivers, some Love tracks, Richard Harris (okay – that’s stretching it!)… well, you get the idea. He was everywhere!

The Beach Boys - the shocking truth revealed at last

How the Beach Boys stayed great even after America lost faith

Okay, there is no excuse for this posting, except that it’s been a rather irritating few days, and I need to indulge in some truly mindless fun. And when I need my spirits lifting, the nerdy blokes in the stripy shirts never fail me.

"Green Onions", "The Locomotion", "The Wanderer" - 1960s pop music was great before The Beatles

We all know that the period between the end of rock and roll’s initial wild-man era – 1956 - 1958 – and the 1964 British Invasion of the US pop charts represented a dreary wasteland of safe, manufactured, talentless teen idols and tepid, gutless singles: the Music Industry, frightened by the wildfire spread of the raucous, lust-drenched yowlings of sexually-deranged young white and black Southerners had regained control by imprisoning Chuck Berry for transporting a minor across state lines, exposing Jerry Lee Lewis’s marriage to his 13-year old cousin, and tucking Elvis safely away in the army for a couple of years.