Music remains the only key that can unlock the past for me in a way that I can inherently trust. A song from the old days strikes up and instantly a film is projected in my head, albeit an unedited one without a linear plot line; just random scenes thrown together to appease my reflective mood of the moment. For example, someone just has to play an early Joni Mitchell track or one of David Crosby’s dreamy ocean songs and their chords of enquiry instantly transport me back to the Brighton of 1969 with its Technicolor skies, pebble-strewn beach and jaunty air of sweetly decaying Regency splendour. I am dimple-faced and lanky and wandering lonely as a clod through its backstreets and arcades looking longingly at the other people in my path: the boys enshrouded in ill-fitting greatcoats and sagebrush beards and the bra-less girls in long skirts sporting curtains of unstyled hair to frame their fresh inquisitive faces.

It was at these girls in particular that my longing looks were aimed. Direct contact was simply not an option at this juncture of my life. Staring forlornly at their passing forms was the only alternative. This is what happens when you don’t have a sister and have been sidetracked into single-sex schooling systems since the age of eleven: women start to exert a strange and terrible fascination, one born of sexual and romantic frustrations as well as complete ignorance of their emotional agendas and basic thought processes.

And so it was that - on December 31st 1969 - I found myself glumly ruminating on my destiny to date. I kept returning to its central dilemma: I had just turned eighteen and yet I had never even been kissed passionately by a lady. It was an ongoing bloody tragedy.

But then it suddenly all changed - just as everyone was counting out the final seconds of the sixties and getting ready to welcome in 1970. I was in a pub in Cardiff when a beautiful woman impulsively grabbed me and forced her beer-caked tongue down my throat. She was a student nurse down from the Valleys with her mates to see the new decade in, she told me giddily. She had long brown hair and wore a beige minidress that showed off her buxom physique to bewitching effect. She smiled at me so seductively our bodies just sank into each other. In a room full of inebriated Welsh people, I let my hands wander over her breasts and buttocks. So this was what the poets were talking about when they invoked the phrase ‘all earthly ecstasy’. Suddenly, a door had opened and the sensual world was mine to embrace.

It was only a fleeting fumble. At 12.05 I unwrapped myself from her perfumed embrace for some thirty seconds in order to seek the whereabouts of a male friend who’d brought me there - only to return and find the same woman locked in an amorous clinch with a bearded midget. The door to all earthly pleasure had slammed shut on me almost as soon as it had swung open and yet I left the hostelry still giddy with elation. At last I’d been granted my initiation into fleshy desire. I was no longer on the outside looking in, like that cloying song by Little Anthony & the Imperials. And it had all happened just at the exact moment that the seventies had been ushered in to raucous rejoicing. I sensed right there and then that the new decade and I were made for each other.

On the train back to Paddington the next day - I’d been visiting old friends in Cardiff the night before, catching up on their adventures ever since I’d moved almost two years earlier from there to Horsham in Sussex, a mere thirty-mile whistle-stop from London-I felt further compelled to review my sheltered life thus far. Everywhere around me in the new pop counter-culture of Great Britain and elsewhere, young people were gleefully surrendering themselves to states of chemically induced rapture, growing hair from every conceivable pore of their bodies and cultivating sundry grievances against ‘the man’. And yet I was still stuck at home with my parents, who’d brainwashed me into believing that my adult life would be totally hamstrung without the benefits of a full university education and degree. As a result, most of my time was being spent furtively spoon-feeding ancient knowledge into my cranium until it somehow stuck to the walls.

It wasn’t a particularly easy process. I cared not a fig for Martin Luther or his Diet of Worms. But I had three A levels to sit - English, French and History - in May and had to somehow cram all the arcane details of each syllabus into my consciousness in order to get winning results. In retrospect, it wasn’t all a pointless procedure. The French I was studying would hold me in good stead when I came to live in Paris in my late thirties. My English A-level studies involved poring briefly over the poetry of both Yeats and T. S. Eliot, and both had a forceful impact on my own burgeoning literary aspirations. But then there’d be long mind-numbing sessions of having to grapple with the lofty moral agenda laid out in the collected works of John Milton.

In Paradise Lost Milton spelt it out to the sinners: ‘temperance - the golden mean’ is what humankind needed to adopt as an all-embracing lifestyle if they truly want to get right with God. Wise words, but somewhat wasted on an eighteen-year-old virgin just counting the days before he can catapult himself over to the wild side of life.

My father was a great admirer of John Milton also. His all-time favourite poem was Milton’s ‘On His Blindness’. He’d often quote the final line: ‘They also serve who only stand and waite.’ It fitted his overall view of an all-inclusive humanity. My father was a thoughtful man who’d had his young life thrown into turmoil first - as a child - by his own father’s bankruptcy and then - in his early twenties - by having to fight overseas throughout most of the Second World War. He returned in 1945 with the after-effects of undiagnosed malaria and severe rheumatoid arthritis partly instigated from falling out of a moving truck and landing flat on his back on a dirt road in North Africa.

He and my mother, an infant-school teacher born and raised in the North of England, had already met two years earlier in a wartime canteen and had begun an ardent correspondence. They married in 1945 at war’s end and moved into a two-storey house in North London’s Mill Hill area that same year. At first they were told by various doctors that my mother would be unable to conceive, but in April of 1951 she discovered she was pregnant. I arrived on Christmas Eve of that year after a long and complicated birth. My parents couldn’t believe their good fortune and - rightly sensing that I would be their only offspring - showered me with affection.

So often these days people tartly evoke Philip Larkin’s damning lines about family ties - ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do’ - as if it sums up the whole parental process in one bitter little sound bite. But my parents never fucked me up. They didn’t beat me or abuse me. They loved me and fed me and encouraged me to think about everything, to develop my own value system and stretch my attention span. Above all else, they introduced me from a very early age to the sensation of having one’s senses engulfed by art. Classical music streamed through our living room constantly. Much of it - particularly Beethoven and Richard Wagner-I found unsettlingly bombastic but the works of Debussy and Ravel were also played often and their enchanted melodies wove into my newly emerging brain-span like aural fairy dust. To this day, Debussy’s music can still stimulate within me a sense of inner well-being more profound than anything else I’ve ever known. It is the sound of all that unconditional love pouring down on me as a little child.

My father liked to lose himself in music. He was often in physical pain and relied on its healing properties to keep him emotionally buoyant. He was a professional sound recordist - one of the best in the business. When Sir Winston Churchill - at the very end of his life - was persuaded to read extracts of his memoirs for recorded posterity, my dad was the one invited to Chequers - Churchill’s stately home - to set up the equipment and tape-record the great man’s every faltering utterance. He told me later that Churchill was in such bad health they had to employ an actor to replicate his gruff tones on certain passages.

At the outset of the fifties he was a staff engineer at EMI’s Abbey Road Studios - George Martin was another new recruit at this juncture - but the pay was so abysmal that when I appeared, he was immediately forced to look for more financially advantageous avenues of employment. This he found in 1952 at Radio Luxembourg, whose London-based recording studios he basically ran for several years. The outlet then required a daily cavalcade of live entertainment to fill its airwaves - its transformation to a DJ-centric pop music format was still some years off - and so my father spent his days setting up the sessions and then recording everyone from George Formby to Vera Lynn.

Vera Lynn and him became first-name pals: she always had a good word for my dad. But he didn’t like her music. In fact, he couldn’t stand his job. He didn’t like ‘light entertainment’ - he found it all offensively simplistic. And as a devout Christian, he was thoroughly appalled by the loose moral conduct he often encountered in the industry: the sexual favours and rampant alcoholism, the fly-by-night agents and managers with their predatory ways, the shrill-voiced, pill-addled post-war prima donnas careening from one private catastrophe to the next. When I’d become a teenager, he told me just how flawed these people were in his eyes. His most unforgettable reminiscence involved a much-loved actress of the era who’d become something of an English institution for her sympathetic, matronly portrayal of a farmer’s wife on a popular radio broadcast. According to him, she’d once bitten a man’s penis off whilst performing oral sex on him when the car they were both travelling in was involved in a sudden head-on collision with a wall. He tried to instil in me early his belief that most popular entertainment was - at best - smoke and mirrors and that behind its bejewelled curtain lurked a tainted and predatory kingdom.

Both my parents viewed what passed for popular culture in the fifties with a ferocious disdain. Elvis Presley they considered like some degenerate hillbilly sex maniac, the musical equivalent of Robert Mitchum in Cape Fear. Frank Sinatra they called a ‘smarmy little gangster’: my father already knew all the insider scuttlebutt (gossip) on his Mafia affiliations and leg-breaking routines. When I suddenly fell under pop’s giddy spell, it was a shock to both of them.

The first time was when I heard Elmer Bernstein’s ‘Theme from The Magnificent Seven’ on the car radio during a family outing when I was nine going on ten. Staccato violins suddenly stabbed out a turbulent mariachi rhythm over which a hauntingly exuberant melody was being articulated and every atom of my being was suddenly activated by its impact on my ears. I’d never before heard or felt anything as thrilling as this. Every detail is still vivid in my mind: my grandmother’s fierce eyes looking at me from the front seat, my father’s aching back as he drove, the rank odour of cheap petrol that permeated the back of the family car. From that moment on, I was plugged into a new form of rapture that my parents could never understand.

The world of pop that I found myself suddenly enthralled with was not one that bristled with danger and raw excitement. The early sixties were a slack time for musical daredevilry. Elvis had been neutered by the army and his hoodlum peers were publicly disgraced and slouching snake-eyed through their wilderness years. Their places had been taken by a markedly less disruptive breed of young entertainer - bland crooners with dimpled cheeks and puppy-dog eyes forever voicing their feelings of undying love to some sulky beehived harpy. It was mostly cloying stuff - musical Brylcreem that left you feeling sticky and light-headed.

But then, in October of 1962, I was listening to popular disc jockey Alan Freeman enthusiastically address the nation’s ‘pop-pickers’ on the kitchen radio one Sunday afternoon when he introduced the debut single by ‘a young combo from down Liverpool way’ that he referred to as the Beatles. The song itself, ‘Love Me Do’, wasn’t particularly groundbreaking - the harmonica refrain dominating the arrangement had been clearly inspired by Bruce Channel’s recent mega-hit ‘Hey! Baby’ - but the robust blend of plaintive guitar strumming and playful Scouser vocalising made it infectiously easy on the ear nonetheless. No one could sense in that innocent moment that a musical and cultural revolution was about to blow up and that the Beatles would be its central motivating core, its leaders and all-purpose Pied Pipers.

How sweet it was to be ten years old when they kicked off: my whole teenaged experience was illuminated by their output and very existence. They never disappointed and each new musical plateau they ascended to left their audience delirious with a joy so contagious that it came to define the very spirit of the decade itself. The better world their songs aspired to was a universe that everyone was welcome to inhabit, one where notions of class and racial disharmony simply melted away, where being kind was infinitely more virtuous a pursuit than simply being cool and where the sophistication of high art could effortlessly be fused with the visceral impact of lowbrow pop. It was them and Dylan who kicked open the door that had formerly kept twentieth-century bohemian culture trapped in suffocatingly smoky nightclubs on the outskirts of town and let it come pouring into the high streets where young people were gathering to define a new sort of commercial mainstream for their own consumer urges.

Not forgetting the Rolling Stones of course. You can never overestimate their role in detonating the rebel instincts of my bright-eyed baby boomer generation. I should know. I was there in the front row when the deal went down. I felt the explosion full in the face. The force of it hot-wired my imagination, invaded my dreams and taught me everything I needed to know about the realities of youthful self-empowerment.

In 1959, my father - always on the lookout for better-paying employment - was offered a senior position in a fledgling TV company known as Harlech that was then poised to become the Welsh branch of the ITV network. He took the job even though it involved immediately uprooting his family from our relatively blissful North London home and hearth and relocating in Llandaff, a sleepy little village on the outskirts of Cardiff that was remarkable only for its lofty-spired cathedral, one of the largest centres of worship in all of the British Isles. I would come to know its interior well: my parents were weekly attendees and they obliged me to accompany them every Sunday morning until I reached the age of fourteen.

None of us were happy in our new surroundings. My father soon found himself in daily conflict with the higher-ups at the studio and the accumulated stress caused his various physical ailments to further flare up. My mother felt out of place, and I became lonely and withdrawn, uncertain of how and where to fit in with everyone around me.

The hearty ‘welcome in the hillsides’ that the Welsh were always promising to shower on all foreigners entering their borders had been mysteriously withheld from me. At school, I was mocked for my English accent, which I refused to modulate in order to blend in with the blocked-sinus cadences of the South Wales resident. I was useless at sports too - apart from cross-country running - and as soon as I’d entered grammar school at eleven, I found my place amongst the stragglers and the underdeveloped lurking in the shadow-dimmed corners of the playground.

One of my fellow outsiders at school was a youth with a facial defect who seemed at first glance to be ever so slightly mentally challenged. We got to talking one day and he mentioned that his father was a leading promoter of wrestling events and pop concerts in the South Wales area. I then talked up my dad’s role as TV studio controller and the boy became excited. He immediately proposed a deal: if I could get my father to agree to take him for a guided tour around his studio, he’d coerce his dad to let me attend one of his pop concerts. He’d even take me backstage to meet the acts.

A few days later, I was formally invited to witness a concert that was booked into Cardiff’s Sophia Gardens on February 28th 1964. It was a package tour of recent UK hit pop acts, headlined by an actor called John Leyton then renowned for his role as ‘Ginger’ in the TV series Biggles who’d also scored a no. 1 hit of late with his overwrought rendition of ‘Tell Laura I Love Her’. The rest of the bill were similarly old-school Tin Pan Alley chancers and prancers with one marked exception: nestled well below Leyton’s name and likeness on the marquee poster were five hirsute faces belonging to a Richmond-based quintet of young white R & B purists who called themselves the Rolling Stones. They’d already started getting publicity for themselves and had so far released two singles - the second, ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’, being a Lennon-McCartney composition - but neither had penetrated the top 10. They were still something of an unknown quantity outside of the South of England as a concert attraction and had been placed low on the bill in case their act failed to take off in the British provinces.

At around 5 p.m. on the evening in question, I entered the premises and was duly introduced to the acts that were already secluded in the backstage area. They were all surprisingly cordial with me, considering the fact that I was a pre-pubescent twelve-year-old dressed up like the quintessential spare prick at a wedding. Harold Wilson’s Labour government had recently been brought into power after years of Conservative misrule and my parents being good socialist thinkers had celebrated by buying their only child an overcoat made in a material called ‘Gannex’ that one of Wilson’s closest supporters and business cronies had begun manufacturing. It was supposed to be the fabric of the future but it looked and felt like a cheap bath mat with sleeves. It was a hideous material and was doomed to become extinct just as soon as Wilson had left power, but not before I’d been rendered sartorially challenged at this landmark occasion in my life.

Still, no one said anything untoward about my catastrophic fashion sense. The early-sixties UK pop breed were an approachable bunch if nothing else. They knew all about the devious nature of pop success and were fastidious about always presenting a smiling face and friendly word or two to any potential fan crossing their paths. Jet Harris-a hopeless alcoholic and one of UK rock’s first-ever bona fide casualties who’d been booked on the tour even though he was so plastered all the time someone else had to play his guitar parts behind a curtain - was even nice to me. His girlfriend-a singer named Billie Davis - let me play with her dog. I felt accepted by all of them and liked being in their company. But as soon as the lights dimmed and each of them slipped under the spotlight to reveal their stagecraft, I could sense that they were all living in the past and only a few heartbeats away from becoming instant entertainment-industry relics.

All these acts basically looked the same. Thin lips, prominent cheekbones, pompadoured Everly Brothers hair, shark-white teeth clenched in winning smiles, tight shiny suits with spaghetti stains on the lapels, loud shirts and skinny little ties. They sounded identical also. Twanging guitars played at docile, non-feedback-inducing volumes, drumming you could gently tap your foot along with, singers clumsily attempting to reproduce the husky-voiced drama of Elvis Presley’s recent recordings. In fact what we the audience were seeing that night was the timely ending of an era - the dreary watershed years separating the fifties from this new decade we were now living in and the beginning of true sixties culture as an oasis of unbridled hedonism. It occurred at the very moment the Rolling Stones entered the building.

The group had been delayed on the motorway and had arrived just in time to literally walk on stage for their spot. Suddenly the mood in the hall became more charged and disruptive. The predominantly female audience had been polite in their reception of the other acts but now they were becoming distinctly agitated. Screams started erupting in the hall followed by a succession of adolescent females leaving their seats and rampaging around the building in fierce packs.

I was seated in the front row just as the lights went down to herald the group’s onstage arrival and was suddenly confronted by a demented young woman who angrily demanded that I vacate my place for her. When I refused, she took off one of her shoes and positioned the stiletto heel against my neck like a shiv forcing me to acquiesce to her demand. One of the bouncers saw what was going on and pulled her off me, but by that time complete pandemonium had set in everywhere I looked. I was surrounded on all sides by young women in a collective state of extremely heightened sexual psychosis. They were touching themselves in inappropriate places and letting forth primeval howls. My eyes were popping out of my head.

This was the first time I’d ever come face to face with ‘sex’ - never mind raging mass sexual hysteria - so you can understand that the moment had more than a lingering impact on my naive little psyche. They were scary broads too but I instinctively understood the root cause of their dementia because the Rolling Stones’ presence in the room had also sucked me into something equally life-scrambling. The Rolling Stones never smiled and physically they were the polar opposite of everyone else on the bill. No ties, no Brylcreemed hair slicked back to better define the young male forehead. The Rolling Stones didn’t have foreheads. Just hair, big lips and a collective aura of rampaging insolence.

They slouched onto the stage and stared witheringly at the crowd before them as they donned their instruments. The house compère hastily announced them only to have his utterances drowned in screams. Then they began playing. It could have been ‘Not Fade Away’, the Buddy Holly song they’d release a week later, thus securing their first top-10 placing and their full-on ascension to the status of rebel-prince youth phenomenon.

All I can recall in my mind now is a vibrant, irresistibly all-embracing sonic churn - ‘the very churn of sedition itself’, I’d later come to call it. It was raucous and primordial and it sent young women into an instant state of full-on demonic possession. Something that had previously been forbidden in white culture was being let loose here: a kind of raw tribal abandoning of all inhibitions that held the key to a new consciousness still emerging. Within the space of their twenty-minute-long performance, my childhood’s end was preordained and the door to adulthood held tantalisingly ajar. I remember it now like someone reaching into my brain and turning a switch that suddenly changed my fundamental vision of life from grainy black and white into glorious Technicolor.

They played ‘Route 66’, ‘Road Runner’ and ‘Walking the Dog’ and they were right at the top of their game. Brian Jones hadn’t yet fallen by the wayside as a musical contributor and he, Jagger and Keith Richards presented a unique three-pronged attack as live performers. Jones - the most conventionally good-looking - minced menacingly on the left whilst Keith perfected a kind of big-eared borstal strut to his far right, endlessly winding and unwinding his coiled frame around the guitar rhythms he was punching out.

The two of them perfectly bookended Jagger, who at that point in time was one scary motherfucker to behold. No one had seen features quite like his before: the pornographic lips, the bird’s nest hair. The Stones had a disturbing ‘Village of the Damned’ quality about their combined physical presence but Jagger had the most radically alien looks of the quintet.

And his was by far the most overtly malevolent presence in the house. At one point in the set, a spectator-I couldn’t tell if it was male or female - rushed the stage and attempted to grab Jagger’s legs in a sort of rugby tackle manoeuvre. The singer responded by calmly driving his mike stand into the interloper’s face, causing blood and several teeth to arc across the spotlight. It was shocking to behold but also somehow perversely appropriate. We were all in the grip of something that was completely out of control, a sort of mass delirium, a voodoo ceremony for the white adolescent libido to come alive to.

By the end, all the barriers had come tumbling down. When they left the stage, they’d obliterated every performer and every note that had preceded them. I saw the other acts leaving the building with their instruments and suitcases at the end of the evening and they had to run a gauntlet of rabid female Stones fans outside the stage door who were only too willing to call attention to their various musical and image shortcomings.

The rules were all changing. ‘Tame’ was out. ‘Audacious’ was in. The Zeitgeist pendulum had moved to the other end of the culture spectrum, the one diametrically opposed to notions of conformism and bourgeois uniformity. And the Rolling Stones were at the centre of this cultural youth quake, its designated dam-busters.

I actually got to meet them that night too. The promoter took me and his son into their dressing room, which wasn’t much bigger than a toilet cubicle, about a quarter of an hour after they’d vacated the stage. ‘Why is that little cunt getting to meet them and not us?’ screamed an enraged female, one of many being blocked from entering through the adjacent stage door. But hey, I couldn’t help it if I was lucky.

At first glimpse the group looked utterly shattered, wrung dry by the exhausting routine of travelling around the British Isles in a cramped and underheated Transit van night and day. Keith Richards was stretched out on a makeshift sofa, eyes closed, mouth slightly agape, an open bottle of brown ale balanced precariously on his lower torso. Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman were towelling the sweat from their hair and necks and staring blankly at their dressing-room walls as if under hypnosis. They didn’t exactly radiate approachability but when I timidly offered them a piece of paper to autograph, they obliged without complaint, even though I had to gently nudge Keith in order to wake him up.

Mick Jagger was the one I was wariest of. I’d just seen him literally smash someone’s face in and now he was standing directly before me looking extremely angry about something or other. For an insecure second, I thought he might be experiencing an allergic reaction to my overcoat but then I noticed that his livid expression was aimed squarely in the direction of Brian Jones. Jones was surrounded by three young female fans, all of whom were clearly captivated by his genteel Cheltenham-bred manners and blond-haired pretty-boy insouciance. I could tell these girls were attracted by Jagger too - they kept shooting awed glances his way - but he frightened them with his contemptuous eyes and sullen expression so much that they never dared actually approach him. This set off a tense dynamic in the room: Jones swanning around these girls like the cat who stole the cream and Jagger staring at him with murder in his eyes.

Of course, Brian Jones had started out as the undisputed ringleader of the Rolling Stones and was certainly acting as though this continued to be the case. He was still physically strong and mentally focused: the drugs and alcohol hadn’t yet diminished him. In fact, he was possibly at his all-time happiest at this precise juncture of his life. All his dreams were coming true and the Stones were still fundamentally ‘his’ creation. The Jagger- Richards songwriting partnership had yet to reach commercial fruition and so he could still kid himself that he held the reins and was directing the whole operation. It would take only two or three months for this to end all too dramatically. From then on, he was a lost boy, a dead fop walking.

In later years, I would talk at length to many of Brian Jones’s closest acquaintances and they would almost always depict him as a ruinously flawed specimen of humanity. Some called him ‘sadistic’, others ‘pathetic’. In his defence though I have to say - he was incredibly nice to me. He was the only member of the Stones that night who bothered to engage me in conversation. He wasn’t condescending in the least; he told me he thought it was ‘fantastic’ that someone so young was coming to their shows. He said ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ repeatedly. He took his self-appointed role as the Stones’ good-will ambassador so seriously it was almost quaint to behold. He was so clean, courteous and daintily expressive it seemed unthinkable that he might be harbouring dark intentions under all that golden hair. He had me smitten anyway. Suddenly I had my future adult agenda mapped out before me. This was exactly the kind of person I was determined to grow up and become.

It was providential indeed then that my parents hadn’t actually heard of the Rolling Stones when they reluctantly agreed to let me attend the concert I’ve just described. If they had, I would never have been allowed near the venue. In the following months, however, they became aware of the group’s existence and began loudly regretting the fact that I’d been exposed to their worrisome influence.

Things reached a head in early ’65 when three group members were brought to court in order to answer charges that they’d urinated all over the forecourt of a garage somewhere out in the provinces. ‘These people you seem to idolise - they’re nothing but degenerates,’ my mother scolded. My father went even further, invoking a word I’d never heard before. ‘There’s something decadent about that bunch of animals,’ he said one evening as images of the group exiting their trial were broadcast on a TV news report. He was ahead of his time with that evaluation: the Stones’ decadent phase wouldn’t kick off for another four years.

There was one incident where my dad truly freaked out. We were both watching the television one evening in 1965 when Ready, Steady, Go!, the London-based weekly pop show, came on. That week, James Brown was the special guest: he and the Famous Flames performed live throughout its entire half-hour-long duration. It was Brown’s first-ever TV exposure in the British Isles and he rose to the occasion with a performance that gave new meaning to the word ‘torrid’. The cameras couldn’t help but linger on the predominantly female audience, who were experiencing the same kind of shared sexual psychosis that I’d witnessed first-hand with the Stones. After about twenty minutes, steam started spouting from out of my father’s ears. He bolted out of his chair, turned the TV off and told me in no uncertain terms that I was henceforth forbidden from watching Ready, Steady, Go! ever again. I still watched it though because it was usually broadcast at 6 p.m. on a Friday-a time when he was returning from work and I was alone in the house. Sometimes he’d arrive back just a minute or two after its conclusion and he’d always feel to see if the valves at the back of the TV were still warm. If they were, there was hell to pay.

In 1966, I saw Bob Dylan live backed by what became the Band on his seminal electric tour of Britain that spring. They played a single show at Cardiff’s Capitol Cinema. A friend at public school bought me the ticket so that I could tell him what transpired by phone the next day. It was the first time I’d ever seen another human being under the influence of drugs. Dylan rambled a lot between songs and his speech was seriously impaired. And the music was so loud that it was impossible to take in on any kind of aesthetic level. It was like standing in a relatively small room whilst a jet-aircraft engine was set into motion. ‘Tumultuous’ doesn’t even begin to cover it. I couldn’t hear properly for a week afterwards.

In 1967, another epiphany: I attended a special ‘psychedelic’ package tour - once again at Sophia Gardens - that featured the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd, the mighty Move from the Black Country and prog-rock pioneers the Nice. Best bill I’ve ever witnessed. Four mind-boggling performances. Seeing Syd that night ignited something within me that I’ve been obsessed with all my adult life. The sense of mystery he projected from that stage was something I felt an overwhelming compulsion to solve. His story - however it developed - was mine to tell.

He was also the second person I’d ever witnessed who was clearly in a chemically altered state. He was so out of it he couldn’t sing or even play his guitar coherently. Jimi Hendrix - who followed the Floyd ten minutes later - was the third. But Hendrix was a pro. Being on acid didn’t prevent him from pulling out all the stops in his voluminous trick-bag of guitar wild man theatrics - it only emboldened him to take the whole shtick further until he’d incited mass hysteria in the house. There was a sexual bravado about Hendrix live that night that was so palpable it made my jaw drop. I was even more thunderstruck when I witnessed several young girls surrounding him at the lip of the stage who had become so aroused they were trying to fondle his genitalia whilst he played. I’d seen these same girls week after week timidly accompanying their parents to Llandaff Cathedral throughout my early teens.

In 1968, glad tidings. Harlech’s contract with ITV expired and my dad moved us back to the South of England, close to London. I left Wales that summer with a spring in my step and nine O levels under my belt. My folks were well chuffed. And I was happy to be closer to the heart of the counter-cultural revolution. London was abuzz with magical concerts, many of them held for free in Hyde Park. I saw Traffic, Fleetwood Mac, the Pretty Things and the Move give great shows in an idyllic setting.

And then in August I got to go to my first extended gathering of the rock tribes - the Reading Jazz and Blues Festival, a three-day slog that I misguidedly chose to attend without bringing along a canvas tent. I spent the first night there sleeping on the side of the road. It was a fitful slumber. My big recollection of the audience was the preponderance of youths in greatcoats with ‘Did J. P. Lenoir Die For Nothing?’ stencilled on the back. It was a slogan that had been featured prominently on the cover of a John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers album called Crusade. Lenoir had been a hard-done-by black blues singer that Mayall was currently championing and so he was suddenly the new de rigueur totem of authenticity for the white middle-class blues-rock poseur.

Blues-rock was the sound of ’68 and this festival became a kind of designated showdown for all the white guitar-slingers infiltrating the genre. Alvin Lee and Ritchie Blackmore made their fingers bleed to keep the crowd baying for more. Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac told dirty jokes and made a raucous fist of relocating Elmore James’s Delta blues to the more sedate English suburbs. Jeff Beck dazzled everyone with his string-bending showmanship but his singer Rod Stewart was so shy he spent half the group’s performance vocalising from behind a large amplifier.

At the climax of one evening, an unannounced Eric Clapton suddenly appeared - ‘God’ himself looking suitably messianic in a white suit and hair well past his shoulders - and plugged in to add fiery solo guitar accompaniment to a frantic drum battle being waged on the stage between his Cream acolyte Ginger Baker and Baker’s drug buddy, the infamous junkie jazzer Phil Seaman. The hands-down winner though was Richard Thompson. His band Fairport Convention did a version of Richard Fariña’s ‘Reno, Nevada’ that afforded Thompson the ample opportunity to stretch out and play an extended solo on the guitar that - for sheer inventiveness and musicality - put to shame everything else that had been ripped from a fretboard that weekend. He was seventeen years old.

1969 was another fine year to be a teenaged middle-class bohemian wannabe. That was when I read Kerouac’s On the Road and started hitch-hiking hither and yon, mostly to Brighton. On weekends I’d use my dad’s train card and travel to London, where I’d haunt One Stop Records in South Molton Street and Musicland in Berwick Street - the only two outlets for American imports in the city. They were also the first places to ever stock copies of the San Francisco-based fortnightly publication Rolling Stone in Great Britain.

Summer meant more festival-hopping: I first made it down to the Plumpton Jazz and Blues Festival. It was a glorious weekend marred only by reports that were circulating via the daily press available on the site that the actress Sharon Tate and several companions had just been sadistically executed in Roman Polanski’s Hollywood homestead. It would still be some months before the culprits - Charles Manson and his repellent Family - were caught and revealed to the world at large. The shock of seeing longhairs capable of cold-blooded murder would send a bullet ricocheting into the heart of hippiedom.

But that was all in the immediate future. For the moment, young people were still merrily uniting in benign displays of mass bohemianism centred around live music without fear of being ripped off and brutalised by their own kind. The Isle of Wight Festival that year was the key UK event of the season. The promoters had even snagged an appearance by Bob Dylan, his first paying performance in three years, and this was a most significant turn of events for we new-bohemians who’d been praying for his return to active music-making and getting only bad country music like Nashville Skyline as an occasional response.

When he finally arrived on stage flanked once again by the Band, he looked very different from the ghostly apparition who’d almost deafened me back in 1966. He was fuller in the face and wore a bulky white suit that made him look like a character from a vintage Humphrey Bogart gangster film set in Panama. He wasn’t stoned either - at least, not so that you would notice. He looked more apprehensive than anything else. He had a right to be because it soon became apparent that he was a changed man vocally as well as imagewise. He sang every song in a whimsical croon that was light years removed from the amphetamine shriek of yore. You almost expected him to break into a yodel at any moment. Like the Band themselves, it was an exercise in old-school musical Americana that couldn’t be faulted for its pioneering spirit and woodsy finesse. But it was about as sexy as kissing a tree.

I loved the Band’s first two albums like everyone else but had issues with their collective fashion sense and penchant for extravagant facial foliage. They were just too hairy for my taste. Of course, this probably had something to do with the fact that I still couldn’t grow facial hair to save my life. But the Band turned almost everyone in the rock milieu into budding Grizzly Adamses practically overnight. Look at photos of Paul McCartney during the Let It Be sessions. Or Jerry Garcia at the end of the sixties. You’re confronted with more hair than face. These people were just disappearing behind a forest of their own testosterone. That’s why the Stones were always the best-looking rock act of that era. Five members and yet no facial hair whatsoever. They always had their priorities well sorted.

Now it was 1970 and I was bored. Time weighed too heavily on me too often. I only felt grounded in the moments when I was listening to music or reading a worthwhile piece of literature. My mother had always made sure I was a reader. She made it her business to compel me to seek solace in books and enlarge my basic attention span in the process. I would have already started perusing the self-styled ‘new journalism’ tomes that had sprung up over the past ten years.

Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood was the first-a great book. Capote had a marked influence on me - particularly his celebrity profiles. He truly got Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe to open up in print and give voice to their personal vulnerabilities. In a way you could sense Capote was also betraying their confidence by revealing their intimate bar-talk to his readers in such a naked light, but it was a warranted invasion of privacy, made with a flawless insight into the human frailties that lurk behind the surreal world of celebritydom.

I was certainly intrigued by Tom Wolfe’s dandified upper-echelon hipspeak prose style and provocative choice of then-contemporary cultural fetishes to unleash it on. But the tome that really fired me up that year was James Joyce’s Ulysses, the greatest book ever written. It was a tough nut to crack, involving at least six months of daily reading sessions and the added necessity of having to constantly consult two separate reference books that broke down into minute detail all the labyrinthine complexities lurking in each and every sentence of the text. Ulysses focused on just twenty-four hours in the lives of three Dublin residents at the turn of the last century, revealing their every hidden thought and impulse as they whimsically grapple with their destinies. Whilst writing it, Joyce found a way to penetrate the complex innermost workings of the human imagination and evoke them sublimely in the printed word. He ripped open the floodgates whence the whole ‘stream of consciousness’ aesthetic was sired. In a sense, it was a pioneering artefact of the psychedelic impulse because - if you only took the time to log into its many-layered meaningful-ness - it was guaranteed to blow your mind and stimulate new insights into the world of artistic expression. To borrow a line that the News of the World - Britain’s leading tabloid of the day - used to run at the head of every issue, ‘All human life is there.’

My months spent doggedly digesting the full importance of Ulysses seemed to impress my English teacher, who then took it upon himself to persuade my parents that I should aim for a place at either Oxford or Cambridge University. This involved staying on at school for an extra term in order to sit a special entrance exam. It was probably just as well: my A-level results ended up being nothing to boast about.

In late October I took the test, flaunting my newly acquired Joycean insights throughout one essay and attempting to pinpoint the cause of Virginia Woolf’s obsession with depression and boredom in her various novels in the second. Both were pretentious screeds unworthy of serious consideration. I sensed as much in early December when I was interviewed by a lecturer at Queen’s College, Oxford, who wasted little time in further acquainting me with my shortcomings as a literary analyst. Those dreaming spires wouldn’t be housing my sorry hide, I quickly concluded. I wouldn’t be darkening the towers of higher learning in this exclusive neck of the woods. A formal letter of rejection was in the post heading towards my address before the year was out.

Was I sad? Not that I can recall. I was finished with kowtowing to the high-minded dictates of academia anyway. My brain couldn’t take in another avalanche of useless information. The old ways meant nothing to me now. My mind was set on rambling, on striking out for parts unknown. My thoughts were all on how I could best project myself into the new wild frontier of London’s brimming youth counter-culture.

What was I really like at this precise ‘crossroads’ moment in my life? A weird kid, certainly - moody, introspective, unsure of myself, girlish-looking, long-limbed, fresh-faced, a victim of bad posture. Puberty had been a hell of a long time arriving and I was still shyly adjusting to the new regime that had only recently invaded my body and hormones.

I was becoming something of a bedroom hermit, plotting out my future and fantasising the hours away behind drawn curtains. I had a lot in common with Tom Courtenay’s escape-obsessed character in the landmark sixties film Billy Liar; my dreams had lately gotten so out of control that I needed to live them before they devoured me.

But what would happen if my dreams were suddenly revealed as a kind of living nightmare? Wouldn’t it be somehow more sensible to opt for a life of quiet rural underachievement instead? That way at least my ‘innocence’ would still be protected. I wouldn’t be soiled by worldly experience. But innocence has always been an overrated virtue in my scheme of things. It’s a kissing cousin to naivety and being naive is only one small step from out-and-out stupidity. People who endlessly talk up its purity of sentiment usually turn out to be either morons or chicken hawks.

William Blake was right. You have to soldier on down that dank tunnel of adulthood until you arrive at the bigger picture. Otherwise you’re just abandoning yourself to a world of small-mindedness, bitterness and regrets.