A conversation with John, the only other Englishman in our village, sparked a memory of what for me was quite a defining moment in my teenage years and would have a lasting effect throughout my life.

I remember it well. I was at boarding school and it was announced that Saturday night there was to be a record-playing evening of modern music for those who would like to attend.

I was aware of music and particularly when cycling around Chipperfield and then Watford, I would hum and sing to myself – a habit I was to drop a few years later when I bought a tape-recorder and heard myself singing and realised I could hold a tune in my head but could not transmit same from my mouth.

I would hum such things as Memories Are Made of This (Dean Martin), which was also recorded by comedian Dave King who had a hit with You Can’t Be True To Two. In fact that was one of the songs played on the music night at school for I recall two 17-year-olds discussing the merit of the message of the song. Such people seemed so mature from my younger perspective, so I listened intently when one sagely advised the other: “It’s very true. You can’t be true to two.”

I realise now, he was trying to impress that not only did he have a girlfriend, but in fact he had two.

About six records into this musical evening, someone said it was about time they played “the big one”. I think Winifred Atwell was top of the charts that week beaming through Poor People of Paris and David Whitfield was coming up strong with My September Love. Or perhaps it would be Mel Torme with Mountain Greenery. You tended to hear these songs being sung by English singers Alan Breeze and Kathie Kay on Billy Cotton’s Bandshow.

Everyone was silent as the large 78rpm record was placed on the turntable.

The first word to hit my ears was “wull”. I didn’t know what that meant and I was no wiser when the second word came out as “sunce”, followed very quickly by a compound word that seemed to my untrained ears to be “marbay-bee”.

By the time I had decoded this and picked up on the fact “wull” was in fact Memphis-speak for the word “well”, he had said it three times in three lines, which helped me with the translation and then I realised the singer was well on the way down Lonely Street to Heartbreak Hotel, which later Ricky Nelson revealed was in Lonesome Town for the benefit of those with a geographical bent.

I had never heard anything like it: the voice, the accent, the delivery, the tempo and the song. It was so raw and jagged, cutting into your brain. By the time the guitar break came, I had joined in with the rest, tapping my feet in time with the rhythm.

There must have been 15 of us in that room and I know for a fact the majority had never heard the record or anything like it. It was not that surprising really, because Elvis Presley’s Heartbreak Hotel was only aired three times on BBC radio during the entirety of 1956.

My mind was blown: my musical concepts in disarray. Alma Cogan’s recent Never Do A Tango With An Eskimo or Twenty Tiny Fingers seemed to belong to another era.

It was a shock to the entire system. In respect of music, the world as we had known it was changed overnight. Nothing: The Beatles et al had such an impact as the advent of rock ‘n’ roll.

The record was played three more times that evening and I also heard for the first time a song called Rock Island Line.

I was struck immediately by the fact the singer could not sing: not in the accepted sense of Whitfield, Pat Boone, Perry Como, Nat King Cole or Sinatra. It was a voice that whined its way through the airwaves but, after a time, I began to realise the song told a good story about life on the American railroads, and it had a certain exultant humour. I had never heard of Lead Belly or the man who sang the American’s original song that night: Lonnie Donegan.

Much later, humming away to ourselves, we left the record session and went to bed. A window had been opened and the next evening, I telephoned my parents and requested a small radio for my imminent birthday.

A month later I discovered what being “sent” involved as I listened to snatches of Why do Fools Fall in Love by Frankie Lymon and The Teenagers as a couple of us risked problems by listening to it being played through the prefects’ room’s door.

I was transported by the sound. My body felt different as it washed over me, It happened again not long afterwards when the second guitar solo of Hound Dog took over my senses. I was solid gone, man.

When my radio arrived, I listened to it illicitly under the bedclothes as I tuned into the only source for more of that music: Radio Luxemburg, where the signal would fade in and out a couple of times each minute. True you could, if you were lucky, pick up AFN (American Forces Network) but not on my little transistor jobby, which only had a volume control and no such thing as a tone control, for there was only one tone: tinny tranny.

It was our underground music: it belonged to us and slowly but surely it began to dominate the charts, while only the really well-produced melodies and ballads were able to break through.

Eventually, in early 1957, the BBC made an early Saturday evening concession to the new fad with the introduction of Six-Five Special: a lightweight pastiche of the real hard-edged rock.

We would gain the occasional snippet of what the real thing was like when they showed you a brief clip of What’s Hot in the States. Knowing the BBC and the unhip nature of the world then, the clip was probably named “What’s doing awfully well in the US of A”. Then you would hear and see an excerpt from Chuck Berry or Big Joe Turner or whatever was shifting shedloads of wax.

That year I worked towards buying a record player, and looking at over 2,000 cds stacked behind me, and recalling I used to write a record column for the old West Herts Post, that line informing me: “Well, since my baby left me” all those years ago, when he felt so "lone-la" he could die, started something.

(To be continued)