As I mentioned last week, as a youngster I would hum melodies that came to mind, while cycling round the locality.

Strangely, for one who would become fascinated by lyrics, I was not into them in my early teens, so often I did not have the remotest idea as to the name of the song and, in fact, I associated one tune with riding my bike for so many years but had no idea as to its origins.

Quite a lot of water flowed under the bridge until one evening in the late 1970s, I sat down to watch a documentary about the last woman to be hanged, Ruth Ellis.

A collection of headlines from the time and newsreel shots gave us the feel for that era, replete with the unknown song I had hummed on my bike through habit as a teenager. I waited for the credits to roll and then I was able to put a name to this tune that ran through my brain whenever I recollected the days I lived in Chipperfield: Jo Stafford’s You Belong To Me.

I didn’t even know the lyrics until that documentary and the opening line hit me as I recognised the tune: “See the pyramids along the Nile”.

Ellie cannot stand the song, although she admires Miss Stafford’s vocal powers, but she allowed me a discordant couple of lines when I sang it as we approached the pyramids at Gaza a few years ago. Neither of us were cycling.

I was pleased to identity the song and a friend, Percy Stratford, gave me his old 78 version of it, for I had become an avid collector. I remained so until I began to run out of enthusiasm when Punk and house and rap began to hold sway, forcing me to retreat into yesterday, or the world of adult orientated rock of The Cars, Bob Seger, Dire Straits, Chris Rea, Tom Petty and co. while keeping tabs on Bob Dylan’s erratic course between the inspired and the mundane.

I had stopped reading the New Musical Express by the time the 70s took hold, bringing an end to my stint as a regular customer for 20 years.

There is an irony here in that I wrote a record column from 1960 until 1963 in the West Herts Post. One of my predecessors on the paper was Maurice Kinn. After he had left the Post he became a music promoter and agent, buying the old struggling New Musical Express in 1951 and, having noted the Billboard magazine in the USA included a Top 100 best-selling record charts, decided to introduce a similar concept.

Record sales were not large in those days, and there was still a tendency towards sheet-music sales, which people would buy and take home to play on their piano or whatever.

The first record charts were compiled from a number of London outlets and the first chart, with Al Martino’s Here in My Heart at number one, comprised 15 discs.

Gradually, as sales increased, the chart developed into a Top 20 and then a Top 30 and at one stage, record-buyers in Watford contributed towards the forming of the weekly national charts, by their purchases at Past and Present Records in St Albans Road, along, of course, with many other shops all over the country. The charts page in the NME would also include a list of the top sheet-music sales and, of great significance, the Top 20 in the USA.

Apart from Lonnie Donegan, bringing blues and traditional cotton-field songs to our ears, Britain had little to offer in the 1950s, and while things improved a little in the early 1960s, it was not until the music really developed around 1964 onwards, that the UK become a major player.

So the US charts were the ones to watch in the 1950s, and you would wonder what these songs were like. Somewhere between two or three months later, that US recording would be released in the UK. People tend to forget that hiatus, but it was useful for the Brits because they could fly over The Pond, collect the Top Twenty discs, come back and work out which one their artist would cover.

Marty Wilde built a career on that: covering the American million sellers Donna, Teenager in Love and Sea of Love and Craig Douglas ceased delivering a pinta-milka-day and covered Teenager in Love and denied a far greater singer, Sam Cooke, by covering Only 16.

All those songs were released in 1959, and to underline the delay in release times for Stateside hits, Here Comes Summer by Jerry Keller was released in August in the UK, but fortunately that summer continued to burn through to late October and Jerry made number one.

Yet in the 1950s, I recall a specially printed list of the Top 20 would appear in the windows of record shops. For instance, Que Sera would be listed as the top song, and under the title would be listed all those who had made a recording of it: from Doris Day to the likes of Edna Savage, but these were the sheet music charts, whereas there was only Doris’s version in the record charts.

Some might deem the rock and pop music of those days as unsophisticated. When I was heading for my 70th birthday I compiled a playlist on iTunes of all my favourites from the 50s, and then 60s, etc, on until today.

The other day, I had the 50s playlist playing quietly in the background as we had a leisurely Sunday lunch and a few bottles of wine, stretched over a period of eight hours, with our friends, including John, who is a couple of years in advance of me.

I was quite pleased when he suddenly reacted, as I do, when he heard the first few bars of Bobby Darin’s Dream Lover.

“This was special,” he said of the 56-year-old record. I feel that as well. I still get an uplifted feeling whenever I stumble across it. Was it because the sun always shone in 1959, or because I was a teenager with the world before me?

As John said the other day, triggering these memories that I have noted this and last week: “Do you think with The Voice and all those shows, the kids today get the same out of their songs as we used to when we tried to keep up with what was going on when it was all underground and frowned upon because we were listening to ‘The Devil’s Music’?”

As for Dream Lover I just happen to think it was one of those pop records that hit the spot and, in addition, boasted a special quality.

There were quite a number of them scattered throughout the 1950s and music by Buddy Holly, Jackie Wilson, Sam Cooke, Eddie Cochran, The Everly Brothers and Ricky Nelson with James Burton on guitar, has long been credited as being key influences on the British and American artists that followed.

The bloke who told me “wull sunce mabay-be loft me” back in 1956, also did pretty well.