Between 1958 and 1962, I went from being a confused pre-pubescent male desperately short of information, to being a fourteen year-old hormone factory frustratingly short of girls who shared my enthusiasm to know everything as quickly as possible. During this period, my main medium for making any kind of sense of it all was popular music.

This was the brief era I always think of as From Elvis in the Army to Beatles in the Cavern. An awful lot of the pop music around was derivative one-hit wonder drivel, but some of the output was classic stuff. My very first little love-affair was with a girl called Linda Mordin, and soon afterwards The Everley Brothers released ‘So sad to see Good Love turn Bad’. I cannot even today hear this track without immediately seeing Linda’s mile-wide grin and accompanying giggle….and trying to remember what went wrong in that vaguely Huxleyesque romancette.

Running through most releases back then was what we see now as an incredible innocence, but at the time it seemed to me the sort of profound heartach parents could never grasp. Eddie Cochrane’s ‘C’mon Everybody’ was a song about trashing the house while your folks were away for the weekend, and then rushing around like a headless chicken to clear up the mess, while chucking open every window in a bid to expel every last trace of forbidden tobacco smoke. I wasn’t quite at that stage by then, but I wanted to be. I also wanted to be a bloke fancied by all those girls I fancied from a distance. I wanted to be the bloke in the Crystals’ ‘And then he kissed me’.

This was still the period of pristine admiration, apple-pie complexions and being back home by 9.30 pm at the latest. Singles at the outset of that odd little interlude were about largely wholesome things: little deuce coupes being driven by The Beachboys, surfboard parties hosted by Jan and Dean, Swiss maids being wooed by Del Shannon, and Living Dolls being admired by Cliff Richard. As 1962 approached, The Sixties got going properly – and within two years, just at the time my own emotions were opening up properly, there were songs about Pleasing Me and Liking It and Getting Started. But in 1959, that was all in a future as yet unimagined.

I feel enormously privileged to have been going through a parallel maturing process at the same time (and speed) as pop music. Carole King in 1960 sang the anodyne ‘Might as well rain until September’: but by 1965, she was waxing lyrical on the subject of the Earth moving under her feet. In that terrifyingly short half-decade, the world went from holding a Victorian candle for someone, to ribald lyrics about using that candle for unspeakably different reasons. It was a quantum leap in sexual mores from which the world has never quite recovered.

Very few artists made it through from shocked innocence to all-knowing orgy. Cliff Richard sort of did, although today – tonight in the Jubilee concert, even – he seems an oddly antediluvian survivor. But one who did (and I didn’t realise this until yesterday) was the ultimate late Fifties teenage pop idol Dion. His massive hit ‘Runaround Sue’ gets airplays today, but Dion Francis Dimucci himself (72 years young and still rocking) has transformed himself into the genuine article Kerouac blues singer. His 2012 album Tank Full of Blues is a cracker.

Another was Ricky (later Rick) Nelson, whose standard ‘Hello Mary Lou’ can take me back to 1959 after the first few bars. Nelson went on to sing and produce some excellent singles much later (like ‘Garden Party’) but we must sadly use the past tense in relation to this man, because in the best tradition of all 1950s pop heroes, he died in a plane crash on December 31, 1985. Buddy Holly went the same way, as did The Big Bopper. Eddie Cochrane died in a car crash in England during a 1960 tour. His last and posthumous single was Three Steps to Heaven.

There is a book – potentially, a very good book – to be written about that extraordinary interregnum between the Haley-Presley years and the Beatles-Stones decade. I’m too knackered and lacking in either time or focus to write it myself, but it’s still nice from this distance in time to stumble across the best of it. Just this afternoon I listened to In Dreams by Roy Orbison, and Only Sixteen by Craig Douglas. Corny as Kansas in August, but supremely pure in its desire for all that.

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