The first time I received payment for playing in public as a 15 year old fledgling drummer was not, as may be expected, in coins of the realm. It was not even with an offer of a return booking to show off my talent. No! My rhythmic efforts were rewarded with a humble hot meat pie.

Every Saturday, if it was not raining “cats and dogs” or Dover was not enveloped in one of its damp, blanketing, channel fogs, my best friend and I would leave our respective homes and go into town to while away a few hours in one of the town centre coffee bars, which were extremely popular with our generation. With their bright lights, Formica tabletops, mirrors, plastic flowers, frothy coffee and non-stop jukebox music they were a great place to meet up with school friends – and girls of course.

One part of this weekly ritual was to visit one of the town’s electrical appliance shops, where we would spend a pleasurable half-hour listening to the latest records in that week’s Hit Parade, as it was known then. At around 5/- (0.25p) for a “single”, and way out of reach of my 2/6d a week pocket money, it was also an ideal way to hear, with greater clarity, some of the hits that I had heard on my little transistor radio underneath the bedclothes that week on Radio Luxembourg. The one problem with this station was that the signal would fade in and out, making it impossible to hear a song right the way through without interruption.

Dover, like many towns in the early 1960’s had few shops, if any, dedicated solely to the sale of records. To buy a disc you had to visit a musical instrument or electrical appliance shop, where in one corner of the store stood the record department, looking like something of an afterthought. Some of the more adventurous shops had booths where a song could be listened to in total privacy. Many merely had a record player on the counter where you self consciously shifted from foot to foot while listening, in full view of other customers in the shop, to the record you pretended you were going to buy.

We soon learned to alternate the shops we visited as the counter staff became aware that we never actually bought anything, merely using the premises as a free jukebox.