A friend from Marsh Lane, a lad called Peter, whose last name unfortunately, and most embarrassingly, vanished many years ago in the mists of my flagging memory, suggested that we go one night to a place called Lathom Hall, in Seaforth. We duly took a bus over to Seaforth just in time for the doors to open. You might imagine, the evening was something of a revelation. I had never actually seen a Teddy boy before, and this place was overrun with them. Brothel creeper shoes were the norm, along with drain-pipe trousers and Edwardian jackets and for the coup-de-gras, the ubiquitous Tony Curtis, or ducks-arse hair style.

The girls were gorgeous, with multi amounts of petticoats, flaring their skirts, Nylon or silk stockings and calf enhancing high-heeled shoes. The girls dancing in pairs, mostly, while the guys stood on the sidelines, deciding which of these chicks they were going to take home later. The whole place bounced. Records I had never heard, by people, singers, bands, I had never heard of, made up the first part of the excitement of the first hop I ever attended. 

Later that evening, despite the fact that I had thoroughly enjoyed it, the first half of the hop was to pale into insignificance. 

Around halfway through the evening, the Master of Ceremonies (MC) came on stage. There had been noises behind the curtains for some time; sounds of guitars being tuned, and drums being banged, someone counting into a mike…’testing wun, two, wun two’, and this, it seemed, was what we had all been waiting for. The MC’s voice blared over the personal address (PA) system, ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ (I think, in retrospect, considering the amount of teddy boys there, that the ‘gentlemen’ comment was meant as his own little joke,) ‘The One and only King-size Taylor and the Dominoes.’ Yeahhhhhhhhhhhh! The crowd surged forward towards the stage, and slowly, the curtains opened.

Standing in the middle of the stage was quite the biggest guy I had ever seen. He was dressed in a plaid jacket, and held a guitar that looked ridiculously small in his hands. (If memory serves, the guitar was a Hofner President. I held that guitar sometime later, and believe me, it was not quite as tiny as it looked the first time I saw it.) The rest of the band wore pale gray suits, with turquoise ties, pocket hankies and socks. The front line was made up of a blond bass player, Bobby Thompson, who had the whitest teeth I’d ever seen, and a dark haired guitarist, John Kennedy, wearing drainpipe trousers, long sideburns and the aforesaid DA hairstyle. At the back, on drums, was a guy who looked – to me, well, normal – or at least normal compared to the rest of the band, Cliff Roberts. But as I said, I had never seen a real DA haircut, or drainpipe trousers, or a real live teddy boy before that night.

Later that evening, I got the chance to chat with the boys from the band. In those days, there were no prima-donna pop stars in Liverpool bands. They were boy next door types, who worked at normal, somewhat prosaic jobs during the day, and enjoyed themselves playing music at night.

That was the night I fell in love with rock ‘n roll.

My father bought an old Bedford van on my seventeenth birthday. I acquired my provisional license the same day and passed my driving test four weeks later. Soon after that, I started working at night for Ted and the boys while continuing my rather reluctant career as a painter and decorator’s apprentice, and the band and I became firm friends. The boys would earn something like five pounds for a gig, and I would be given an equal share as wages, and to cover petrol costs, which at that time ran at about four shillings or so a gallon. That’s something like twenty pence for about five litres. I eventually even bought, and wore, a suit the same as that worn by the band. Smart…but strange.

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