IT’S apologies this week to the customers of the Swan public house at Whittington, Worcester, who on Monday lunchtime put up with five old blokes sitting in the corner drinking ginger beer and talking, probably a bit too loudly at times, about the 1960s.

It was the first occasion for the best part of 50 years the five of us had all sat down together, relics of a musical (and I use the adjective lightly) era that will almost certainly never be repeated.

In the mid-Fifties the American phenomenon of rock ‘n’ roll had burst across the radio airwaves, first with Bill Hayley, then Elvis, Chuck and all the rest. Over here Tommy Steele swivelled and grinned and then Cliff Richard recorded Move It and everything took off.

By the early Sixties virtually every town had its own local group scene and when The Beatles emerged out of Liverpool in the autumn of 1962 things went crazy. In Worcester it sounded the death knell for decent dance bands led by the likes of Dennis Wheeler, Max Nicholls and Jack Blackman, and in their place the kids were dancing to electric guitar and drum groups like The Jaguars, Cossacks, Whirlwinds and Heralds.

Unbelievably by the

mid-Sixties there were more than 30 such groups based in the Worcester area alone. While from Malvern came The Sundowners, from Bredon The Cherokees and from Bromsgrove The Playboys.

Regular venues were the Co-op Hall and Catholic Hall (both of which are long gone) in the city centre and on the edges were the parish halls at Rushwick, Hallow, Kempsey and probably the original place around here, The Wharf at Holt Fleet. For larger audiences there were the Winter Gardens at Malvern

– where promoter Doug Webber staged a very popular series of Rock Group Contests – and Droitwich, with lots of well oiled young farmers.

Serious stars did emerge from all this, among them Dave Mason, who was in The Jaguars, Hellons, Deep Feelin’ and Traffic and went on to solo success in America, and Jim Capaldi from Evesham, who started in The Sapphires and was also in Feelin’ and Traffic and was a considerable force in the music business until he died too soon in 2005. There was also Gordon Jackson and Clifford T Ward of Kidderminster’s Cliff Ward and the Cruisers

On a slightly different tack, one Worcester band, The Skeeters featured a guitarist who has become a best selling author, Bob Blandford, who now writes about pubs and the police. Bob, like all of our band The Renegades, went to Worcester Royal Grammar School.

Sadly our lead singer Brian Jenkins, who became a very popular insurance broker, died a while ago, but the rest of us, Jack Randall, Techer Jones, Keith Rayner, Geoff Weaver and me, raised a glass to him at the Swan. At the same time wondering how on earth we managed to find places like the British Legion Club in Swindon on a Saturday night in 1964. More to the point, how did we get home.

Up in Liverpool, a magazine called Mersey Beat, edited by Bill Harry, recorded the local scene, so down in Worcester journalist Graham Jones, who wrote the Youth Page on the Worcester Evening News, decided to do the same.

With no money for any print facility, Graham cajoled some friends among our printers to run off “moonlight” copies of his Beatline Worcester during slack periods at night. I think it made one and a half issues before management clocked on.

Fortunately, most, but not all, of the bands lasted a bit longer.