Move It was intentionally written to be as American in style as possible. Every song Cliff Richard and the Drifters had ever performed until then had been American, and Move It was the result of everything I had ever learned ranging from Gene Autry's campfire songs to Chuck Berry's splendiferous observations about teen-age America.

Move It only took twenty minutes to write, but it was a lifetime in the making.

Things American had always been an endless source of fascination to me. From cowboys to Cadillacs, from chewing gum to nylon stockings, from bobby sox to blue jeans, the entire panoply of Americana seemed to possess an energy, a vitality and a joyous exuberance which, to say the least, was somewhat lacking in the austere post-war years in Great Britain.

And when rock 'n' roll finally arrived, it was as though someone had arranged a grand musical pyrotechnic display. Just imagine, in the space of two or three years: Elvis with Heartbreak Hotel, Gene Vincent with Be-Bop-a-Lula, the Everlys with Bye Bye Love, Chuck Berry with Johnny B. Goode, the Crickets with That'll be the Day, Little Richard with Long Tall Sally, Carl Perkins with Blue Suede Shoes and Jerry Lee Lewis with Whole Lotta Shakin', just to name a few.

It seemed that every Friday when we went down to the local record shop there was a brand new American rock 'n' roll classic which we just had to have.

My father grew up in a world without rock 'n' roll, and, until about the age of sixteen, so did I.

Mo Foster, in his superb book Seventeen Watts? - the First Twenty Years of British Rock Guitar, observed that houses were quiet in the early 1950s, no all-day radio stations blaring away, and only one TV channel which transmitted until eleven pm and was off the air for an hour at tea time. There was no music at home. You could hear clocks ticking!"

At our house as in most houses there was no TV. It was the radio that took pride of place. We called it the "wireless." It stood on a tall cane table next to the fireplace. To the right, outside the french windows, was a small patio with steps leading down to a concrete path that neatly divided the lawn. The path led to a row of plum trees behind which was my father's Victory Garden. On the left hand side of the lawn was a bird bath in the form of a wishing well complete with a handle and a rope with which to pull up water from a non-existent well.I would sit cross-legged on the floor next to the window, eating hot buttered toast, watching the blackbirds, starlings, chaffinches, wrens, robins and sparrows come and go, and listening to Children's Hour on the BBC Home Service. "Uncle Mac" (David Davis) would tell sleepy tales of Wind in the Willows, and Violet Carson (long before she became Ena Sharples of Coronation Street) would play the piano. Music from a box -- amazing!Wonderful memories, and all with World War II raging around us.

During the war many children had to be evacuated from London and other big cities to the relative safety of the English countryside. It was my good fortune to have a built in escape route courtesy of my Aunt Ruby and Uncle Bill who lived in the peaceful little village of Moulsoe in Buckinghamshire. I had been christened there at St. Mary's Church, a sturdy Norman edifice dating back to the twelfth century. In my time it enjoyed a small but healthy congregation.

If you haven't heard a choir of fourteen Buckinghamshire farmhands plus one precocious townie tackle Handel's Messiah, you haven't lived. What we lacked in polish, we made up for with enthusiasm. Hallelujah!

Before the war, Uncle Bill (William Evans) was the village blacksmith. When the nearby airfield at Cranfield became an American airbase, he was employed there as a civilian mechanic.

He would bring home wonderful American magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post and Life. I read them over and over again. I think it was the cars that impressed me the most. Great long, shining, streamlined automobiles with amazing names like Cadillac, Pontiac and Chevrolet. Pastel paintings of convertibles parked by white picket fences with perfect families getting ready to drive away to sun-filled, ant-free picnics - my American Dream.

They don't make cars like that anymore. Come to think of it, they don't make dreams like that anymore either. Not even in America.

It was a world in which people, of necessity, made their own music.

In his youth my father had been an enthusiastic amateur violinist. For some reason he decided not to teach me the violin, but arranged instead for me to take piano lessons from the venerable Mrs. M. Lloyd-Thomas, F.L.C.M., L.R.A.M.

Within the gloomy confines of her aspidistra filled victorian living room I learned how to sit up straight, arch my fingers and avoid getting rapped on the knuckles with a baton. I certainly deserved to have my knuckles rapped. If Beethoven could have heard me play, he would definitely have rolled over.

Much to my surprise I eventually won a certificate by passing an examination at the prestigious London College of Music. "This is to certify . . . etc., etc." and signed "By order of the Council, Clifford Roberts, B.Mus. (Birm.)."

It is dated December 30, 1947. It is thanks to my mother's sentimentality that this rather impressive looking document is still in my possession. One of these days, I am going to have to have it framed . . . one of these days.

When I was eleven years old, my father succumbed to an attack of bronchial pneumonia and passed away. He was only forty-two years old.

He had attempted with considerable patience to teach me the piano and the rudiments of music theory, but more importantly, he taught me to love music.

At the age of twelve I was sent to boarding school.

Long Dene School was in Long Dene Castle in the Village of Chiddingstone, Kent. It was a very 'progressive' and informal school, not at all like Eton or Harrow. It was co-ed and there were only about a hundred students. There were no school uniforms, no school chapel, no requirement to attend church and no music to speak of.

Instead there was a course in comparative religion, a closet full of assorted tambourines and maracas and a battered upright piano in a room reserved for the girls to practice ballet. I temporarily lost interest in music, but somehow managed to develop a great fondness for girls in tutus.

Sadly, Long Dene School closed down. It became a museum for a while, and then reverted to private ownership. But I will always cherish the memories of those few brief idyllic years and the wonderful people who gave me so much more than just an education.

Having finished school, there was still some time to kill before I was due to begin my two years compulsory National Service in the Royal Air Force.

I went to live with my mother who had moved to the village of London Colney near the city of St. Albans. I didn't know it at the time but, just a few miles away a young Harry Webb (long before he became Cliff Richard) was attending Cheshunt Secondary Modern School.

St. Albans, which is built on a hill, was originally a Roman encampment known as Verulamium. There are still the remnants of an ampitheatre but, so far as I know, in the entire nineteen hundred years of its existence no one has ever tried to play a rock concert there.

For centuries St. Albans had been a market town. Wednesday was market day, and in the evening in the mid 1950s the market hall was turned over to traditional "trad" jazz nights. It was the place to be. It was run by Ken Lindsay who managed a second-hand jazz, blues and folk music record store in London's Charing Cross Road.

Among the many bands who would regularly perform there were those led by Humphrey Lyttelton, Ken Colyer, Terry Lightfoot, Alex Welch, Cy Laurie and the great Chris Barber Band featuring Ottilie Patterson, clarinetist Monty Sunshine and, standing at the back playing banjo, the future king of skiffle, Lonnie Donegan.

It was, of course, Lonnie Donegan's version of Huddie Ledbetter's Rock Island Line that inspired half the kids in England to form skiffle groups.

(Donegan's Rock Island Line was included on a 1954 LP entitled New Orleans Joys by the Chris Barber Band. Donegan had been paid as a session man for the LP so he never received any royalties for his hit song.)

Cliff Richard was in the Dick Teague Skiffle Group, an eleven year old Van Morrison joined the Sputniks, and John Lennon formed the Quarrymen, the seminal group which later included Paul McCartney and George Harrison.

Meanwhile up in Newcastle, Hank Marvin pursued his interest in blues and jazz with the Crescent City Skiffle Group before joining Bruce Welch in the Railroaders where they took what has been described as a more "commercial" approach which led them to rock 'n' roll which ultimately led them to London.

I was no exception. Well, I didn't actually form a group. What happened was that a friend of my mother took thirty pounds to London and came back with a Spanish classical guitar and three pounds change.

I bought the only instruction book that I could find in a St. Albans electrical store where you could buy a vacuum cleaner, an electric iron, a radio set and the latest records.

The instruction book turned out to be too advanced and jazz oriented for a beginner like me. There was no one around to ask for help (I didn't know any guitar players except skifflers who only knew the three chord trick), so I learned what I could by listening to records and experimenting.

A neighbor who worked at the De Haviland aircraft factory gave me a pilot's throat contact mic minus the usual rubber surround. It was about the size of a florin (10P), and I glued it to the body of the guitar.

Even with this technological breakthrough, I couldn't get the Spanish guitar to make the sounds I was hearing on records, so eventually I traded it in for a real electric guitar.

It was a hollow bodied arch-top Hofner with F holes and four, count them, four control knobs . . . volume, treble, bass and tremolo! It wasn't exactly a Fender Stratocaster, but I loved it anyway.

The fact is that, due to import restrictions in place at that time, there were no American instruments available. In 1959, Cliff Richard bought the first 'Strat' to England for Hank Marvin.

Hank was quoted in Mojo magazine of January 1999 saying, "It looked like something from outer space when I first saw one. We'd never seen anything like it. We got a brochure, looked through and bought the most expensive one, red with gold fittings. It looked incredible, totally brain-destroying. We ordered one from the Fender factory. "

I believe it is now owned by Bruce Welch. Next time he invites me over for tea, I am going to steal it.

Since my new guitar was electric, I needed a new amplifier. Hank Marvin once said that his first amp was the size of a corn flakes box and sounded like it.

Well, big deal Hank, mine was the size of an electric toaster, sounded like a frying pan and I had to walk ten miles barefoot through the snow to get it!

This, of course, was long before the whiz kids of Spinal Tap invented the concept of 11. If I remember correctly, the maximum volume on my amp was only 5½.

We've come a long way!

Anyway, by that time I was enduring my two year compulsory stint in Her Majesty's Royal Air Force at RAF Hendon where I courageously defended my country by guarding a couple of ancient Avro Anson aircraft and making cups of tea for the squadron leader.

One day myself and one other hapless soul had been awarded the dubious privilege of cleaning out our billet. There we were with our mops and pails when suddenly, blasting from the radio, came the glorious sound of Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps. The song was Be-Bop-a-Lula. It was irresistible.

I jumped up onto the nearest bed, and using my mop as an imaginary guitar, began to sing along. "Be-bop-a-lula, she's my baby, be-bop-a-lula, I don't mean maybe . . ." My pal immediately did likewise. And there we were, two Gene Vincents, both with our Air Force blue shirt sleeves rolled up, both with our mop guitars, both bouncing insanely up and down on the mattresses and both having a wonderful time.

Then, out of the corner of my eye I noticed something. Something so awful, so horrendous, so dreadful that I dropped the mop, jumped off the bed, switched off the radio and slid swiftly to attention at the foot of the bed.

That something was the corporal in charge of our billet. He was standing in the doorway with his arms folded and his knuckles clenched. How long he had been standing there watching us I had no idea. For a long time he just stood there, surveying the scene.

Then, slowly and without a word, he began to walk toward us. I was closest. He came up to me and stood directly in front of me, his nose about an inch away from mine. There was an interminable pause, during which I tried hard to keep a serious expression on my face.

Then, still without a word, he bent down, picked up my discarded mop, and handed it to me.

I clutched it across my chest as one might hold a rifle.

The corporal took one military step backward, looked me up and down, and then turned on his heel and marched over to my unfortunate conspirator.

It occurred to me that the chances of our spending the rest of our national service peeling potatoes or painting things that didn't need to be painted had never been better.

Our corporal repeated the same procedure in front of my pal, picking up the mop, handing it to him, and stepping one pace back

"What," he asked, "are you holding, Airman?"

"A m-m-mop, Corporal."

"Not . . . a rifle?"

"No, Corporal."

He turned on his heel and marched back to me. "And what," he asked, "is that you're holding, Sunshine?"

"A mop, Corporal."

"Not . . . a guitar?"

"No, Corporal."

He stood there for a long moment, shaking his head in despair. Then, "@#&%\ amazing!" he said, and walked out of the billet.

Much to our relief, we never heard any more about it. I guess he must have been a Gene Vincent fan.

Not long after that a barracks mate who had learned that I owned a guitar invited me to join his band, the Ash Valley Skiffle Group from Ashford in Kent.

In those days, to join a group all you had to do was own a guitar. You didn't actually need to know how to play it. The whole point was to have some fun, and we did.

After a while the group began to do rather well. We won a local competition and even appeared once on the BBC's Saturday morning Skiffle Club which, coincidentally, changed its name to Saturday Club in 1958 as Move It began its climb up the charts.

I remember that the great American folklorist and song archivist Alan Lomax stopped by the studio while we were performing (he had his own BBC show, Ballads and Blues, with Ewan MacColl), and he commented that I had an Appalachian style of playing.

Wow! Me? Really?

I was pretty impressed. After all, it was Alan and his father John Lomax who had saved Huddie Ledbetter from languishing in obscurity in a Louisiana prison.

No "Leadbelly," no Rock Island Line . . . no Rock Island Line, no skiffle . . . no skiffle, no Wally Whyton and the Vipers and no live music in the basement of the 2 i's coffee bar

Eventually I became bored with playing The Wreck of the Old '97, The Midnight Special, Cumberland Gap, and Worried Man Blues, so I left the Ash Valley Skiffle Group to join a promising young rock 'n' roll outfit who called themselves the Drifters.

It wasn't too long before the Ash Valley Skiffle Group broke up, but lead singer Dave Kelsey went on to become a member of a very successful folk rock group, the Countrymen.

Thanks, Lonnie.

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