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...I was born Friday 7 October 1955 close to the undistinguished source of west London's Goldhawk Road and my first home was in Bulmer Place near Notting Hill Gate. My brother was born two and a half years later, by which time my parents had bought their own house in Bedford Park in what was then the London Borough of Acton, and suburban west London was marked by a homespun simplicity back then that we can only dream of today.

By '63, with my brother and I safe in South Kensington's French Lycee, social change was in the air, though in truth it had been for some time, especially in Britain and the USA, at least since the rise of Rock'n'Roll, and youth culture, whose watershed years were '55 to '56, but for all that England in '63 was still apparently in black and white, and the first shaggy-haired beat groups fitted quite snugly into this innocent time of Norman Wisdom pictures, of the well-spoken presenters of the BBC Home Service, Light Service and World Service, of coppers, tanners and ten bob notes, tuck shops and tuppeny chews.

On this day, NOI leader Elijah Muhammad reached the age of 58, psychologist RD Laing, 28, while Beat poet Amira Baraka and revolutionary leader Ulriche Meinhof both hit 21. The future Colonel Oliver North celebrated his 12th birthday, Judee Sill her 13th, Paul Weyrich his 8th, Vladimir Putin his 3rd...

It was a day marked by an event which it's fair to say had a monumental influence on the evolution of our culture, when at San Franciso's Six Gallery about 150 people gathered to witness readings of poems by Allen Ginsberg, Phillip Whalen, Phillip Lamantia, Michael McClure and Gary Snyder. All went on to be leading lights of the Beat Generation, as did Jack Kerouac the shy Canuck from Lowell, Massachusetts who attended the reading as a well-refreshed cheerleader. His "On the Road" published a year later, and dealing with his wanderings across America with his muse and friend Neal Cassady remains Beat's most famous ever work.
After the Six Gallery reading, the Beat movement which had existed in embryonic form since about 1944, left the underground to become an international craze, with the Beatnik taking his place as a universally recognised icon with his beret, goatee beard, turtle-neck sweater and sandals.

1955 was also the year in which Rock'n' Roll assaulted the mainstream thanks to hits by Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard and others, although it's "The Blackboard Jungle", which, released on the 20th of March, is widely credited

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