Pop goes history ...

Very little has made me feel my age more than Monday night’s TV. First off there was University Challenge. Neither the team from Balliol College, Oxford, average age 26, nor King’s College, London, average age 23, were able to identify the Everly Brothers singing Bye Bye Love. Admittedly it was the Everlys' first hit and dated from 1957, but they had such a characteristic and unique sound, it seems incredible that not one of the eight in the teams was able to recognize them. 
 
It got worse. The team from King’s who won the bonus then failed to identify Roy Orbison—admittedly a trick question, because he was singing an Everly Brothers' song—but then no-one could identify Buddy Holly singing Raining in my Heart. Of all the iconic sounds of pop music from the late ‘Fifties and early ‘Sixties, surely the Everly Brothers, Roy Orbison and Buddy Holly must be at the top. Still, probably even the teams’ parents had not been born by the time Buddy Holly died.
 
Then, Mark Kermode’s Secrets of the Cinema—Pop Music Movies, compounded my misery when I found that not even half way through the timeline, I had little or no knowledge of the bands he was showcasing.
 
Finally, following Mark Kermode the BBC repeated A Hard Day’s Night. I remember being up in the West End and coming out of a music shop where I had been ogling a Gretsch guitar of the type George Harrison used. There was a primeval scream of fans who had caught sight of one or other of the Beatles who were in town for a London Palladium performance. It thrilled me to the core, and the film brought it all back; it was 1964, fifty-seven years ago …