Sunday Night is...

Dion...



Runaround Sue. With the Del Satins backing.

There is something touching now about early white rock 'n' roll, about the simplicity of it, the predictable chord structure, the entrance of the backing chorus and the grin of the clean-looking boy with the quiff and his otherworldly Pepsodent freshness.

This was Dion before I was properly conscious of such music as a presence, when it was just a noise elsewhere. There I'd be at the age of twelve, practicing Mendelssohn or Beethoven or one of the simpler Chopin waltzes at the piano like a good Central European (and, I now realise, Jewish) boy from an aspiring middle-brow family of not quite categorisable class - for what could you do with a mixed-class set of refugees in a working to lower-middle class suburb of London, who hailed from the Red East where even the working class were more properly bourgeois than the suburbs of London imagined - aspiring to books, to classical music, to G-plan furniture, to radiograms, to televisions, all of which added up to a kind of heroic ascent to the world as it should be, which, somehow, would still be just and socialist, the whole impossible idyll about to be ruined by boys like Dion, and by the about-to-be forbidden, decadent Radio Luxemburg.

One day I must get hold of some Mantovani. My brother's first violin teacher, Mr Shane, played in Mantovani's orchestra. He was actually on telly. Clearly an important man, I thought. Was it about him the Andrews Sisters were singing in Bei Mir Bist Du Schön. My Dear Mr Shane... Please, let me explain....

And, of course, what was shortly to be missing from my life was Runaround Sue, or her equivalent. Or any Sue for that matter. Any equivalent.