In which JL still is king

Every Thursday night, from the late 1960s until some date lost to memory, my brothers and I would gather around the television to watch Top of the Pops, praying that my father would not interrupt the programme (in those one-TV-set-per-household days) and that my mother would be able to arrange the making of his tea in a way that would overlap with our time attending this semi-religious broadcast. 

TOTP was something shared exclusively between myself and my brothers. There wasn't a great deal of music in our house. I do recall one rare single bought by one or other of my parents: Tears by Ken Dodd - though I don't recall its being played except by one of us. True, Dodd was a Liverpudlian, but we knew wasn't the same as the Fab Four.

 The Beatles, as the most newsworthy representatives of the new style of music to be heard on TOTP, were half-heartedly tolerated by my mother but actively disliked by my father, who considered their financial success as unfairly earned and saw their creed of pleasure as something dangerous. I recall listening to the White Album for the first time on a brand new Boots stereo bought by my immediate elder brother, and the paternal disapproval over the collage-type insert with bare flesh: "I'm not very happy about that." Mild words - but as Bertie Wooster would have put it, he meant them to sting.

There is another incident remembered from childhood which bears out the "semi-religious" tag being applied to pop music for myself and my brothers. My father was advising a priest who was staying overnight, and we, the children, had a lot of opportunity to talk to him. I think (and this sounds like a lousy joke but isn't) he may have needed time off to reflect on his calling, as a later article in a newspaper dignified his Dark Night of the Soul with the heading:

VOCATION? NO - VACATION!

Anyway, the wide-ranging conversation came round to the subject of pop music, and this man of God shocked us by claiming that the Beatles regularly laughed themselves silly at the "cripples and hunchbacks" who would be waiting to greet them at airports; it was all there in the biography, he said, if we didn't believe it.

I can barely remember the incident, let alone the timescale; all I recall is at some point later my eldest brother proclaiming: "It doesn't matter - JL still is King."

Whether that meant he did or didn't believe it, I'm not sure; but I think on some level he'd worked out that that the priest's words were a salvo in a religious war, firing from the same side as my father. Our collective faith did not waiver - and later, reading Hunter Davies' biography, I could see that the claim was , at best, a mischievously distorted one.