I’ve loved Mexican music for a long time and the first time I heard it was on Ry Cooder’s 1976 album Chicken Skin Music. And the songs that stood out were the ones featuring the accordion of Flaco Jimenez.

There was a gospel version of Stand By Me, a melancholy waltz with Goodnight Irene – and this bolero arrangement of the Jim Reeves song He’ll Have To Go.

I never got to see them play together but I was lucky enough to see Flaco and his own band a couple of times, including a memorable gig at the old Sir George Robey pub in the late Eighties.

I remember it well because, having recently returned from America, I wore a big cowboy hat and had adorned the front of mine with a rattlesnake head I’d picked up on my travels to Texas… a real stuffed rattlesnake head, mouth open and ready to strike.

I realise that sounds strange (I also had the bead-like rattler from the tail) but it was not an unheard-of thing to do in those southwestern desert states; if not on a rainy night in Finsbury Park. 

Anyway I was at the bar, buying a pint, when a man farther down the bar with the look of a real-life cowboy rather than my cosplaying attempt – he had a droopy moustache and wore a similar hat and cowboy boots – murmured in a strong Texas accent: “Nice rattler.”

Looking up, I saw that it was one of Flaco’s band members, so I thanked him and he tipped his hat, just like in the movies. “Ever eat one?” he inquired. I confessed I had not, and asked him what they tasted like. “Rubber,” he replied.

Eager to continue the conversation, I said I’d been told rattlesnake meat had the consistency of rubber all right, but wondered what it tasted like. “Rubber,” he replied, and went back to nursing his shot of bourbon.

That’s as near as I got to meeting the great Flaco, but I was privileged to see and hear him. And his playing is where my love of Mexican music in its various Tex-Mex hybrids – conjunto, tejano, norteño – began.

His early band The Texas Tornados and Los Super Seven are well worth investigating too and one of his most notable recordings is on Dwight Yoakam’s 1988 version of the Buck Owens song Streets Of Bakersfield.