They were on a tiny communal TV in the Sixth Form common room at my school on 14 March 1975. The programme was the Old Grey Whistle Test and they played Keep It Out Of Sight, Roxette and She Does Right.

 

They looked and sounded nothing like the rest of the musicians Bob Harris introduced each week, not all of whom were Jesse Colin Young (though it often seemed like it). And not just because they had shorter hair.

 

After the fancy-dress and make-up of Glam and Disco, these guys looked like geezers you might encounter in a rough pub; geezers who might start something if you looked at them in the wrong way. Aggression was a new look in Seventies music.

 

That tension translated into their music: an urgent take on rhythm and blues, channelling Chuck Berry and John Lee Hooker and Little Walter and the rest, by way of the white working-class experience of life amid the refineries of Canvey Island in Essex.

 

Lee Brilleux, skinny as a rake and fuelled, it seemed, by the drugs and alcohol of which he would later sing, had a ferocious growl, jabbing at the space around him before fishing a harmonica out of his white suit jacket. His blank, sullen stare is something Johnny Rotten would borrow as his default look onstage.

 

Not so much vying for attention as demanding it – and getting it – was Wilko Johnson, jerking his head like a chicken and scampering back and forth firing off bursts of guitar, pointing it like a machine gun.

 

There were two other guys anchoring the beat of their rocket-powered R&B rhythms, and they were great at their jobs. But, frankly, no one was looking at John B Sparks or John Martin (aka The Big Figure) on bass and drums.

 

The next day I sent off for their debut LP Down By The Jetty by mailorder from a coupon in the back of a music paper, as we did in those days (especially when the nearest record shop was in the forbidden metropolis of York 25 miles away).

 

It did not disappoint, from the monochrome cover to the mono recording. I loved it then and I love it now and it’s still in my vinyl collection.