Not many people know this but Helen Shapiro, famed for being a child star in the early Sixties, made her live debut with her school friend Mark Feld, later to become Marc Bolan.
She was only ten, and the venue was their school – Northwold Primary – barely a mile from my present home.

The year was 1956 and their band, named after her cousin Susan Singer – who lived up to her name by making several records herself in the early Sixties – was called Susie & The Hula Hoops. Mark Feld, a year younger than Helen, went on to make a few records too, and would become my favourite pop star.

Not many people know, either, that Shapiro was the headliner on the first national tour by The Beatles, who had yet to release an album.

They used to sing together on the tour bus where Helen, already a seasoned pro by the age of 16, advised the older boys to make From Me To You their next single after Please Please Me.

In return, Lennon and McCartney wrote her a song called Misery but Shapiro’s label, EMI, in a dumb decision to match Dick Rowe’s at Decca, turned it down – missing the chance to release the first Beatles song.

By then Helen was a teenage superstar. She recorded her biggest hit, Walking Back To Happiness, when she was just 14, and had ten hits in little more than two years.

I’m posting this not just because she’s a Hackney girl, but because it was in the charts on my fourth birthday in 1962. In fact it was in the charts for months, at one stage selling a staggering 40,000 copies a day.

Helen was born in Bethnal Green and brought up in a council flat in Clapton, where my first home-away-from home would be 15 years later.
She started playing the ukelele as a small child, borrowing her neighbour’s record player to listen to music because her parents could not afford one of their own.

When she was nine her parents, Russian-Jewish immigrants who worked in the East End rag trade, moved to Victoria Park but Helen kept attending Clapton Park Comprehensive.

She joined her brother Ron Shapiro’s trad jazz and skiffle band and was still at school when stardom came – and went. Ironically, it was her old friends The Beatles, and the Beat Boom that followed, that swept away Helen’s old-fashioned style.

Her last hit was in January 1964, when she was still only 17, leaving behind a discography including an album that prefigured Dusty In Memphis by five years – Helen In Nashville.