Mike Vernon was a key figure in the British blues boom of the mid-Sixties, and produced a swathe of influential debut albums.

Mike Vernon. It’s a name that rings a bell in my head full of music trivia, but I would have struggled to place him until now.

Raised not in the backwoods of Mississippi but deep in Surrey’s stockbroker belt, Vernon was a blues aficionado who played a key role in the music’s British revival of the mid-’60s as both producer and creator of his own Blue Horizon record label.

As a teenager in 1966, he produced the self-titled debut album of John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers, sometimes known as The Beano Album because the cover features Eric Clapton reading the comic.

Vernon also produced the debut of Fleetwood Mac, introducing Clapton’s replacement Peter Green, and their million-selling chart topper Albatross, as well as debuts by David Bowie, Focus, Ten Years After, Climax Blues Band and Savoy Brown.

Years later he tasted chart success as a musician playing bass in Rocky Sharpe & The Replays in the ’80s, while his long list of production credits extended to Dr Feelgood, Level 42 and Roachford.

He also set up a recording studio where countless hits were recorded, from Gerry Rafferty’s Baker Street and Bye Bye Baby by The Bay City Rollers to albums including the debuts of Duran Duran and Radiohead.

This tune, featuring a searing solo by a young Eric Clapton, comes from what I believe was his Vernon’s very first production job for Decca, whom he joined at the age of 18.

It’s an album by Champion Jack Dupree called From New Orleans To Chicago, and the barrelhouse pianist’s band includes John Mayall and Tony McPhee, with Clapton playing the fluid blues guitar on the opening track, a cover of Willie Dixon’s Chicago blues, Third Degree.

A month after its release in April, Clapton played another starring role under Vernon’s guidance at the Decca Studios, on the debut album of John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers – sometimes called ‘The Beano Album’ on account of Clapton reading the comic on the cover photo.

Vernon had first caught the blues bug at school in Purley in the mid-’50s and gone on to play harmonica in his own blues band, The Mojo Men, with school friend Neil Slaven.

A dedicated record collector in thrall to American artists like Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, Little Richard and James Brown, after a stint at art school he founded a fanzine (R&B Monthly) with Slaven and with his brother Richard he set up a label, Blue Horizon Records, to reissue obscure American singles – and, soon after, to create an outlet for a new wave of British bluesmen.