By 1975 I was old enough to drink and smoke and I was beginning to discover that tobacco was not the only thing you could smoke. And ready to discover The Doors.

After a couple of disappointing experiments with dried banana skins, I found that while I was away at boarding school my childhood friend Paul had acquired an expert knowledge of such things.

Not entirely coincidentally, he introduced me to a whole new world of music I had never heard during an adolescence listening to T.Rex, Slade and Sweet.
While the highlights of my meagre album collection were Motown

Chartbusters Vol.6 and Goats Head Soup, he had LPs by people I had never heard like The Velvet Underground and The Doors.

We would listen to them in his bedroom, poring over NME and Sounds and puffing furtively out of the window with joss sticks burning as his mum pottered about downstairs with her two Cavalier King Charles spaniels called Romulus and Remus.

The Doors were my first favourites from that mystical music era before mine. I think I must have discovered their music in reverse chronological order because the first song of theirs that I remember is Riders On The Storm, which is actually the last track on their last album, LA Woman.

Along with what we were smoking, its brooding fusion of rock with jazz and blues opened up a whole new musical world for me; a world far beyond the three-minute pop song that had become my staple.

Riders On The Storm was not only long, it was magical. The sound of rainfall, the liquefied cascades of Ray Manzarek’s electric piano, Jerry Scheff’s rolling bass, the airy cymbals of John Densmore’s “more is less” approach to drumming.

And the warm embrace of Jim Morrison’s rich baritone, so exotic, so *American*​, with those disturbing lyrics about a “killer on the road” – the sense of unease and edgy apprehension enhanced by Jim’s spooky double-tracked whisper as he warned ominously: “If you give this man a ride / Sweet memory will die.”

Apparently, the lyric was inspired by a serial killer called Billy Cook who had killed six people, including a young family, while hitchhiking to California, while the song itself was inspired by Vaughn Monroe’s country tune Ghost Riders In The Sky, later popularised by Johnny Cash.

This was the last song The Doors ever recorded together as a quartet, and their final single to be issued while Morrison was alive – released a month before his death in July 1971.