It might have been the Summer of Love in San Francisco, and even in London, for all we knew, but we were in Blackpool, where it was just a normal summer. I’d heard Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, I remember, and I didn’t know what to make of it, though I thought “She’s Leaving Home” was one of the saddest, most beautiful songs I’d ever heard. I wanted to be a songwriter as well as a singer and famous actress. What can I say? I was fourteen. I suppose here I’m trying to explain why I walked so naively into what happened on Saturday, and that was certainly a part of it, my desire to be a singer and songwriter. Do Your Own Thing! might have been mostly for the boring old grown-ups, but they did occasionally have someone on with a guitar, like Donovan, who sang his own songs. Why not me?

And I was also at that time an inveterate autograph hunter. I don’t suppose it’s a very popular pastime these days, but it certainly was in the sixties. It seems to be the sort of thing no one does anymore, like having a pen pal or trainspotting. I mean, having an email pal and writing down diesel engine numbers doesn’t make it, does it? And stars are either too inaccessible or too busy pretending to be just like you and me that you wouldn’t even think of asking them for their signatures in a little book. Then you get people like Russell Brand signing his autograph on young girls’ bare breasts.

Back then, you could buy all kinds of fancy autograph books with different colored pages and golden edging between fake burgundy leather covers or William Morris designs with “Autographs” engraved on the front in gold leaf script. They had their own shape, what you’d call “landscape” in these days of computer printers. Even my dad had an autograph book—he showed me it—and he had Nat Gonella and Harry James and lots of people I had never heard of who were famous in his time.

Mine wasn’t as full, and I do confess to writing away on occasion with a stamped self-addressed envelope and receiving a signed photograph in return. Or sticking in a scrap of paper I happened to have with me at the time. Blackpool was always good for autographs because of all the summer season shows there. Since I first started collecting, when I was twelve, I got Frank Ifield, Helen Shapiro, Jimmy Tarbuck, Les Dawson, Adam Faith, Sandie Shaw, Marty Wilde, Heinz from the Tornados, Des O’Connor, Cilla Black, Scott Walker, Tommy Cooper, Gerry Marsden, Paul Jones, Gene Vincent and Karl Denver. I could’ve got the Bachelors once, too, if I’d waited longer, but I was too near the back of the crowd.