De du doh don't de doh!

It was 1979. I was 14 years old. I was working at the local Royal British Legion club on a dump of a council estate called Cantril Farm in Liverpool collecting empty glasses. I was, what's known as, a Pot Lad. In the club I spent a lot of time listening to cabaret bands and watching audience members crooning to Patsy Kline numbers and Mack the Knife at every opportunity they had to get on stage. It was fun in a kind of innocent way and I made friends with lots of nice people.

I was just starting to get into music for the first time and one of the lads I was working with at the club was a drummer called Steve from another nearby council estate called Kirkby. Steve was a year or two older than me.

It was 1979. My sister Lesley had just had a house party to celebrate her 13th birthday, Elvis Costello had been on repeat the whole night singing Oliver's Army on an old Decca record player and one of Lesley's invited friends was thrown out of the house by our Mum for French kissing on the sofa in front of everyone. Things were heating up.

It was the end of the 70s, Punk was dead, thankfully, and my drummer friend Steve had learned some new drum patterns from this new band that he'd just started getting into. I bought a pair of drumsticks and copied Steve trying to play drums like his new hero Stewart Copeland. The band were The Police. They were the first band I really got into and it was all because of Steve who introduced me to them.

I loved the Police, they had an attitude that appealed to me, unlike Punk. Ironically I'm more understanding of Punk and it's meaning now that I'm an adult than when I was a kid and in a position to join in its revolution. The Police had a great sound. Their music was a mixture of rock and reggae, branded White Reggae. Sting sang with an Afro Caribbean vocal edge and he was very cool. He was also from the North of England which didn't make much difference to me then but seems to now that I'm older.

It's now 2009, 30 years after I first heard The Police. I'm 44 now and sitting in an air conditioned office a couple of hundred miles away from the old council estate. I've recently replaced my old vinyl copies of the early Police albums. Message In a Bottle, The Bed's too Big Without You and So Lonely have just been playing on my iPod and I'm transported back in time. The smell of stale beer is lodged in my nostrils and I'm playing drums on upside-down drip trays with Stewart Copeland again while Patsy Kline sings I'm Hurt for the umpteenth time this week. Someone strangle that woman!

De du du du, de dah dah dah, that's all I want to say to you.