ENTER THE DRAGON

IN THE BEGINNING …

I was part of a whole generation of people who were seduced by the sounds of rock’n’roll through their radios. We heard this wild music – whether it was Little Richard or Elvis Presley, or even big band stuff, but certainly [a] more rockabilly side of it. And I heard this guy called Lonnie Donegan, who was doing Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie-type music, but he had a sort of beat to it – and that was skiffle. Everybody seemed to really be enamoured by his performances because he was so passionate with the songs that he was doing, like Rock Island Line and Cumberland Gap.

The next day at school, people would say: “You see this guy Lonnie Donegan on the television?” The whole school would