After the first Newport and Monterey jazz festivals took place in America, Harold Pendleton and I thought, ‘This is great - we should be doing this.’ The difficulty for us was finding somewhere big enough where they would allow you to do it.

The first National Jazz & Blues Festival was held at Twickenham, the seat of rugby, [in 1961]. The owners of the ground said, “You’ve got to preserve the pitch!”, so we had the stage on a special wooden structure on the pitch and the audience had to sit in the grandstand halfway across the field, about 50 yards away from the stage! We also used the clubhouse as a club and we had people like the Rolling Stones playing in there on the first one, because Richmond was virtually their hometown.

We were trying to present the music in a bigger and better way and make it a bigger occasion, so you could have more interesting and expensive acts. Of course, it didn’t take many years after the first one before the thing that drew the crowds was the Stones and Cream and the whole event became a giant, but [in the beginning] sound systems were not developed yet.

When we started out with my band in 54/’55, the word ‘trad boom’ hadn’t been invented, but we did great business everywhere. People don’t realise how powerful it was. In the mid-Fifties, we toured round Britain all the time and we played in all the town halls. In particular, I can remember the nice 3,000-seater hall in Newcastle Upon Tyne. We played there five times in 1956, and the only time it wasn’t full was one time when we went on the bill with an American guy called Eddie Condon, who the public probably didn’t know so well.

It was enormous business, but we didn’t realise it at the time. Obviously, if we could do that many people, we could have played at the football ground, but we would have needed a P.A. system big enough to work and there weren’t any. The availability of technology changed it all.

So the National Jazz & Blues Festival was the beginning of something in the right direction, but it couldn’t get any bigger than that at the time because of the technicalities. Eventually the festival became a monstrous, enormous thing which needed a giant organisation running it, while Harold and I like to have a moderate-sized organisation in a homely way where you know who everyone is - but it’s still running [as the Reading/Leeds Festival]. We’ve seen other festivals come and go, because the people organising them weren’t doing it because they thought it was something that was a good idea to have - for them, it was just a way to make money.

Check in on Saturday to find out why the Marquee club had to move from the basement of the Academy Cinema in Oxford Street to its best-known home in Wardour Street.

Did you go to any of the early Richmond Jazz & Blues Festivals? Who did you see there? Share your memories here: