A six-foot-seven man hears a scruffy kid busking a Muddy Waters song on a train platform at Twickenham Station and hires him on the spot. The kid is Rod Stewart. A few years later that same man forms a band called Bluesology, hires a keyboard player named Reg Dwight, and unknowingly supplies half of the stage name Elton John. This episode asks how Long John Baldry, born in 1941 in a wartime maternity ward in Northamptonshire, built the stage for the British invasion yet slipped through the cracks of mainstream memory.

We visit the sweaty incubators of the early 1960s British R&B boom, from Eel Pie Island to the Marquee Club, where Baldry sang with Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated, put together a group to support the Rolling Stones at their first Marquee gig, and performed Got My Mojo Workin' on a 1964 Beatles television special. The c ...