Steve Sutherland

It's a Sunday afternoon late in 1966 and we're in South London working overtime at Olympic Studios. The band have already done their stuff – the basic track was laid down a few weeks earlier at the RCA Records Studio in Hollywood. So today it's just us, the producer, his chauffeur, the engineer and the singer, who's busy behind that screen putting down vocal takes between hitting on a mighty spliff he's rolled to keep him in the zone.

Every now and then, it's OK to be wrong. Not often, I grant you, but on occasion a long-held misbelief can be way better than the actual fact. That lyric you misheard years ago maybe, a phrase which has informed your enjoyment of a particular song – until you discover that the words and meaning were something different all along. Sometimes the reality can ruin the thereafter. And it's better to continue with your fantasy.

We've got to start somewhere so why not with Gaye Bykers On Acid? The Bykers were from Leicester, had a singer called Ian who called himself Mary and were members of what the music press back in the late 1980s called Grebo, which meant you came from the Midlands, had a thing for denim and leather and wore your hair in a mess of dreadlocks.

A little over a decade ago, the comic actor David Walliams was interviewing Liam Gallagher's brother Noel for the now-defunct Observer Music Monthly and Noel told him this story about how the Gallagher bros happened to be at a Spinal Tap show taking place for charity at the famous Carnegie Hall in New York.