Hamish Champ: Skiffle - the new rock and roll?

I know I am the wrong side of 45, but even I'm not old enough to recall the heady days of that peculiarly English brand of 'make do' music, namely 'skiffle'.

True, my parents owned an EP - that's 'extended play', for those reared on digital downloads - recorded by Lonnie Donegan, reckoned in his day to be the best pop act in a mid-Fifties Britain that had at that time yet to hear of one E. Presley.

But this aside, and apart from occasionally hearing 'Rock Island Line' on the radio, I was immune to the charms of a genre which demands its proponents use things like an old washboard instead of drums; a 'tea-chest bass' - effectively an empty tea chest with a pole sticking out the top with a string running down its length which one plucks as one would a double bass - and very battered acoustic guitars.

Until last week that is.

After the obligatory warm up of a few beers in a pub on Soho's Wardour Street in London - a pub incidentally where the barstaff once had to post notices around the walls warning customers to do no more than swing their hips to the music emanating from the pub's CD player as the place didn't have a dance licence! - a bunch of us popped into a tiny club on the other side of the street to see one of our party's friends' modern-day skiffle act.

I went with an open mind but little idea of what to expect. What I encountered knocked my socks off. True enough, fears about the dubious sound quality of the cramped venue proved well founded, but the combo still rocked the house, as I believe the parlance of today's youth has it thus expressed.

In a low-ceilinged room the band - whose members were, like me, in the, er, 'late-afternoon' of their lives - whacked out good old fashioned lo-fi rockabilly-type stuff to a hugely enthusiastic audience.

But here's the thing; the majority of the fee-paying public in the place were well under 25. And some were probably considerably younger than that. But they were all really into the music.

I was quite taken with the way these kids (yes, I sound like the old git I so clearly am) were themselves taking to a sound that had completely missed my generation and probably the ones either side of me too.

I mean, at their age my peers and I were stroking our respective chins along to The Cure's 'dark period'. But there we were, watching the aforementioned Bright Young Things dancing away to a type of music that wouldn't have seemed out of place in the very same venue more than fifty years ago.

And given that what live music that is being put on these days is often being put on in bigger and bigger venues it was also a joy to experience a band 'putting on the style' in a tiny basement bar, one packed to the rafters.

A great night then, though there was one glitch. With the band coming on at midnight and playing well into the early hours I had to take my life in my hands and get a bleedin' night bus home, since any cabs that were passing refused to go 'South of the River'. It seems we are cursed in this country with overground trains that don't run much past the witching hour. That and hydrophobic cabbies…