. . . I felt like a thoughtful French New Wave movie, so I rolled the credits and appeared on location in Hampstead Village's thriving beatnik scene. An arty vibe pervaded the Witch's Cauldron, where the young and mainly affluent religiously posed and preened, as they drawled quasi-cultured monologues over well-nursed cappuccinos. I, of course, stood apart from this dishevelment. Their uniform of scruffy, shabby jeans worn under large and holey sweaters hid a universal pre-occupation with getting (or not getting) laid.

I was trying to sell my imported Elvis singles. Thinking I would have a captive market back home, I had spent my allowance in France on 40 copies of 'It's Now or Never.' It was certain to be hot since it was as yet unavailable in England until a copyright dispute over 'O Solo Mio' was resolved. I would have turned a greater profit had I invested in Juliette Greco or Jacques Brel. I didn't sell many disks in this dalliance with retail-the bohemian punters wanted the Modern Jazz Quartet, and the neighborhood Jewish kids refused to be conned.

Gina, a pale beatnik wraith whose parents owned a Greek eatery on Heath Street yanked me outta the Cauldron, away from the dregs, and up to the Hampstead Everyman Cinema to catch a Chabrol film kicking off the French New Wave season. She led; I followed.

Gina and I were slim and pleasing-to each other and to those who wondered whether our bodies kept the same timing because we shared the same spring and smile in the night to our step. They didn't, but Gina and I enjoyed the game, the compliment our spirits were to each other, and those we did keep time with. Opposites don't always attract, sometimes they just look good together; her spirit was unharnessed, unbroken, a mod pop bundle of joy.

And perhaps more than her own Peter Meaden, whom I'd meet on another Everyman day for night, she introduced me to the space between notes that lives above gender, for that space occupies a room or two and Peter lived out on the ledge. I remember the moment we were not above it, and we could but would not get attached.

We were on the slope that takes you away from Hampstead High Street down over Frognal and down again towards the Finchley Road where up on the hill away from the traffic Gina lived with her family. Gina took note of the moment, too, we both laughed it off. I blushed, her eyes furnaced above the pale mask she wore. My hand wondered how pale was the rest of her as our arms clasped around each other a little tighter to preserve and bottle the moment. Laughter and love went together, we settled for harmony, we'd both just been and felt effective jazz.

We picked up our pace and strode on up the hill towards the heath and the Everyman. I would occupy this space with several significant others in the very near future, but Gina was a first of her kind.

We walked the minute or two south towards Fitzjohns Avenue where snugged in the last cluster of shops we snacked and nattered in the warmth of Gina's parents' Greek eatery. I held the cup the way I wanted to hold her hand. I had seen some leaflets on the earlier life of the Everyman and was now an expert, holding forth to Gina about how the cinema had once been a live theatre and had housed an earlier angry young person other than our good selves and "le bonfroglot".

Thirty years earlier than Osborne, in 1924, the young master himself as pop personified had written and starred in his first number one smash: the controversial Vortex. The young master? Noel Coward.

Gina and I didn't care much about the matters that weighed the Vortex; drugs, homosexuality and mother's little penchant for toy-boys. For me, one had been left resting on the mantleshelf at Wellingborough, the other resided in Soho and my mother's only little penchant was for her toy-boy to get some decent work.

What gobsmacked us was the shock Coward caused, the uproar amongst his peers and elders-that's what it was all about, the cry to have the play removed from the stage of life, not dissimilar to a later hue and cry about the Stones. We didn't fall for the cast or the hoopla, we were both too high at the pride of our lives to be interested in the grotty malaise. We fell for the move forward in life-the arrival, the charisma of Noel Coward making his indelible mark . . . .the event.

The falling down in life to powder and flesh we knew naught about yet. We were happy, deviant free new wave divas, and we wrapped ourselves in all things Noel, hot lemon tea and mousakka. We forgot about that blush of fate earlier on the hill. We strode back out onto Hampstead High Street bidding adieu to that. School was now out, shops were now near closing, Hampstead and its heath alive with cars on their way home. The other kids marching on the block were different. Somehow they knew where they were going and didn't like it whereas Gina and I did like where we were going and our stride was already there.

It was the new cinema that we were on our way to see that seduced and hooked me instantly. Springing from the political atmosphere that had inspired the New Left, it ridiculed commercial cinema. The work demanded plots and exemplified themes relevant to the struggles of reality, stirring me to dress down and attitude up.

I happily let the wave wash over me. Claude Chabrol was a man after Laurence Harvey's many hearts-he financed his first film Le Beau Serge, with an inheritance left to his first wife. It introduced Jean-Claude Brialy, whose cynical screen personality, lively temperament and courtly manner I identified with and adopted immediately. The Chabrol style in Le Beau Serge and Les Cousins via Brialy was curiously detached and I liked it. The props were a New Wave haircut, textured clothing like Shetlands, cords and 'Le duffel-coat.' A return to brogues on the feet, the 'moouvement' of the hands to express my heart, and I had it down. A beige wool-and-cashmere driving jacket from the Adams booty proved to be a wardrobe coup for this new movie.

When life demanded something a little more brittle I would change reels into Jean Luc Godard, get 'Breathless' and allow for jump-cuts and unsteady hand-held moving shots. Godard reshaped film syntax while paying homage to the American gangster movie, as Jean Paul Belmondo reinvented Jean Gabin by way of James Dean meets Humphrey Bogart. That role was a stretch for me at 16, so I usually calmed down into the more comfortable and laconic Jean-Claude Brialy mode.

I may have left Wellingborough but I was still at school. Don't let my French Wave languor fool you, I was hard at work as were many others.

This underground cinema movement was radically different, philosophically and visually, to anything we had ever experienced on screen before. The Hampstead Everyman, champion of the New Wave in London, was manna from heaven for my friends and me at the time, as we celebrated 'La difference.' As the 60s gathered momentum, the French New Wave would heavily influence the British arts, initially in film and theatre, by engendering the British Free Cinema, helmed by Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson and Lindsay Anderson. This trio of young British auteurs brought a new kind of internationality and sophistication to English-language films with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, This Sporting Life, Look Back in Anger, The Entertainer, The Loneliness of The Long Distance Runner and A Taste of Honey. Tony Richardson and John Osborne formed Woodfall Films and would later go for the whole nine yards with Tom Jones, winning an Oscar in the process. The Nouvelle Vague, spearheaded by Chabrol, Godard, Truffaut, Rivette and Eric Rohmer, still makes causes and harvests effects on film making to this day.

Its visual style trickled down into the fashion world via Courreges' bold, stark, scientifically precise mathematical beauty. Pierre Cardin's vision was to become the most highly franchised designer name in history. Let us not forget a little schpater pop music from the Beatles and the Stones. The French films' sparse, grainy b&w look would dominate early images by the beat boom's leading lights. The Stones input came direct from moi via the Everyman, plus what they brought to the table, and the Beatles got their attitude in Hamburg under the tutelage of Hamburg's Star Club and their German friends.

It was at the Everyman, too, that I met the light of Gina's life, Peter Meaden, who would provide both fuel and beam to so many lives, save his own. I came, I saw, he conquered.