Why I remain grateful to 'The King'

Perhaps only those who lived before the revolution can know how sweet the revolution was

There's a rather tired pub at the end of my road in Brixton, south London. Normally there's just a few hard-core drinkers barely talking. The sun fights to get through the dust on the windows and the faded brown velvet curtains are pulled at closing time, leaving the hard core inside.

Some weeks ago, however, they announced that a singer – the "top Elvis impersonator in Britain" who had come "third in the world" (how they established that I quiver to think) – would be playing that Saturday. And the joint jumped.

Of course Elvis lives. According to one statistic, every five seconds someone somewhere around the world will be getting up in jump-suit and cloak to sing his songs. It may be sad, grotesque even. But it is fantastic. No other figure in the history of popular music has sold as many records, earned as much money or spawned so many imitators.

Buddy Holly may have been a better musician, the Beatles more creative, Motown easier to dance to. But Elvis just was, and that astonishing voice – whispering, stretched and reeking of desire – expressed more intensely what people felt than any of these others.

The problem with all the discussion (and the 25th anniversary of his death is not until Friday, in case you were confused) about his place in rock, his debt to black music, the originality of his songs, his entry to the army, is that it misses the point.

The Beatles, Buddy Holly and the rest cheered, created, influenced. But they never threatened. You could object to the noise and the behaviour around them, even the drugs (although it seems pretty pathetic to claim smoking pot in the Buckingham Palace lavatories as a great act of rebellion), but not the music. Chuck Berry, Hank Williams, the Stones, the Clash, but above all Elvis; these were dangerous. They were about anger, excitement, bad taste and rude thoughts. And they were also – possibly because of this – singers who could only find themselves in live performance.

Perhaps only those who lived before the revolution can know just how sweet the revolution was. The Fifties were an oppressive decade – prissy, rule-bound, marbled with anti-Semitism and dragged with assumptions of racial superiority. In Britain we had the tweed suits of Toryism and the aftermath of rationing. In the US they had freer markets, but segregation and Eisenhower.

On to this Elvis didn't just explode; he exploded it. Cilla Black, in the BBC's excellent documentary on Sunday, giggled as if he was a sort of teenage mop head and Bob Geldof, growing pompous in his eminence, made lordly judgements of where he went wrong in his career. But Petula Clark came nearest to understanding his effect: "When Elvis performed it was if he was turning himself on and that, for a woman, was, well, a turn-on."

No wonder he was denounced from the pulpits and kept off the television screens for so long. Establishment America didn't want a demon letting loose the subconscious desires of its young. In 1956, when my father said he was going to America on business, I begged him to bring me back Elvis's second album, then just out. He did, but going to the office on his return must have been told exactly who and what Elvis Presley was. He returned, demanding the offending disc with the words: "I won't have that disgusting animal in my house." Fortunately I had lent the album out by then. Of course I had. I was the class hero for getting hold of it.

The best of American popular music has always come from the other side of the tracks. And that was where the Presleys hailed from, among the "poor white trash" and the blacks. And he fused their music, the blues and the country and western, to devastating effect.

John Lennon was wrong. Elvis's music didn't die when he went into the army or even into films. Society has always tried to neuter its outsiders by co-opting them. Britain does it with MBEs and knighthoods. America invites you to Hollywood.

The point of Elvis Presley was that, after a dismal eight years of Hawaiian cha-cha on the screen, he returned to the stage where he always belonged, and to the grinding treadmill of being on the road, which has killed so many of America's artists. He may not have pushed the boundaries of music farther, or recorded ground-breaking new songs. But the things for which the dismissive most deride him – the cars, the suits, the jewellery, the excess – were the very things that made him true to himself. When he waddled on to the stage, in overtight trousers and a ridiculous cape, you could feel embarrassed. When he opened his mouth to release that baritone, the only white voice that could ever match the blues, all you could feel was his longing and your own stirrings.

Now that all the rock historians, the superannuated pop stars and the biographers and recollectors have had their say, can one add a few words from those who were around when he struck. Not "long live the King" but simply "thank you."

a.hamilton@independent.co.uk