Because Stefan Mylenik, a Boy Scout patrol leader I admired, said they were his favourite group, the Dave Clark Five became mine too – and, in October 1964 when I was thirteen, their Anyway You Want It became the first record I ever bought.

Having invested a good half of a week's paper round earnings, I intended to spin it until it was dust: sometimes focusing only on, say, the drumming, the saxophone section or the words. I also played it at the wrong speeds – and, for much of one afternoon, backwards after rigging up a tinnily monophonic Dansette record-player to do so. I was determined to get my money's worth from this two minutes and twenty-seven seconds of what was perhaps the most violent disc ever produced during a mediaeval period of recording technology - when it's not much of an exaggeration to say that the order of the day was sticking a microphone in front of a group and hoping for the best.

Without so much as the merest preamble, the entire Five hit their instruments at once. With unprecedented depth of sound in pop terms, an electric storm of pulsating bass, rasping sax, crashing drums, and block chords vamped on dranging guitar and whining Vox Continental organ then raged at defiant mid-tempo until the play-out groove. It paused only at the end of each verse for a solitary bar filled with the overhanging resonance of an echo-chambered “hey-hey-hey” from mostly omnes fortissimo vocals, delivering lyrics that sounded like they were composed with crayon on a piece of cardboard.

In contrast to this gloriously in-yer-face row, the flip-side, Crying Over You, was a “sophisticated” slow ballad. I didn't listen to it anywhere as much as Anyway You Want It, but a slide into Dave Clark Five dependency had become breakneck as I set about acquiring everything on which they'd ever breathed. For hours at a stretch, I'd gloat over my plastic treasures, my black beauties, finding much to study, notice and compare. On the label of 1961's Chaquita, the debut single, for example, Clark was misspelled “Clarke” - and the LP version of Can't You See That She's Mine was marginally different from that of the 45 rpm A-side.

No such detail was too insignificant to be less than totally absorbing. I could dwell very eloquently, almost evangelically, on my interest, and couldn't grasp why others weren't as captivated, even when the going got erratic for the Five in the domestic charts while they concentrated on taking North America for every cent. Studying the music press, I'd often spot a Five single I'd never heard climbing the US Top 40. Nevertheless, after no less than Stefan Mlynek turned his back on them, I remained unswerving in my loyalty.

Taking the mildest disparagement of the Five as a mortal insult, I supported them as other schoolboys would a football team until 1967 when awful Tabatha Twitchit was unleashed on an indifferent mass public, causing even snowblinded disciples like me to listen to subsequent Clark releases before purchase. It wasn't even so-bad-it's-good – though I was overcome with a sort of appalled amazement that they'd had the desperate audacity to insert a recycling of the thump-thump hook of Glad All Over, their only British Number One, centuries ago in January 1964.

Lord, I believe: help thou my unbelief – but this was the moment when the entity I'd worshipped from afar for three crucial years of my adolescence became just The Men Who Used To Be The Dave Clark Five. Yet what had turned from a hobby to a craving, nearly a religion, was never quite extinguished, and, as it is with a former heroin addict yielding to the temptation of one last fix, a solitary blast of Anyway You Want It can still invoke at least a ghost of its old automatic-replay power and the associated “vinyl junkie” repercussions in all their ancient abundance.