Thirty years on

Even although I was very, very young at the time - still hadn't worked out that the summer holiday was some kind of trick - I can still remember hearing the news about the terrible, pointless loss of life in Memphis that August day thirty years ago.

Oddly, though, it's not Elvis' death which has stayed with me across three decades, but the reports on Radio 2 News about the two girls killed outside Gracelands when a car ploughed into the mourners. Elvis himself? That was just Top of the Pops cutting a song to fit in a "tribute" - pointless, as it turned out, as death was about to float him up the chart again, carrying him aloft, like Styx. Only with the Estate rushing to get the pennies off his eyes.

It's not that I disliked him - frankly, he hadn't made much of an impression on me before he took his final trip to the toilet (he was no Carpenters, say) and my young mind didn't think there was much point in paying to attention to him now. I'd done death already - it meant grandparents stopped popping round once a week with a bag of shopping they'd picked up, so it seemed that this Mr. Presley dying meant that we'd not be seeing him around any more, either.

That turned out to be wrong.

History is littered with people who built things, and people who were first to do things. Both are noteworthy, in that their names are noted, but it makes sense to reserve your awe for the man who built the bridge, rather than the bloke who went across it first of all. Elvis, I think it's fair to say, was a bridge-crosser, not a bridge-maker, a man who followed a route rather than plotted a map.

It's telling that he's known as The King - a title handed down to people by accident of birth, signifying wealth built on the exploitation of others. An honorific, not an earned title.

That the TV today will be full of people in white suits screwing up their faces and going "uh-huh-huh" shows that he wasn't even inimitable.

He did make some great records - he had an excellent ear, he had access to the work of legendary writers, he was surrounded by people who either knew what they were doing, or had the luxury of being able to make it up as they went along.

He was the first of his kind. But let's not confuse first with best. Had he lived, we'd probably find him a little embarrassing nowadays, like Cliff Richard, uncertain how to balance the respect for what he was with against the awkwardness of what he's become.

Raise a drink to Elvis Presley, and his memory. But don't make the toast "The King".