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Ahead of five rare UK shows, ever-present frontman, guitarist and last remaining original Flamin’ Groovies member Cyril Jordan invites us to a 50th-anniversary birthday party in honour of the Californian group’s signature single, Shake Some Action, which is often rated as among the greatest rock’n’roll singles of the 70s

Rolling Stone magazine once hailed the Flamin’ Groovies as “maybe the greatest rock’n’roll band to ever come out of San Francisco”.

We’re probably the only rock’n’roll band from there. The Grateful Dead were psychedelic improv-meets-folk rock. None of those bands were influenced by Little Richard, but we recorded two of his songs.

These upcoming dates celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the power-pop anthem Shake Some Action, and the album of the same name. What do you recall of the song’s birth?

We cut that song at Rockfield in Wales at Christmas of 1975, eleven years after the British Invasion. I like to write in sections, and over a three-month period I tried in vain to finish them. In the end I put all of my ideas together to make one whole song.

Did you recognise it immediately as a hit?

No [laughs]. Not at all.

Shake Some Action was produced by Dave Edmunds. How did you get on with him?

I had been turned on to Dave with I Hear You Knocking [1970]. Hearing it on the radio, I stopped the car and turned up the volume. When I heard it had been cut at Rockfield, which seemed to me to be the new Sun Studios [in Memphis], I swore to myself that one day I would go to Rockfield and record with Dave Edmunds. It happened, and it was fantastic.

Cited as a watershed moment in the birth of punk, Flamin’ Groovies’ 1976 headline gig at the Roundhouse in London had two notable support acts: Ramones and The Stranglers. How did that happen?

Back then we had some clout, so I would call up friends in England and ask them about the up-and-coming local groups. One year it would be the Boomtown Rats, the next The Stranglers and then Dr Feelgood. On our last tour of England it was The Damned.

Groovies lead singer of the era, Chris Wilson, once called the Ramones “Nice kids but limited players”. Do you agree?

Well, we were quite a lot older than those guys. We were advanced guitar players. We were fingerpickers. As a barre chord guy, Johnny was always amazed by that. One of the reasons the punk scene was so radical is that the players were not advanced. They made a noise. That’s what it was all about.

But it could be a special noise.

In 1972 I became friends with Malcolm McLaren [Sex Pistols manager]. Three years later we played the annual NME party at Dingwalls [in London’s Camden Lock], and Malcolm came by along with this new band he was managing. One of them proceeds to steal our briefcase which contains the band’s passports, five thousand pounds in cash and my fuzz-tone pedal.

At the hotel, one of their roadies returns the briefcase, saying it had been taken “by mistake”. We open the thing up and everything is there – except the fuzz-tone. It all made complete sense to me the first time I heard [Pistols’ debut album] Never Mind The Bollocks. Years later I found out Steve Jones had stolen it.

On this tour, apart from Shake Some Action – obviously – what else can we expect to hear?

We’ll do maybe eighty per cent of the songs from that album, plus an assortment of others that are stuck to my shoe like gum. It will be a mish-mash of earlier songs, the stuff from Shake Some Action and brand-new material that I’ve written. It’s still an energetic rock’n’roll show.

The Flamon’ Groovies UK tour begins this evening (September 15) in Bristol, followed by dates in Leeds, Edinburgh, Nottingham and London. Find tickets.

When The Damned guitarist Captain Sensible was at the vanguard of 70s punk, his penchant for the proggier side of things remained undisclosed. But in 2009 he owned up to ripping off the genre he’d professed to hate – although he confirmed that some of his negativity was genuine.

“The first record I ever bought was I’m A Moody Guy by Shane Fenton, who became Alvin Stardust. I was so young that I had to get my mum to buy it – I was five or something. I still love that record! I found it on the internet recently and I still knew every bit of it. I must have played it over and over again on the family Dansette or whatever it was.

I love records like that, where every note is pure genius. I’m a huge fan of music. When I was a kid you’d save your money up for ages before you went to the record shop, so you really had to be picky. I’d go in and I’d want Blodwyn Pig and Wishbone Ash and Traffic and Soft Machine – but which one do you choose? I had that exact decision to make. I bought the second Traffic album, the one with Forty Thousand Headmen on it. I used to walk around with my albums under my arm, posing!

I’m not obsessed with vinyl at all. I absolutely love my iPod; it’s changed everything. It’s so great to be able to take your entire record collection with you, all your favourites. You never know what mood you’re going to be in. When I go to the dentist, for me it’s always A Rainbow In Curved Air by Terry Riley. It’s perfect – it lasts as long as the treatment takes, so take that and a valium and you’re sorted… ou come out of the dentist’s with a smile on your face!

I like prog, but I don’t like 20-minute drum solos. I don’t mind a bit of widdly-diddly guitar, as long as it’s interesting. That’s why I never liked Clapton! You get someone like Peter Green and he’d play a lot fewer notes, but they’d be better ones. Like Chick Corea said: it’s not the notes you play that matter; it’s the ones you leave out!

So prog should be interesting – but who decides what’s interesting? Who are the prog police? I like the Groundhogs, but I can’t stand Yes. What’s the difference between them? One of them is really inspired and passionate and the other one is singing songs about fairies at the bottom of the garden.

Tony McPhee is my hero. He sang about real stuff that actually means something. Thank Christ For The Bomb is an incredible album. It’s an ironic title, of course; my girlfriend is Japanese, so I had to explain that one to her!

These fucking public school wankers in these prog bands in the mid-70s – these Royal College of Music educated posh tossers – were singing songs about absolutely nothing because they had nothing to protest about.

I want to hear people singing about real things with passion. When punk came along, it was part of the job to destroy Genesis and Yes. I wanted to see them fuck off and die.

But I do like the Canterbury scene. I like Hugh Hopper and I love the fuzz organ on the Caravan stuff. That’s where The Damned’s I Just Can’t Be Happy Today came from. Rat Scabies was a fan of Caravan and Gong as well, believe it or not.

There was an organ sitting in the studio and we decided to chuck it through my fuzz pedal to make it sound like David Sinclair from Caravan. We’ve been ripping off the prog lot for years!

I usually say that all the best records came out in 1970. It’s such a good year. Grand Funk Railroad’s Live Album is the best live album ever made. The bass player and the drummer create these grooves that whip the audience into a frenzy. That’s all the band were designed for.

The lyrics are complete twaddle, obviously, and there’s a drum solo on here – but it’s a good one! I saw them in Hyde Park [in 1971] and they were supposedly the loudest band in the world. I didn’t think they were that loud, to be honest.

Everybody should check out an album called First Water by Sharks. It’s Chris Spedding and Andy Fraser from Free, and two other blokes that no one’s heard of. What an amazing bass player Andy Fraser is! He does that Chick Corea thing – he knows all about which notes to leave out. He’d leave huge holes in the songs.

On All Right Now, he didn’t even play in the verse; he only comes in on the chorus, but then he plays the most incredible riff on the solo. You’re not listening to Paul Kossoff; you’re listening to Andy Fraser.

The Sharks album is so worth getting. I probably listen to it more than anything else. Andy Fraser’s solo album is great too. It’s him on lead bass. He only plays bass solos and he’s going through this rasping distortion and it’s absolutely brilliant.

I only like Pink Floyd up until Atom Heart Mother. Then it became bank clerk music. Syd Barrett was a genius; there are so many things that he did first. It’s not just about the beautiful songs. When he made The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn – and I say ‘he’ because the other guys were lucky to be part of it – you’d go into a studio like Abbey Road and they’d all be wearing white lab coats.

When all these remarkable albums were made, the studio people didn’t understand where the music was coming from or why the musicians would disappear into the toilet every five minutes!

I’d love to have been a fly on the wall at those sessions. How did it go from 1966 and Silence Is Golden to Astronomy Domine and Lucifer Sam? That’s amazing. One minute it’s trite little pop songs – no disrespect to The Move because I do like them – then suddenly it’s genius. Syd changed so many things.

It’s a shame they’ll never have me on Desert Island Discs, will they? But it would be so difficult to choose six tracks. I’d probably pick some Ravel to confuse them, but also A Visit To Newport Hospital by Egg, Eccentric Man by the Groundhogs, Slightly All The Time by Soft Machine, Hallogallo by Neu! and wacky stuff like that. That’d shake up those Radio 4 bastards, wouldn’t it!”