Nostalgia: on Planet MOJO it's the love that dare not speak its name, a shamefully squalid secret we cannot admit. Nostalgia for the music of our tender years is the elephant in the room we contort ourselves to write around as if it isn't there, a feeling best repressed and only indulged, if at all, when alone in the house with the curtains drawn rather than enjoyed to the full as a perfectly respectable emotion.

So, to 1968, a year that hasn't exactly been publicity-shy of late, canonically soundtracked by the Beatles' "Revolution," James Brown's "Say It Loud I'm Black And I'm Proud," the Stones' "Street Fighting Man" and Hendrix's "All Along The Watchtower."

Not for me, though; not one of these deathless waxings meant a thing to me at the time, not least because I frankly doubt that DJs Emperor Rosko or Stuart Henry ever spun them on the BBC's just-launched pop broadcasting organ, Wunnerful Radio 1.

For me, back then, nine going on 10, the music that turbo-Prousts me to the year of MLK, RFK and Tet are such uncanonical and widely unrevived 45s as "Red Red Wine" by Jimmy James & the Vagabonds and "Cinderella Rockafella" by Esther & Abi Ofarim.

But when I hear these songs again (and all that year's UK chart-toppers by Tiny Tim, Louis Armstrong, Mama Cass, Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich, ad infinitum), the canonically cool, Capital E Events--the riots, assassinations, ‘Nam and Apollo 8--only spring to mind as conscious afterthoughts to the far deeper lingering echoes of my crocodile-brain recollection of how things and people sounded, looked and smelled and how I felt... The personal memories--and we've all got ‘em.

This, then, is Real Nostalgia, the stuff that lives in the id, rather than the False Nostalgia our egos more readily admit to. All too often, wishful thinking compensates for the inconvenient fact that while the rest of the world is heavily into acid-rock, bluebeat or post-punk, we're heavily into Top 10 bubblegum, short trousers, gonks or not even born at all. But such is life, and concealing the truth that we've been underage bystanders looking and hearing the wrong way as great pop-cultural events explode elsewhere denies us what should be the guiltless pleasure of wallowing in the real nostalgia of the impressionable youth we actually had.

When I turned 10 I spent my birthday money (eight-and-fourpence at Harlequin Records, Barnet High Street, drop-jawed with amazement and the first tingle of budding loins at the spectacle of the window-displayed naked ladies on the sleeve of what I later recognized as Electric Ladyland) on Joe Cocker's awesome hit version of "With A Little Help From My Friends" with Jimmy Page revving away on his supercharged Telecaster, and I treasure it still with its Regal Zonophone label and sleeve advertising new albums by Procol Harum and the Move.

Like the Small Faces' "Lazy Sunday," William Bell & Judy Clay's "Private Number," Fleetwood Mac's "Albatross" and Nina Simone's "Ain't Got No... I Got Life," it turned out to be one of the really rather few childhood favourites that my older self could rack at the front of my collection with visible pride.

But why should Gary Puckett & the Union Gap have to gather cobwebs in the attic, airbrushed from my official biog to appease the party line on cool? Why should the Scaffold's "Lily The Pink" cower in the shadows, a record which spoke just as eloquently to my 10-year-old condition as did Magazine's "Shot By Both Sides" to my older, groovier post-punk self?

Sure, who wouldn't like to have had the super-precocious taste to soundtrack their childhoods with classics of cool instead of daft chart tat? Who would not rather imagine their '68 selves grooving to the Delfonics' "La La Means I Love You" instead of Don Partridge's "Rosie"? Or the Kinks' "Days" and not Mary Hopkin's "Those Were The Days"? "Those were the days, my friend," warbled the Welsh songthrush; "We thought they'd never end," a sentiment echoed by the gap-toothed Muswell Hillbilly:  "I won't forget a single day, believe me."

Ah, nostalgia ain't what it used to be, both Real and False. So let's start hearing it loud and proud for the stuff that actually filled our ears and shaped our souls. Let's destigmatise the pop moments that reconnect to our real younger selves, not the kids we wished we'd been. We're all cool enough now to do that, aren't we? Aren't we?

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