By day he hammered dents out of car panels in a garage; by night he cupped a harmonica against a microphone and unleashed a sound that polite 1950s Britain had never heard. Cyril Davies, born in Buckinghamshire in 1932, started out playing banjo and 12-string guitar in a skiffle band until hearing Little Walter’s amplified Chicago blues harmonica rewired his musical identity. Around 1955 he teamed up with Alexis Korner to open the London Blues and Barrelhouse Club, where they hosted touring American legends like Muddy Waters, Sonny Terry, and Memphis Slim by piggybacking on Chris Barber’s jazz network.

This episode explains why British jazz and folk purists treated a simple amplifier as a vulgar, Americanized threat, and how that hostility pushed Davies and Korner to form Blues Incorporated and open the Ealing Club in a damp basement beneath a bakery in 1962. That room became the incubator of the British Invasion: an unknown Mick Jagger climbed on stage to sing Got My Mojo Working on the second night, and Eric Burdon was in the crowd. It also covers Davies’s uncompromising split from his own band over Chuck Berry songs, his short-lived success with the Cyril Davies All-Stars, and his death at 31 in January 1964.

• What skiffle was, from washboards and tea-chest basses to its fundamentally safe, acoustic character
• How Little Walter’s tightly cupped bullet microphone and overdriven tube amp turned the harmonica into a distorted, saxophone-like wail
• Why Davies quit Blues Incorporated in October 1962 rather than play Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley numbers, and how his purism was inseparable from his genius
• The All-Stars with Long John Baldry on vocals, the Pye Records deal, and 1963 television appearances on Hullabaloo
• Pleurisy, heavy drinking to numb the pain, the collapse at Eel Pie Island, and the aftermath as the All-Stars became the Hoochie Coochie Men