A six-foot-seven man hears a scruffy kid busking a Muddy Waters song on a train platform at Twickenham Station and hires him on the spot. The kid is Rod Stewart. A few years later that same man forms a band called Bluesology, hires a keyboard player named Reg Dwight, and unknowingly supplies half of the stage name Elton John. This episode asks how Long John Baldry, born in 1941 in a wartime maternity ward in Northamptonshire, built the stage for the British invasion yet slipped through the cracks of mainstream memory.

We visit the sweaty incubators of the early 1960s British R&B boom, from Eel Pie Island to the Marquee Club, where Baldry sang with Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated, put together a group to support the Rolling Stones at their first Marquee gig, and performed Got My Mojo Workin’ on a 1964 Beatles television special. The conversation covers his role as bandleader and employer with the Hoochie Coochie Men and Steampacket, the number one pop hit Let the Heartaches Begin that his own band refused to back, his 1968 intervention in Elton John’s crisis that inspired Someone Saved My Life Tonight, and the toll of living as a gay man under British law. We follow his own overdose and recovery, the 1978 album Baldry’s Out, his move to Canada, a Juno Award, and a surprising third act as the voice of Dr. Robotnik in the Sonic the Hedgehog cartoon before his death in 2005.

• Eel Pie Island, the Marquee Club and the birth of British blues
• Bandleader as venture capitalist: paying wages to future superstars
• A number one hit so despised by purists that Bluesology left him alone with a tape recorder
• Saving Elton John’s life while hiding his own identity under draconian laws
• Baldry’s Out, Vancouver, cartoon villains and a farewell soundtracked by Sister Rosetta Tharpe