John Watson Rushworth. He was a big influence in my life when I was in my teens. He grew up with his parents and older brother in a back house in Bolton Road, its windows looking out over Canal Road towards Valley Parade.

Around 1960, John started to go out with my big sister Kay. He was seven years older than her and more than eight years older than me. He’d done his National Service in the RAF and returned to his trade in the textile industry. He was worldly and knowledgeable and seemed impressively sophisticated to a 16-year-old lad.

It was John who broadened my horizons beyond the rock’n’roll which up to then had been my sole musical interest. It was impossible to resist the enthusiasm with which he extolled the virtues of the likes of Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Tony Bennett, Sarah Vaughan and Sammy Davis Jr.

When I embraced traditional jazz at the start of the 1960s, John encouraged me to listen as well to modern jazz. I learned to appreciate the merits of Dave Brubeck and the MJQ alongside those of Acker Bilk and Chris Barber.

His tastes in recorded comedy included the dark, satirical mischief of Tom Lehrer and off-the-wall silliness of Songs For Swinging Sellars. And soon, so did mine. His tastes were very much focused on America. He would read blockbuster novels about GIs at war. He raved about the film The Man With The Golden Arm, for which Sinatra was Oscar-nominated for his portrayal of a drug addict.

He introduced me to the philosophy of Hugh Hefner and the delights of Playboy magazine in the days before the air-brushed glamour of centrefolds in top-shelf publications was replaced by full-frontal pornography.

Thanks to John’s influence, I learned a lot about popular culture at a more polished level than I might have done left to my own devices.

When he and Kay went off, courageously, in the late 1960s with their two infant daughters to a new life in Brazil, where John managed a textile mill, I missed them. It was good to welcome them back 20 years later, and to see John build up again, virtually from scratch, his musical collection through car-boot sales and visits to record fairs.

Now he’s gone. It was his funeral last Friday. He was 72. The vicar at the crematorium summed up splendidly the kindness of heart and generosity of spirit with which he was blessed and which made him such a pleasure to know.

His influence on my life continues, though. His passing prompted me to stop and wonder if I really want to work on until my birthday a month into 2009. I don’t, so I’ll be retiring instead at the end of December. A new year and a new life, with more time to listen to good music – rock’n’roll, of course, but also some Sinatra, and Ella, and maybe a spot of Peggy Lee.