When I was in secondary school in the 1960’s, Friday afternoons were devoted to various hobby clubs. I remember model aeroplanes and stamp collecting being two popular pursuits amongst my confreres.

If your interest was not represented by an existing club you could submit to form a new club, provided you could sign up the requisite number of members, which was ten, if my memory serves my well.

The drone of petrol-engined balsa and paper planes never appealed, partly because I couldn’t bare the embarrassment of that inevitable crash that saw your midget pride and joy soar momentarily then, inevitably, crash and splinter. And philately? Well, I was never going to find a one-penny black, was I?

What really enthused me at the time was the unruly, unsettling, somewhat threatening and, therefore, hugely attractive sound of the Blues.

Like so many boys my age (and it’s always seemed to me that the Blues are primarily a boy thing, despite an impressive array of outstanding female Blues performers), I’d come to Blues music through the likes of the Rolling Stones, The Animals, Them, Long John Baldry, the Yardbirds, Graham Bond and Fleetwood Mac.

Even through the medium of these young white English musicians, the music was still virulent enough to infect me. Who was writing these songs that, for some reason, got so deeply under the skin of a white middle class boy from Sydney who didn’t know his delta from his mojo hand? The names that appeared in brackets after the songs on the album sleeves weren’t the names of the performers. Who was McKinley Morganfield (Muddy Waters)? What sort of a name was J. B. Lenoir? How could I find out about Chester Burnett (Howlin’ Wolf), Willie Dixon, John Lee Hooker, Lightnin’ Hopkins and Sonny Boy Williamson – the people who were writing this earthy, compelling stuff?

I wasn’t the only one in my circle smitten by this strange and unlikely siren song. Other boys my age became enraptured. It was going on all over the place. In Sydney, on those Friday afternoons, having got the Blues Club going, we’d spend our time in the music room one-upping each other with albums we’d been able to find in the preceding week.

Someone had heard the Stones’ “2120 South Michigan Ave” off 12X5 and discovered that it was the address of Chess Records, so the Chess label quickly became a great source of material. Someone else had an uncle who’d heard Them doing “Bright Lights, Big City” and was able to supply the original version by Jimmy Reed. Another found a Rufus Thomas record in a discount bin and discovered that the Rolling Stones weren’t first with “Walking the Dog”.

And so it went all over the place, except that boys my age in England and Europe didn’t have to traipse through the record collections of errant uncles or flick through discount bins for the vicarious pleasures of a blues record. While these legends of the Blues were obscure artists back home in America, in the UK and Europe they were lauded. So much so that between 1962 and 1966 there were annual tours playing to packed houses where youngsters such as Mick Jagger, Brian Jones, Keith Richards, Bill Wyman, Long John Baldry, Alexis Korner, Cyril Davies, Paul Jones and Jimmy Page sat, rapt, in front of their heroes at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester or the Fairfield Hall in Croyden, or in a German TV studio in Baden Baden.

For six shillings they attended the 6.45 pm or the 9 pm American Negro Blues Festival to see Memphis Slim doing “The Blues Is Everywhere” backed by T-Bone Walker on guitar and Willie Dixon on bass, or Muddy Waters belting out “Got My Mojo Working” with Sonny Boy Williamson, Otis Spann and Dixon; Williamson performing “Nine Below Zero” backed by Otis Spann, Matt “Guitar” Murphy and Dixon again; Dixon doing “Sittin’ and Cryin’ The Blues” backed by Memphis Slim and Big Joe Williams, or the series of incredibly intense performances by the Wolf doing “Shake For Me”, “I’ll Be Back Someday” and “Love Me Darlin’”, backed by Sunnyland Slim, Hubert Sumlin and Dixon.

All this is contained in these two DVD volumes, along with performances by Lightnin’ Hopkins, Roosevelt Sykes, John Lee Hooker, Big Mama Thornton, Magic Sam, Otis Rush, Sippie Wallace, Walter “Shakey” Horton, Junior Wells, Earl Hooker, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and Mississippi Fred McDowell.

Are you licking your lips? I was last year when I read about the discovery of this footage. Two Germans – Horst Lippman and Fritz Rau, promoted the tours. They loved Blues, and felt that by supporting the music and the artists, they were supporting the US civil rights movement. And the artists loved doing the tours. Just about everything in the southern United States was still segregated when these tours took place. When the bluesmen reached Europe, audiences who were genuinely moved by the performances, lionized them. John Lee Hooker recalled in his biography, Boogie Man, that the first time he went to Europe was in 1962, “and boy it was just like the president or Jesus comin’ in…every night was a sell out. Standing room only, no matter how big the place was.”

A German television station recorded the footage contained on these two discs. It was “lost” in storage for 40 years, but has remained in remarkably good condition. The black and white footage is crisp and the sound is superb. (Legendary Electric Ladyland engineer, Eddie Kramer, gets the credit for audio restoration).

In some cases the settings for the performances are quaint: TV-studio recreations of southern juke joints and shot gun shacks, with the performers introducing each other with homilies about the meaning of the Blues; audiences listening intently, dressed in suits and furs, looking for all the world like a university lecture hall full of German existentialists.

There’s a stark intensity about all the performances. The cool confidence of Sonny Boy Williamson, the all-seeing eye of Willie Dixon, the driving intensity of Howlin’ Wolf. These are vintage performances by some of the major musicians of the 20th century in their prime.

There’s one hilarious performance on Volume Two led by Big Mama Thornton. It’s a harmonica boogie with Thornton taking the first solo followed by a line-up of Shakey Horton, J. B. Lenoir, Doctor Ross and John Lee Hooker, all stepping in front of each other to take their harmonica solos and none knowing when the one playing is going to step aside for the next one to pick up the lead. John Lee Hooker was one of the great guitar stylists, with a voice that could move mountains, but in this performance you can see that the harmonica was definitely not his instrument.

Because I wasn’t there, unlike Mick and Keith and Brian and Jimmy and the rest of them, I feel incredibly lucky to be able to see these performances now. Every time I’ve sat down in front of them over the last couple of weeks, they’ve taken me right back to my school days in the Blues Club in Sydney. I feel I’m seeing the performances that I was listening to then, performances that allowed me to realise that the Blues was the basis for nearly all the music I’d liked up til then, and have liked since.

As Bill Wyman says in the excellent liner notes accompanying the series: “Things would have been a whole lot different without the American Blues Festivals; they proved to be a rich legacy for musicians throughout Europe.”

These performances are the real deal - an essential addition to your music collection.