The year is 1960. The venue is the Winter Gardens on the seafront in Weston-super-Mare.

True to the musical tastes of the time, it's "teen beat" night, and stepping up to take centre stage is a young lad called Ricky Ford. Keeping him company are his backing group The Cyclones.

That evening would prove to be quite a night for young Ricky (real name Bill Green). It launched him on a career in popular music that's still going strong more than half a century later.

"I was 20 years old then," he recalls, "and I went from being a rather nervous ex-railway clerk to stepping right in at the deep end."

There was, he feels, something of destiny being fulfilled with that stage appearance. Years before, in his mid-teens, he'd helped out on Saturdays at the Tudor Cinema in Chipping Sodbury and got a real buzz from organising the stage events that accompanied a screening back then.

As careers go, that of Ricky Ford and The Cyclones was, as befits their name, rather cyclonic. By 1963, they had shot up the local popularity charts and were topping the bill.

Fame would surely come calling.

It did, after a fashion.

Ricky and his group got a call asking them to be the backing band for chart-topping Sixties duo Peter and Gordon (Peter was actress Jane Asher's brother). The duo's single A World Without Love was number one and they wanted the Bristol lads.

"I used to open their shows for them," remembers Ricky. "One night, Peter Asher came along and gave me a lovely overcoat – then he said 'goodbye'. Obviously, they didn't want me, they just wanted my group."

A few days later, though, Ricky found himself in demand again. A band called The Marauders had seen him on the Peter and Gordon tour and wanted him to join them.

By then, Ricky was well and truly enmeshed in the non-stop whirl of the British beat boom.

In the intervening year of 1964, Ricky had also become involved in the controversial Bristol-produced rock'n'roll passion play A Man Dies

It was co-written by a Lockleaze church minister. The play starred a bunch of city teenagers – and was accused of blasphemy.

Ricky Ford sang on the album of the show, which was produced at the world famous Abbey Road studios in 1964. That period of his life also saw him getting bookings through the NEMS agency, the company which was owned by Beatles impresario Brian Epstein. "He took me under his wing and said he thought I had a very unusual voice," recalls Ricky. "He got me along to Abbey Road to do some demos with George Martin (the Beatles' iconic producer), but the songs just weren't right."

One that was, though, was released on Parlophone back in 1965. Your Are My Love was the A-side and the flipside track was Long Way From Love.

Ricky plays me the tune from way back then, and reminisces about how Roy Orbison – the man he now emulates in his stage show – gave serious thought to recording the track himself. "It was made at Abbey Road," Ricky remembers.

"It was laid down in an hour. Roy listened to it twice, but eventually turned it down."

Inexorably, the Sixties turned into the Seventies and times changed, but Ricky Ford never gave up singing, finally going solo in 1992 "because the economics of the business dictate that you just cannot carry a group around". He's still got that "very unusual voice" at the age of 68. "I've been lucky that it's always been very strong," he says. "I've never lost the range or falsetto."

Listening to his tracks, he sounds incredibly young, and I ask how he looks after his voice. "I don't smoke, I don't drink much, I rest my voice and I never rehearse," he reveals.

So, as Ricky's approaching three score years and 10, where does he play? "Over the past year, I think I must have done 56 clubs in the South Wales valleys," he says, " – and that's not for the squeamish.

"I also play all over Bristol, local clubs in places like Bedminster Down, Warmley."

His act is a dichotomy. He does a 50-minute Roy Orbison tribute set and then switches to lots of popular pop featuring hits from people like Elvis and Cliff Richard.

Five decades on, his musical career from those early days has caught up with him. He's just discovered that one of his tracks has been picked up to feature on a new compilation album called Try Me Out Ballroom Beat, which is billed as including examples of "prime British beat 1964-1966". The thing is, though, it's not Ricky's A-side they've chosen, it's Long Way From Love, the song he put on the B-side!

"If you hear this track, it's no great shakes," says Ricky, "but it seems that's what they wanted, to try and demonstrate what music was actually like in the youth clubs and local dance halls back then."

Ricky's a grandad four times over and 68 years old, but the demand for his act shows no sign of subsiding.

He's just been asked back to do a gig at a pub in Brean, near Weston- super-Mare. It'll be his fifth year there.

While we chatted, Ricky interspersed our conversation with snippets of songs from his stage act. His voice is still every bit as powerful as Orbison's, that's for sure.

And thanks to this asset, the former railway clerk who became Ricky Ford has obviously had one heck of a musical career.

He's met and mixed with some of the greatest music-makers from that incredible era, including a meeting with The Big O, Orbison himself, and mingled with its movers and shakers such as the late and legendary Brian Epstein.

Despite all that, as he says wistfully, "I've never been famous – but I can still fill a club!"