Brian Pendreigh: Any advance on Johnny Cash?

We also play tennis together and Mark prides himself on his photo with Roger Federer - it's on the clubhouse wall, alongside us on Eggheads (due for broadcast in September or thereabouts).

They know I am a film journalist and probably expected me to say Connery or Eastwood or someone like that, but I said Johnny Cash.

And it was obvious that Mark was slightly taken aback. "Johnny Cash? You met Johnny Cash! Well, that wins it."

The funny thing is that when I was at school, liking Johnny Cash was the sort of thing you kept to yourself for fear of being ostracised. It was a posh school - ostracism would equate with being beaten up at other schools.

My contemporaries were into Black Sabbath, Deep Purple and other bands whose names consisted of two words, one of which must be a colour, and whose music emphasised electric feedback rather than lyrical nuance.

I stood alone in my passion for Johnny Cash and A Thing Called Love - "He was the kind of a man that would gamble on luck, look you in the eye and never back up," though I thought it relatively easy to toughen up and improve that rhyme with one little tweak at the end there.

Few shared my enthusiasm for Neil Diamond, the songs of Jimmy Webb and Bacharach and David, or even the later works of one Elvis Presley.

Today no one is cooler than Johnny Cash, as evidenced by the repeated use of his music in Quentin Tarantino films and the some of the hippest of TV shows, including True Blood, The Wire and Skins.

I stuck up a link to Johnny Cash's version of Nine Inch Nails' Hurt on Facebook a week or two back. I love those final albums when his voice is broken, all but gone, and all that really remains is the raw emotion, the hurt.

I mentioned how everyone laughed when I said that I liked him.

A friend replied: "Puts me in mind of the funniest thing Bob Monkhouse ever said. 'When I told them at school I was going to be a comedian, they all laughed at me. Well, they're not laughing now!'"

You tell someone you like Johnny Cash, and, no, they are not laughing now.

It helped that Cash had his own Hollywood biopic, and the world discovered he was just like the protagonist in A Thing Called Love, a big, tough man, redeemed by love.

Dying sometimes reignites interest. But the rehabilitation had already begun.

And this popular reassessment is by no means limited to Johnny Cash. In the Seventies Neil Diamond was regarded as middle-of-the-road music for middle-aged people.

A few years ago he was at Glastonbury and he is playing Hampden next month.

Bacharach and Webb used to be music for elevators. Jimmy Webb's Wichita Lineman has been cited by Robbie Williams as his all-time favourite song and now figures in discussions of the greatest song ever written.

It is difficult to pinpoint when this realignment began.Maybe it was a decade ago when Tom Jones announced himself as a "sex bomb" and started duetting with the likes of Cerys Matthews and Heather Small, though Cash aged with more dignity and style.

Way back in 1990 Deacon Blue reached No 2 with an EP of Bacharach and David songs, but it was Bacharach's collaboration with Elvis Costello a decade later that reignited his career.

Costello, a product of the punk rock era, had shown from the outset a prodigious talent for a finely crafted song. It turned out there were other people out there that shared my secret passions all along.

The very first single I ever bought, when I was at primary school, was Two Little Boys and my 20-year-old daughter Catherine tells me even Rolf Harris is cool now, though he is apparently "cool in his own way, not like Johnny Cash".

But then no one was quite like Johnny Cash. I met him. I win.