IN the summer of 1972 I found myself in London where I soon discovered that, whatever it was the streets were paved with, it wasn't gold.

I was billeted in a civil service hostel in Notting Hill yet to be yuppified by Hugh Grant. My room mate was a studious Saudi Arabian teenager who drank Coca Cola copiously and at least once a week visited any cinema in the vicinity that was showing Lawrence of Arabia. My interests veered more in the direction of poetry - I was youthfully smitten by Dylan Thomas - and rock 'n' roll. Once, I spotted Roger Daltrey of The Who, hanging out of a window in Ladbroke Grove, his hair as unruly as Harpo Marx's. "Hi Roger," I shouted as I breezed past in my tie-dyed T-shirt and patched jeans, whereupon he disappeared immediately from view. Such is the curse of fame.

In the evenings, I repaired to The Mitre where one of the irregulars was Tommy Cooper. With a gaggle of other expatriates, I drank enough Watney's Red Barrel never to want to touch another pint of the stuff and threw darts with as much accuracy as I might a javelin. There was a jukebox which we fed with shrapnel as one does a duck to produce foie gras and from which poured endlessly Don McLean's smash hit, American Pie. Music is to me is what a petit madeleine was to Proust. All it takes is a few plangent bars of American Pie and I am transported back to an era when life was simpler and emptier. As McLean sang on we would stop and listen and eventually we'd all join joyfully in. How we identified with those good old boys drinking whiskey and rye and "singin' this'll be the day that I die".

Of course, much of the lyrics' meaning passed us by. Sure, I knew what a Chevy was, but a levee? But that wasn't the half of it. To my ignorant ears, McLean seemed to be wilfully courting obscurity with his references to Jesters and Jack Flash and Lenin reading a book on Marx. In that regard, he kept good company. Who on earth, for instance, was the Beatles' egg man? Was he in any way connected to milkmen? Had he been an Eigg man that might have made some sense. Then there was Procul Harum's A Whiter Shade of Pale which topped the charts for as long as it takes to get to Mars. Who were those 16 vestal virgins and why were they leaving for the coast? What could we do in that pre-Google era but scratch our heads? In any case, we had bigger things to worry about, such as Bob Dylan's Desolation Row which we approached as if were Eliot's Waste Land. Many were the days I spent trying to make sense of it. Whose hanging was it they were selling postcards to? And who, come to that, were painting passports brown, and why? Could mind-altering substances have anything to do with it?

Now we learn that Don McLean, who is 69, has sold the original manuscripts of American Pie for £806,000. These included 16 handwritten notes that have been stuck in a box for more than 40 years. According to the auctioneer, these revealed the creative process behind the fabled song. It is not for me to question the sanity of someone who is willing pay such a silly sum for the manuscripts. Suffice to say that the modern world seems replete with fools who have more money than sense. Meanwhile, McLean himself has not given much away. "The writing and the lyrics will divulge everything there is to divulge," he has said. This rather echoes what he told me and countless other interviewers down the decades when we tried to tease from him tidbits that might lead to enlightenment. Asked what American Pie really means, he'd invariably reply: "It means I never have to work again."

Of course, from time immemorial artists have resisted offering explanations of their work. That's not their job. They create therefore they are. It is an enviable position in which to be and helps retain the sense of mystery in which savvy artists cloak themselves. In any case, eventually virtually everything that was once perceived "difficult" and seemingly impenetrable becomes comprehensible, be it Joyce's Ulysses, Picasso's abstracts or Schoenberg's symphonies, all of which were originally received with incomprehension and hostility. So it will be good at last to be able to put a name to the woman we've only ever known as "Miss American Pie".