Please allow me to introduce myself. I’m a man of wealth and taste. I’ve been around for a long, long year. Stole many a man’s soul and faith

If you don’t instantly recognize those words, know this: These haunting lyrics — preceded by a savage jungle beat and croaked by Mick Jagger’s street-scraped voice before the twin guitars start riffing — marked an important point in popular music. The Rolling Stones’ anthem, Sympathy for the Devil, opening the iconic Beggar’s Banquet album in 1968, became a staple of that era.

The song’s title inspired French new wave director Jean-Luc Godard to shoot a documentary of the same name, chronicling the making of a Rolling Stones record. Godard alternated record studio footage of the Stones with stylized dramatic scenes, exploring themes that revolved around race, revolution and violence.

Hey Jude don’t make it bad. Take a sad song and make it better.

When the Beatles released “Hey Jude” in the summer of that same year, the London music scene became the number-one export commodity worldwide. The song was first released as a very ‘special’ single — personal, lavish and clocking in at over 7 minutes, at a time when most radio stations aired disposable 3-minute popsicles. Later, the group incorporated it into their Revolution album. As Bob Dylan had predicted a few years earlier, “The Times they [really were] a-Changin’ ” — and it was all happening in London.

But it was a very different — very serene — London to which I had been introduced in the late 1950s when I first arrived there to complete my studies. Little did I foresee that it was the calm before the storm and that, soon, the time would come when we would be totally absorbed by everything around us.

In a way, though, it had already started back home in the late 1950s with the arrival of James Dean’s Rebel Without a Cause at the Rivoli Cinema. By the time the film was screening, Dean had already been killed in a car crash. Looking back now, I realize that it was not the film’s theme (the generation gap) that made Dean a legend. No, it was the blue denim jeans and the red zip-up jacket ‘Jimmie’ wore in the film that really started the youth revolution.

Klonaris, a Downtown sportswear shop (which still exists to this day) on Abdel Khalek Tharwat Street, offered a similar version of that zip-up jacket, but I arrived too late to buy the red one — they had sold out, and I had to make do with a khaki substitute. A few years later though, I had no problem buying an Aquascotum suit similar to Sean Connery’s in Goldfinger (1964), but that was from a London store.

Back then, British cinema (as well as its European counterparts) was bubbling with talents before they were eventually lured to Hollywood. Directors Tony Richardson, Lindsay Anderson and John Schlesinger, to name but a few, made films that changed the face and soul of the craft with such works as Look Back in Anger, If and Darling, respectively. They were backed by then-rising writers including John Osborne and Terence Rattigan, who collaborated on many more vibrant, exhilarating and socially critical plays and films.

One morning, I attended a public screening of Jean Renoir’s Le Caporal Epingle (The Elusive Corporal) at the Academy Cinema on Oxford Street, where the master himself (aged 76 at the time) introduced his film to ordinary filmgoers like myself.

The Academy recently closed down despite howls of protest.

In 1960s London, long before it became a highly profitable tourist attraction as it now is, theater was within the reach of ordinary citizens. I was one of those fortunate enough to have caught Alec Guinness in the role of Lawrence in Ross, watched the legendary Peter O’Toole performing Bertolt Brecht’s Baal and witnessed Richard Harris in the one-man play Diary of a Madman.

And they were among us, in our neighborhoods. While waiting for my order at Dino’s, a sandwich shop next to the South Kensington tube station, guess who I found standing next to me? None other than one of Hitchcock’s favorite leading men, Cary Grant, in the flesh, ordering a sandwich in his smooth, distinguished voice.

It was normal, then, to rub shoulders with (or simply spot) a celebrity in your neighborhood. Then, it was nothing to spot Michael Caine in a sheepskin duffle coat walking down Charing Cross Road, breathing the sweet smell of his recent success in The Ipcress File (1965), which was quickly followed by Alfie (1966), itself remade nearly four decades later with Jude Law in the lead in 2004.

You see, there were no real paparazzi in those days. I didn’t even know what a paparazzo was until I saw Federico Fellini’s masterpiece La Dolce Vita (The Good Life) in 1960.

That was the London I came to know and appreciate.

So, once more, please allow me to introduce myself: I am a ‘London of the ‘60s’ graduate, in the real sense of the word, and a film buff to the very last drop of my blood.

These are my credentials.  et

This is the first of acclaimed director Mohamed Khan’s monthly Egypt Today column. Khan is one of the Arab world’s greatest living directors. In a career that has so far spanned almost 30 years, he has delivered some of the most memorable movies and commanded some of the most prominent actors of the nation, from Nour El-Sherif in Darbet Shams (Sunstroke, 1978) to Yehia El-Fakharany in Awdet Mowaten (Return of a Citizen, 1986), from Ahmed Zaki in Zawgat Ragol Mohem (Wife of an Important Person, 1987) and Ahlam Hind We Camilia (Dreams of Hind and Camilia, 1988) to Nabila Ebied in El-Gharkana (Drowned Woman, 1991). He has been recognized with numerous local and international awards, including the National Medal in Science and Arts presented by President Mubarak following the release of Ayyam El-Sadat (The Days of Sadat) in 2001.