Bobby Graham, hailed as Britain's greatest ever session drummer and the country's “king of drums”, died on 14 September, 2009, aged 69.

Among his 15,000 recordings were such iconic and ground-breaking tracks as You Really Got Me and All Day And All Of The Night by The Kinks, Downtown by Petula Clark, Green Green Grass of Home by Tom Jones, I Only Want to Be with You by Dusty Springfield and I Believe by The Bachelors.

And, as with all great figures in rock 'n' roll history, he was associated with certain apocryphal stories – was he really Brian Epstein 's first choice to replace Pete Best in The Beatles? Did he really play instead of Dave Clark himself on Dave Clark Five hits?

He referred to himself and fellow session players as “musical stuntmen”, doing “all the dangerous bits for the groups and artists of that time”.

He said a typical day during the 1960s would include up to four gruelling recording sessions, with acts ranging from the Tony Hatch Orchestra to PJ Proby and Van Morrison.

His recordings for mod icons The Kinks were his most famous work, replacing regular drummer Mick Avory to provide the driving drum riffs and rolls of their power chord-heavy singles.

Born in Edmonton, North London on 11 March, 1940, Bobby Graham left school at 15 to pursue his musical ambitions. “I didn't want a grown ups job,” he said. “I've never had a grown ups job.”

He worked prolifically throughout the 1960s, also working with the likes of Jimmy Page, The Pretty Things and Nico , then began producing records for EMI in Holland. He had several business enterprises during the 1970s, but returned to music in the following decade with his group The Jazz Experience.