Danny Fields knew he wanted to manage the Ramones from the moment he laid eyes on them. It was early 1975, and he was an influential music journalist who’d helped the Stooges and the MC5 get record deals. The Ramones, hoping for the same, pestered him incessantly to see them play. “I had the people at the magazine tell them I was in the loo,” remembers Fields, now 86. “I was being hounded!”

Eventually he gave in and made his way down to CBGBs in New York’s East Village. He walked in to the grimy club to see four delinquents in leather jackets tearing through a song called “I Don’t Wanna Go Down To The Basement”. He was in love. “It took my breath away,” he whispers reverentially. “‘They’re perfect, they’re perfect’… that’s all that went through my head.”

The Ramones were the snarling sound of things to come: punk rock before the scene even had a name. They sang about sniffing glue, male prostitution and Nazis, over tunes that sounded like the Ronettes played at twice the speed and 10 times the volume.

The four of them had got together in Forest Hills, Queens, a year earlier, adopting a shared musical vision and surname. There was the tall, awkward, romantic singer (Joey Ramone), the sneering guitarist who only played downstrokes (Johnny Ramone), the junkie poet bassist (Dee Dee Ramone) and the urgent, driving drummer (Tommy Ramone). They lived as fast as they played, and were all dead before their first album celebrated its 40th anniversary.

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