Their respective bands, the Crickets and the Police, performed their music in group arrangements of stunning and often stark simplicity, highlighting the power and clarity of the words to create a timeless energy and a legacy that includes some of the greatest records ever recorded.

But the connection goes deeper than their shared hit-factory genius. In 1979, as the Police were approaching their peak, Sting was given his screen debut in an indie, ultra- cool UK road movie called Radio On, in which he played the part of Just Like Eddie, a massive Eddie Cochran fan who happened to be the forecourt attendant of a neglected garage close to the location of Cochran’s fatal car accident in 1960.

It’s a bleak, sometimes depressing but always compelling film, made on a shoestring. The highlight for me is a performance by Sting of ‘Three Steps to Heaven’, the song that posthumously and ironically took Eddie Cochran to the top of the UK chart a few weeks after he died.

Sting is leaning up against an old-fashioned petrol pump, strumming an acoustic guitar and singing from the heart. It’s a short but casually fantastic performance, doleful and soulful and captured in grainy black and white, and it’s a moment that tells us everything about how much the song means to him. I share the love. The original version is one of my favourite records ever.

Buddy and Eddie were great friends, so it was fitting and poignant that two of the guys from Buddy’s group the Crickets, guitarist Sonny Curtis and drummer Jerry Allison, were the backing musicians on that fabulous record. ‘Three Steps to Heaven’ was Eddie’s biggest-ever hit single and was the song that provided Sting with such a memorable monochrome moment in a truly fascinating film.

The ties that bind brought the music of Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran and Sting together in an amazing way and it’s wonderful that, all these years later, Sting is now a proud ambassador for the Buddy Holly Educational Foundation and a deeply respected recipient of the Buddy Holly guitar. 

Bob Harris