Little Richard may be renowned for his ludicrous lyrics and larter-than-life performances but when he declares, "I am the originator, I am the emancipator, I am the architect of rock 'n' roll, I am the man that started it all", he's making a perfectly serious point.

Born in Macon, Georgia, the third of 12 children, Richard Wayne Penniman was working as a dish-washer at a bus station when he recorded a song called Tutti Frutti.

It had boogie-woogie piano, raw, expressive vocals and an intro which went "a wop bop a lu bop ba lop bam boom". And it plugged the R'n'B blueprint with so much voltage that, when Sanctuary Records got hold of the track in 1955, the Fifties got a whole new genre of music.

There's a reason, however, why Little Richard should be so loud in laying claim to its invention: While Tutti Frutti was a modest chart success, it was the version by Pat Boone - a white man - which made it a hit in the same year.

"They put a white image, of Pat Boone, with white buck shoes, into there instead of me!" he exclaims. "I was breaking into a white market that black entertainers hadn't been into before and they wouldn't even play my music on the white radio stations. "They were saying, Stop this black guy!

He's a wild man from the jungle! He's going to make your kids go wild, like the medicine doctor!' I just wanted the kids to have some fun."

But the kids soon realised there was no need for imitators - Boone couldn't do the bullet-speed deliveries, the gleeful trills or the wild piano playing. Nor did he have sequinned vests, mascara and a six-inch pompadour. And when Little Richard released Long Tall Sally (saying he'd written a song "so fast that Pat Boone can't sing it"), he had his own top ten hit.

After a spell at Bible School and a subsequent foray into gospel music (the slow lamentations on 1960's Pray Along With Little Richard didn't really do it for the kids), Little Richard retuned to rock 'n' roll in 1962.

Jimi Hendrix was his guitarist, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones were his warm-up acts and, with his output once more tuned to a sort of highly sexed jabber, the star proceeded to sell 32 million records.

Now in his 70s, Little Richard has ostensibly been touring the nostalgia circuit since the late Sixties. But he's still sporting the sequins, still leaping onto the piano and still very much talking the talk.

"You are going to see a once-in-a-lifetime event," says Little Richard. "You are going to see history alive. You've heard about it, you've read about it, now you are going to see it in person."

With support from Restless.