Miles Kington: There's a terrific draughtsman in here

When you come into London along the M40, the last stretch from Shepherds Bush is along a raised concrete bit of magnificent roadway called the Westway, which races along the rooftops and lulls the traffic into a sense of false security before bringing incoming cars down from the skies and depositing them in the traffic sludge known as the Marylebone Road.

I seldom saw the Westway from on top in the days when I lived in Notting Hill. It was almost always from underneath, as I walked down the Portobello Road – indeed, this concrete spinal column with the invisible cars humming overhead stretching from east to west marked the cut-off point where Notting Hill changed from the posh, tidy end, where I lived, into the raffish, multicultural, fascinatingly messy northern bit where I became a tourist.

And rather as houses used to get built on the sides of cathedrals and castles, the underside of Westway became home to many strange accretions, some stuck in the archways, some burrowing deep into the concrete vaults. The only one I ever became familiar with was the headquarters of Knockabout Comics, a firm which not only imported amazing graphic art from all over the world but published its own stuff as well.

I can't remember how I first met the man who ran Knockabout, Tony Bennett, but I realised early on that if I was ever in search of some rare comic or artist, he was the man who was likely to have it. If there was some back number of Fat Freddy's Cat that I was missing, Tony would have it.

And inevitably, once I got there, I would just browse a little among the stacks of stuff and my eye would light on some odd item from Latin America or France or Canada, and I would go away with much more stuff than I had ever intended to pay for. I remember to this day discovering a Canadian comic which told the adventures of "The Toughest Milkman in the West", a character who was so immoral and so ruthless and so violent in a sardonic sort of way (never have so many milkfloats been thrown through the air at innocent people) that my flesh creeps just thinking back to it...

I think it was chez Knockabout that I first became aware of the greatness of Robert Crumb, the wonderful draughtsman who drew – and draws – very funny strips about small men and big women, about sexual doubts and secret fantasies, about American myths, both country style and big town.

From time to time, programme-makers fall in horrified love with this strange man and decide to make documentaries about his life, stressing how weird and how dysfunctional his background is. However, he has never really become a famous figure, so I was tremendously impressed when Knockabout Tony told me that he had actually met Crumb the cult figure.

"Yes, he turned up for the last annual BD jamboree at Angoulême," he said. "He's moved to the south of France, you know. I'm not actually sure how much drawing he does these days. I got the impression he was more interested in the band he plays with, some strange old band which plays bits of jazz and zydeco, bits of country, bits of tango..."

BD is what the French call comic art (from bandes dessinées), and Angoulême is the French town where they have what I believe is the biggest museum of comic art in the world – I passed by there two years ago on holiday and begged the family to be allowed to go in, but to no avail.

Learning that Crumb played in a band explained one puzzling thing about his drawings – the unexplained presence of so many old-time musicians who pop up for no reason at all, bleary old blues singers, leery old bandleaders, cheery girl vocalists...

Crumb was obviously in love with the cheesy old world of 78s and vanished dance bands, and now, amazingly, he has turned up on Radio 3 fronting his own series called Sweet Shellac, on which every Saturday at 6pm he plays old dance music for half an hour. Not from new CDs – I doubt if any of the music he plays has ever re-emerged on LP, let alone CD – but from his own patiently amassed collection of 78rpm records. I have not seen a review or even a mention of this extraordinary series anywhere else, so catch it while you can.

Tomorrow: I turn this piece over, change the needle and play the other side