Memphis was the product of many a bibulous meeting at Sottsass’s Milan house and at the trattoria round the corner. The name arrived, it is said, because, one gregarious evening in December 1980 round at his place, Sottsass was playing a record of Bob Dylan’s “Stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again”. Over and over again. After a few bottles, Memphis seemed to sum up exactly the feel the group was aiming at. As Barbara Radice (Sottsass’s then partner and future artistic director of Memphis) put it in 1984, it was all to do with “The blues, Tennessee, rock ‘n’ roll, the American suburbs, the capital of the Egyptian pharaohs, and the sacred city of the God Ptah”. Not very Italian, then. Not very modernist, either.

Be aware that, at the time he was playing Dylan and forming Memphis and pulling chicks, Sottsass was 64: arguably the oldest swinger in town. He was born during the First World War. I saw it this way: he was the same age as my dad. And indeed, the age gap between Ettore Sottsass and the others in the Memphis collective was notable. In 1981, when the first collection debuted to coincide with the Milan Fair, he had a lifetime of architecture and design achievement behind him. But alongside Sottsass, the key figures in the organisation - which means those who had previously worked with him and were there as the record played that night - were Michele de Lucchi (30), Marco Zanini (27), Aldo Cibic (26), Mattheo Thun (29), and Martine Bedin (24). British-born George Sowden (39) who had worked in the Olivetti studio with Sottsass, and Nathalie du Pasquier (a gamine 24) signed up shortly afterwards. Of course Radice (a womanly 38) was there taking notes.

Sottsass was doing in design what Philip Johnson did in architecture. Like a benign vampire, he needed frequent doses of fresh young blood, and flitted from studio to studio in search of it. The occasion for the inaugural meeting was that Sottsass had received a commission for a new collection of furniture, and was minded to do something different. Explosively so. The youngsters jumped to it. Invigorated, so did Sottsass. Thus it all came together, and an invitation card to the first Memphis collection, sporting a slavering Tyrrannosaurus Rex head on the front, was duly dispatched.

But you need to know more. You need to know that Memphis was not a one-off, though its extreme stance might make it appear so. You need to know about Alchimia, the pre-Memphis group founded in 1976 by an entirely different set of individuals, and which produced objects by Sottsass, de Lucchi, Alessandro Mendini and many others. Before Alchimia, you would find both Mendini and Sottsass at Global Tools, which in turn was the result of a merger between the fabled Florentine radical architecture studios of Archizoom and Superstudio. Sottsass, then, had long been involved in architecture and design as expressions of Pop culture, and had long been exposed to the younger Mendini, Pope of alternative Italian architecture and design, with his well-publicised taste for the ironically banal. So despite Sottsass’s evident skill in modernist, rational design as evidenced by his long-term work for Olivetti and others, he had long hankered after the anti-rational. And he was not alone.