For anyone who doesn't know, Matt the Cat's shows about the Flamingos in his Juke in the Back series are currently being repeate...

  When a young soap actor who originates a role is replaced does he or she have any legal recourse? That's the question posed in a new b...

  I've already paid tribute to Hubert Gregg but this footnote has become necessary because I've just discovered the details about a ...

  If you have read Robert Webb's memoir How Not to Be a Boy you may remember that the youthful Webb mentions an unlikely source of comed...

 [Barney Farmer] I don't suppose it will be news to many of its former customers that the London bakery chain Percy Ingle's closed a...

    My one and only foray into karaoke (literally "empty glutton", unless I'm thinking of something else) occurred a few Chris...

Three months on from the previous posting I hereby declare my "wee phrase" of buying up old cassettes from a well-known auction we...

  It may be a passing fancy, and in time may go, but I wish to announce that I have re-embraced the humble cassette, that much-loved compani...

   Now who, in their right minds, would buy a CD like this? In my case the answer is simple: this was one of the discs which always seemed t...

  Whenever I start to recreate a visit to Cheapo Cheapo Records in my head I always find myself striding purposefully towards the very back ...

A final selection of eleven posts from the archive to mark eleven years of this blog. Click directly on the image beside each description, r...

A selection of eleven comedy-related posts, mostly reviews of books or TV programmes. Click on any image to be taken to the post described i...

Another eleven posts from the archive. Click on the image to read the piece described below.   1 : Golden Teardrops - the Flamingos   Altho...

To mark eleven (count 'em!) years of blogging , an introduction to a selection of posts from 2009-2020, one from each year.  Click on an...

Every Thursday night, from the late 1960s until some date lost to memory, my brothers and I would gather around the television to watch Top ...

  For UK readers, Michael Epstein's 2010 documentary LENNONYC, known over here as Lennon: The New York Years, has just been repeated on...

Dono-fans will be pleased to learn that the concert at London's Cadogan Hall which had to be cancelled in April has now been rescheduled...

I was sorry to learn yesterday of the death of Tony Randall. I had emailed him a couple of days ago to let him know about the Billy Shelton ...

Billy Shelton has described himself in interviews as "a prehistoric Spaniel". He wasn't with the celebrated doo wop group duri...

For readers in the UK the first episode of the 2015 BBC documentary series is temporarily available once more on BBC iplayer - but only ...

I don't normally give any advance indication of when I'll be posting next but I've decided to make an exception in this rare cas...

As mentioned in the previous post, Brent Wilson contacted Ben E King for the doo wop documentary Streetlight Harmonies but the singe...

  I have just watched Streetlight Harmonies, Brent Wilson's new documentary about doo wop, and it's well worth your attention wh...

Another story-in-song which made an impression on me as a child was The Son of Hickory Holler's Tramp, written by ...

Having written about Honey in the previous post I'm now going to look at Ruby, Don't Take Your Love to Town by Kenny Rogers and t...

Like all right-thinking people I follow Alwyn Turner's online series Revive 45 on the Lion and Unicorn website, and I urge the more...

Update: Spencer Leigh's Could This Be Magic? has now been been published as an e-book and is available worldwide from UK amazon he...

Those who have read an earlier post about Donovan's 1972 concert to raise funds for Upper Clyde Shipbuilders may be interested in a r...

I have just heard Adam Thorpe's 2003 radio play Nought Happens Thus Twice, about Thomas Hardy's second marriage, to Florence Du...

A couple of weeks ago, during an interview with Joe Brown, Spencer Leigh let slip that he would be 75 on the first of February, the dat...

The Flamingos are one of the greatest, and most enduring, doo wop groups of them all, so it's a pleasure to report that Todd Baptist...

This is to draw readers' attention to Andrew Hickey's podcast A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs and the accompanying book wh...

[videocap from jazzandjazz] A few months ago I made my way to the village of Lemsford, in Hertfordshire, to meet Henri Harrison, former...