“There Was A Star That Danced ... And Under That Was I Born.”

From The North returns, dear blog reader, for yet another episode of that most unpopular of  continuing bloggerisationisms series' Death, Where Is Thy Sting? Or, even Sting Where Is Thy Death? if you prefer. This blogger knows that he, certainly does. Anyway ...

The Stranglers keyboard player Dave Greenfield has died at the age of seventy one after testing positive for Covid-Nineteen. Greenfield died on Sunday having contracted the virus during a prolonged stay in hospital for heart problems. He co-wrote - with bandmates Hugh Cornwell, Jean-Jacques Burnel and Jet Black - The Strangers' biggest hit and best known song, 'Golden Brown' which went to number two in the UK chart in 1982. Bass player Burnel paid tribute to Greenfield. He said: 'On the evening of Sunday, my great friend and longstanding colleague of forty five years, the musical genius that was Dave Greenfield, passed away as one of the victims of the Great Pandemic of 2020. All of us in the worldwide Stranglers' family grieve and send our sincerest condolences to [Greenfield's wife] Pam.' Drummer Black added: 'We have just lost a dear friend and music genius and so has the whole world. Dave was a complete natural in music. Together, we toured the globe endlessly and it was clear he was adored by millions. A huge talent, a great loss, he is dearly missed.' The Stranglers formed in 1974 in Guildford. Greenfield, who originated from Brighton, joined within a year and they went on to be heavily associated with the punky-rocky era. He was known for his distinctive sound and playing style on instruments including the harpsichord, the Moog synthesizer and the Hammond organ. Critics compared his sound to that of Ray Manzarek from The Doors. In an interview with the band's website, however, Greenfield himself said that he was more influenced by others. 'The only tracks by The Doors I knew were 'Light My Fire' and 'Riders On The Storm',' said Greenfield. 'Before I joined, my main influences were probably Jon Lord [of Deep Purple] and then Rick Wakeman.' In the same interview he said he always considered The Stranglers to be 'more new wave, than punk' and also admitted to having had an interest in the occult, evident from him wearing a pentagram pendant in many early band pictures. 'The Pentagram represents the microcosm (as opposed to the macrocosm),' he said. 'The relation between the self and the universe. I studied (not practised) the occult quite intensively in those days.' 'Golden Brown', perhaps Greenfield's finest moment, eventually won the band an Ivor Novello award; however his bandmates initially discarded the song and did not consider it a single. The band claimed that the song's lyrics were akin to an aural Rorschach test and that people only heard in it what they wanted to hear, although this did not prevent persistent allegations that the lyrics alluded to Hugh Cornwall's brief-but-infamous addiction to heroin. In his book The Stranglers Song By Song (2001), Cornwell stated: 'Golden Brown' 'works on two levels. It is about heroin and also about a girl. Essentially the lyrics describe how both provided me with pleasurable times.' The band's other hits include their extraordinary debut single '(Get A) Grip (On Yourself)', 'No More Heroes', 'Peaches' (who else but The Stranglers could get a song featuring the words 'clitoris' and 'pubic skin' into the UK top ten?), 'Something Better Change', 'Five Minutes', 'Walk On By', 'Duchess', 'Strange Little Girl', 'Midnight Summer Dream', 'Always The Sun' and 'Skin Deep'. They continued touring and recording after Cornwell left in 1990. Cornwell posted on Twitter he was 'very sorry' to hear of his old bandmate's passing. 'He was the difference between The Stranglers and every other punk band,' wrote Cornwell. 'His musical skill and gentle nature gave an interesting twist to the band. He should be remembered as the man who gave the world the music of 'Golden Brown'.' Current Stranglers vocalist and guitarist Baz Warne described Greenfield as 'a true innovator' and a 'musical legend. The word genius is bandied around far too easily in this day and age, but Dave Greenfield certainly was one,' said Warne.

Greenfield played keyboards, sometimes several at once: nothing compared to the banks of equipment behind which his hero Wakeman plied his trade in Yes, but far more than most punk bands countenanced. Sometimes his playing recalled the thin, wild mercury-organ sounds found on 1960s garage rock singles by bands like ? and the Mysterians or The Animals, which was just about acceptable under punk neo-Stalinist rules. More often, though, he played exactly like someone who had been in a hippy prog rock band, decorating songs with complex arpeggios, which absolutely wasn't acceptable under any rules. But, whisper it, it was what set The Stranglers apart from their contemporaries and became their signature sound. His contributions were the solitary aspect of The Stranglers' music that one might describe as beautiful. Everything else about them was as relentlessly, wilfully, breathtakingly nasty as their song titles suggested: 'Ugly', 'Tits', 'Bring On The Nubiles', 'Princess Of The Streets', 'Nice N' Sleazy', 'Peasant In The Big Shitty', 'Down In The Sewer' and 'I Feel Like A Wog'. If several of these, the latter in particular, make for profoundly uncomfortable listening in the Twenty First Century their music had a remarkable power, a sense of unceasing, misanthropic violence, hostility and dread. But they sounded less like a punk band than a band that slightly predated punk, one which sprang out of that weird period immediately prior to 1976, where the bleakness of mid-1970s Britain had seeped into rock's fringes - the tougher end of the pub-rock scene, the more thuggish bits of late-period glam - but had not yet become codified into musical diktats. Which is precisely what The Stranglers were: they had formed in 1974 - as The Guildford Stranglers - Greenfield joining a year later. It meant that The Stranglers were always regarded with some suspicion by the music press - a state of affairs not helped much by the band's propensity for aggro - but it also meant that The Stranglers weren't constrained by punk. Grimly powerful as their debut LP Rattus Norvegicus and its follow-up No More Heroes were, there's a compelling argument that the band really hit their stride on 1978's Black & White, by which time Greenfield's keyboard playing had become more expansive and experimental. It's never really hailed as such, but Black & White has a decent claim to being the first post-punk LP: the taut dance rhythms, jagged guitars and synthesizer tones of 'Enough Time' and 'Threatened', the attempt to meld dub reggae with Captain Beefheart on 'In the Shadows', the claustrophobic 'Curfew' and the stabbing, angular, curiously homoerotic 'Death & Night & Blood (Yukio)' were all adventurous explorations. On the best of their subsequent singles, Greenfield seemed ever-more integral: their extraordinary cover of 'Walk On By' - on which The Stranglers somehow contrived to turn Burt Bacharach and Hal David's exquisite original into six minutes of brooding, barely contained aggression - was dominated by his organ playing; his rolling piano underpinned 'Don't Bring Harry', an authentically chilling song about heroin; on 1979's chart hit 'Duchess', his arpeggios are no longer a striking embellishment, but appeared to have consumed the band's sound entirely. Several further genuinely great LPs followed - The Raven (1979), La Folie (1981), Feline (1983), Aural Sculpture (1984 and Dreamtime (1986). And then there was 'Golden Brown', which seemed astonishing at the time - a Stranglers single that got played on Radio 2 - and seems perhaps even more astonishing in retrospect: a harpsichord-led song about heroin in a strange time signature (pitched somewhere between 3/4 and 4/4) that was only kept off the top of the charts by another very English early-eighties masterpiece, The Jam's 'Town Called Malice'. The lyrics were Cornwell's, but it was Greenfield's show, his performance is the song's heart. They were adaptable enough to keep having hits long after most of their peers had split up or faded away, but a certain sense of diminishing returns eventually set in during the late eighties. Not even their loudest detractors, though, could have pinned on the authors of 'No More Heroes' that they would release the utterly deranged concept LP The Gospel According To The Meninblack. The Stranglers proved to be weirdly unstoppable - neither the loss of Cornwell nor the retirement of Jet Black dented their massive live following. That might have been the flipside of The Stranglers' lack of critical acclaim or latter day reappraisal and the kind of refusal to play by the era's rules that Greenfield seemed to embody: never particularly fashionable to begin with, they weren't subject to fashion's vagaries, instead building a devoted cult following born out of being outsiders. Dave is survived by his wife, Pam.

Florian Schneider, who as one of the founding members of Kraftwerk changed the sound of popular music forever, has died aged seventy three from cancer. For over forty years, Schneider worked quietly and dutifully at the frontline of sonic adventure. He rarely sought recognition and often hid behind mechanical avatars, considering himself a worker rather than any sort of rock and/or roll star. Yet his labours changed the world. Kraftwerk were pivotal figures in Germany's krautrock scene, but Schneider's wider influence rivals the legends of rock, Merseybeat and punk. Electronica, dance music, electro, hip-hop, trance and most contemporary pop music all find their wellsprings in the kosmiche electronic experiments conducted by Schneider and his Kraftwerk partner Ralf Hütter in their secretive Kling Klang studio in Düsseldorf. Via early champions and disciples such as David Bowie (whose Thin White Duke era and Berlin trilogy grew from a love of Kraftwerk's early LPs), New Order, Gary Numan, Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark and Afrika Bambaataa, Kraftwerk became The Be-Atles of dance music, an influence so intrinsic to modern culture that, beyond the most rustic of acoustic singer-songwriter, it's difficult to imagine a single artist in 2020 who doesn't owe Schneider some form of debt.

Born in 1947, Schneider was the son of Paul Schneider-Esbelen, a noted architect who designed Cologne Airport. Florian first played music in a number of groups whilst studying in Düsseldorf, beginning in a band called Pissoff. Operating in the experimental, open-minded rock scene somewhat sneeringly dubbed 'krautrock' in the British press, he formed Organisation with Ralf Hutter, the pair later forming Kraftwerk in 1970. And, instantly, creating techno in ten extraordinary minutes live on German telly They emerged from the same experimental music community of the late 1960s that spawned Can. Amon Duul II, Ash Ra Temple, Faust and Tangerine Dream; key krautrock figures such as Klaus Dinger and Michael Rother of Neu! floated through early Kraftwerk line-ups, but when it came time to record experimental LPs Kraftwerk (1970), Kraftwerk 2 (1972) and Ralf Und Florian (1972), they worked almost exclusively as a duo in the studio, alongside the legendary engineer Conny Plank. Constructing their own HQ, Kling Klang, beside Düsseldorf's central station, the pair became inseparable. Schneider played flute, violin and guitar, though often filtered through electronic processing. His interest in electronic music grew. 'I found that the flute was too limiting,' he said later. 'Soon I bought a microphone, then loudspeakers, then an echo, then a synthesizer. Much later I threw the flute away; it was a sort of process.' After three LPs, Kraftwerk released Autobahn and expanded to a quartet with the addition of Karl Bartos and Wolfgang Flür. The LP was composed primarily on synthesizers and its highly original sound and witty minimalist lyrics made it a huge pan-continental hit - an edited version of the twenty two minute title song reaching the top twenty in both the UK and US.

So much of modern music emerged from Kling Klang. 'We don't want to end up playing Mozart and Beethoven at our local concert hall,' Hütter once said. 'The question is, "What does Germany sound like today?" That's where we started.' Considering themselves workers and keeping strict hours, Hütter and Schneider conceived and constructed many of the instruments and sound systems that they worked with, as well as buying then-cutting-edge synthesizers and vocoders. They created a kind of sonic laboratory behind Kling Klang's innocuous street shutters. The arrival of the Minimoog and EMS Synthi AKS gave the band a more disciplined structure and Autobahn, exposed them to a global audience. They later famously appeared on the BBC technology programme Tomorrow's World to demonstrate their 'machinemusik.' Adding ever-more sophisticated poly-rhythms and drum machines and with Hütter's distinctive vocals, the group went on to release a series of astonishing, ground-breaking LPs that became hugely influential on pop music, particularly the run of Radio-Aktivität (1975), Trans-Europe Express (1977), Die Mensch-Maschine (1978) and Computerwelt (1981). They described their music as industrielle volksmusik: 'folk music of the factories,' as translated by uber-fan Bowie.

With The Man-Machine, the band had taken to limiting interviews and hiding behind authoritarian showroom dummy effigies of themselves - Das Roboter. This was a statement on their wish to unite with their machines in the ultimate, automated humanoid collaboration: 'We love our machines,' Schneider said in 1978, 'we have an erotic relationship with them.' Thanks to the patronage of the likes of Bowie - name-checked on 'Trans-Europe Express' - the band's motorik sounds infiltrated new wave and post-punk, infecting everyone from Joy Division and Wire to Duran Duran, The Human League, Ultravox and The Pet Shop Boys. As well as being forefathers of synthpop, the title song of 'Trans-Europe Express' was sampled in 1982 by Afrika Bambaataa & The Soul Sonic Force for one of the earliest hip-hop hits, 'Planet Rock', while 'Computer World' was hugely influential on the house and techno music that emerged from Chicago and Detroit that decade. In subsequent years, their music has been sampled by everyone from Doctor Dre and The Chemical Brothers to Justin Timberlake and The KLF. Their work also brought them into the orbit of the Berlin-dwelling Bowie and Iggy Pop - in a TV documentary, Pop recalled that he and Schneider once went shopping for asparagus together. Bowie's 'V-2 Schneider' (on "Heroes") was a wry tribute to the band and to Schneider in particular. Known for his enigmatic, somewhat faraway smile, Schneider worked on all of the group's studio LPs, including The Man-Machine, which yielded their biggest hit: 'The Model', a melancholy synthpop song which topped the UK charts in 1982.

After 1986's Electric Café was considered a relative disappointment at the time (it sounds fucking great now), a 1991 CD of modernist remixes of classic songs, The Mix, revived interest in band activities. Then virtually nothing emerged from Kling Klang until 2003. Following Tour De France Soundtracks and a return to touring, Schneider left Kraftwerk in 2008. '[Schneider] is a sound perfectionist,' Hütter told Mojo in 2005. 'So, if the sound isn't up to a certain standard, he doesn't want to do it. With electronic music there's no necessity ever to leave the studio. You could keep making records and sending them out.' No reason was given for Schneider's departure and he maintained a constantly low profile afterwards. Hütter told the Gruniad Morning Star in 2009 that Schneider 'worked for many, many years on other projects: speech synthesis and things like that. He was not really involved in Kraftwerk for many, many years' and, in 2017, he added that the pair had 'not really spoken' since Schneider left the band. In 2015, Schneider released a new piece of music, Stop Plastic Pollution, in collaboration with producer Dan Lacksman. He said the track, released to raise awareness about pollution, was inspired by 'taking a swim in the ocean at the coasts of Ghana, watching fishermen catch nothing but plastic garbage in their nets.'

The actress Jill Gascoine has died at the age of eighty three. She played Detective Inspector Maggie Forbes in ITV's The Gentle Touch (1980 to 1984), one of the first British police dramas with a woman in the main role. She continued playing the character in - really spectacularly bad - spin-off C.A.T.S. Eyes (1985 to 1987) and was also Letty Onedin in The Onedin Line for three years during the 1970s. She died after a long illness, her family told BBC News. Her second husband was fellow actor Alfred Molina, who in 2016 confirmed that his wife was 'in a very advanced stage' of Alzheimer's disease. Born in Lambeth in 1937, early in her career in the 1950s, Gascoine has been soubrette in a UK tour of The Crazy Gang Show. In 1956, she was a chorus dancer in the Christmas season of The Adventures Of Davy Crockett staring Hermione Badderly at the Olympia Theatre in Dublin. Gascoine also worked alongside TONY winner Victor Spinetti in intimate revue in the Irving Theatre in London. By 1959, Gascoine had taken over from Millicent Martin in a tour of Expresso Bongo. A further stage appearances included playing Dorothy Brock opposite Catherine Zeta-Jones in Forty Second Street at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane and in the musical Destry playing Frenchie. Gascoine began her acting career in theatre and had regular roles at the Dundee Rep. Her early work also included collaborations with director Ken Loach before landing roles in such TV series as Z Cars, Oranges & Lemons, Six Days Of Justice, Dixon Of Dock Green, Beryl's Lot, Plays For Britain, General Hospital, Softly, Softly: Taskforce, Within These Walls, Raffles, Home To Roost and Rooms. She also appeared in the sex comedy Confessions Of A Pop Performer opposite Robin Askwith, who remembered her on Twitter as being 'terrific in every way.' An early film appearance has been in a tiny role as one of the titular schoolgirls in The Pure Hell of St Trinian's (1960). After moving to Los Angeles with Molina in the 1990s where she made appearances on US television in series such as Northern Exposure and Touched By An Angel, she went on to become a novelist. Her first book was Addicted (1994), a not-even-remotely-autobiographical story of a successful actress in her fifties who embarks on a destructive affair with a younger actor. This was followed by Lilian (1995), about a woman who begins an affair when she goes on holiday to California with her best friend. In 2009, it was announced that Gascoine would be returning to the UK to join the cast of EastEnders, playing the role of Glenda Mitchell. But she withdrew from the BBC drama on her first day of filming, leading to her role being given to Glynis Barber. 'Having spent the last fifteen years working in America I felt on arrival I lacked the right experience to film such a big continuing drama,' she said at the time. 'I have tremendous respect for EastEnders and the cast so I don't want to let the show or my fellow cast members down.' Gascoine married twice. Her first husband was Dundee hotelier Bill Keith, with whom she had two sons. In 1982, she met Molina when they were working in the same theatre production. Gascoine suffered from clinical depression for most of her life which, she believed, stemmed from her unhappy time at boarding school as a child.

Hamish Wilson, who died recently aged seventy seven as a result of coronavirus, was a pioneering radio producer and gifted character actor. He was born James Aitken Wilson in Glasgow, in 1942 before his family moved to Cambuslang. His father, also James, was a sales rep for a paint company whilst his mother, Isobel, worked in the textile trade. After they divorced, Isobel married another Wilson, Robert and Hamish and his sister Jan grew up with step-siblings Leslie, Sheila and Robbie. He discovered his love of drama while at West Coats Primary School. Later, at the Glasgow Academy, this love drove him to do 'that stupidly romantic thing of running away from school to appear on the stage.' He was soon working professionally - he understudied Jimmy Logan for a summer season at The King's Theatre and appeared in Peter Duguid's 1957 Citizen's Theatre production of Enemy Of The People. He then attended the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and gained more professional experience during summer holidays. He played the title role in 1959's live ITV play, The Boy From The Gorbals, appeared in a 1960 episode of Para Handy with Duncan Macrae and met Walt Disney while he was working on the film adaptation of Greyfriars Bobby (1961). 'I was trying to chat up a pretty blonde extra, with no success at all,' he recalled. 'And this gentleman with blond hair and a little moustache came over and started chatting to me. We nattered away for five minutes and then he wandered away. The girl was terribly impressed, but I spoilt it because I didn't recognise him. I said, "Who was that?" and she stopped being impressed.' He graduated from the RSAMD in 1963, winning the award for Most Promising Male Performance and appeared on stage at Coventry's Belgrade Theatre (1965), Perth Theatre (1967 to 1968) and Dundee Repertory Theatre (1970 to 1971), where his performance in Mark But This Flea was described as 'remarkable' by The Stage, not least because he had stepped into the role twenty four hours before opening night after the original actor had broken his leg. On television he appeared in The Wednesday Play (1965), The Vital Spark (1966), This Man Craig (three different roles, 1966), Softly, Softly (1967) and The Revenue Men (1967). In 1968 Doctor Who regular Frazer Hines, who played Patrick Troughton's companion, fell ill with chickenpox while making the memorable five-part adventure The Mind Robber. After an ingeniously hasty rewrite Jamie underwent a temporary metamorphosis and, with one day's rehearsal, Wilson took over, learning his lines overnight and recording the first of his two episodes the following day. Further TV roles followed, including The Borderers (1969), Boy Meets Girls (1969), Adam Smith (1972) and The View From Daniel Pike (1972) but he found that he needed to turn his attention away from acting because 'a beautiful girl smiled at me.' Intent on marriage and starting a family, he gained more secure employment as an announcer for STV. In 1975 he went to Radio Forth as its arts and drama producer. With limited resources but boundless ambition, he broadcast original writing, late-night horror classics and a six-month serial about Mary Queen of Scots, told in one hundred and thirty twelve-minute episodes, broadcast daily. In 1979 he did an adaptation of The Slab Boys for Radio Clyde, ultimately joining the station and founding Independent Local Radio's first drama department there. His many productions at Clyde included The Bell In The Tree (1982), a series of dramas about the history of Glasgow by Edward H Chisnall; Donald Campbell's Till The Seas Run Dry (1983, with Tom Fleming as Robert Burns and Mary Riggans as Jean Armour) and Nick McCarthy's Elephant Dances (1989, with Katy Murphy). He also encouraged new talent, instigating initiatives which gave professional breaks to aspiring comedy writers and awarded contracts and Equity cards to final-year drama students. He left Clyde in 1989 and joined the BBC, where he produced a huge number of plays and series for Radio Scotland, Radio 3 and Radio 4. He really believed in radio: 'It allows you to creep inside somebody's head and paint pictures that are going to stay long after the programme is finished.' In all, he won twenty three awards for his radio productions - his 'Oscars', as he jokingly referred to them - and served a juror in the Prix Italia (where he was also the first ILR producer to be jury chairman), Prix Futura Berlin and the Prix Europa. When he left the BBC after ten successful years he went back to doing voiceover work and acting in episodes of Taggart (2004), Monarch Of The Glen (2005) and Still Game (2007) as well as Robin Hardy's The Wicker Tree (2013). He was an active member of Equity and taught radio technique at RSAMD and at London's Guildhall School of Music and Drama. In 1996 he was awarded a fellowship of the RSAMD (now the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland). Though serious in his work, he was an affable, genial, unassuming man who was happy to help others and enjoyed reading and war-strategy games. The beautiful girl who smiled at him was Dianna Baron, a wardrobe mistress at Dundee Rep, whom he had met in 1972. They married the following year and had three daughters, Emma, Alice and Abigail, who all survive him, as do grandchildren Colin, Finley, Amelia and Gregor.

Tributes have been paid to the well-known Northern Irish actor BJ Hogg, who has died, aged sixty five. He was best known for his role as Big Mervyn in the BBC Northern Ireland series Give My Head Peace. He was in the comedy for more than twenty years and toured with the cast in the stage adaptation earlier this year. Hogg also appeared in several high-profile TV dramas including episodes of The Fall, The Hanging Gale and Game Of Thrones. He also acted in several films shot in Northern Ireland including Hunger, Closing The Ring and Divorcing Jack. Another role was as the widower father Lexie in the short film Dance Lexie Dance, which was nominated for an Oscar in 1998 for best live action short film. Born in Lisburn in 1955, his career on stage and screen in Northern Ireland spanned almost four decades. His agent, Geoff Stanton, said 'there just weren't the words' to express his shock and sadness at the news of Hogg's death. 'He was such a great man, a big personality and a terrific actor. His family must be devastated and my heart goes out to them,' he said. 'He was just one of the nicest people I know, or knew - he is going to be such a loss.'

The Jamaican singer Millie Small has died at the age of seventy two after suffering a stroke. Millie was most famous for her hit single 'My Boy Lollipop', which reached number two in both the US and the UK in 1964. It remains one of the biggest-selling ska songs of all time, with more than seven million sales. Island Records founder Chris Blackwell announced her death and remembered her as 'a sweet person ... really special.' It was Blackwell who brought Small to London in 1963 and produced her version of 'My Boy Lollipop', showcasing her childlike, high-pitched vocals. 'I would say she's the person who took ska international because it was her first hit record,' he told the Jamaica Observer. 'It became a hit pretty much everywhere in the world. I went with her around the world because each of the territories wanted her to turn up and do TV shows and such and it was just incredible how she handled it.' Born Millicent Small in Clarendon, South Jamaica, she was one of seven brothers and five sisters, raised on the sugar plantation where her father was an overseer. At the age of twelve, she won a talent contest at the Palladium Theatre in Montego Bay and by her teens, she was recording for Coxone Dodd's Studio One label in Kingston. There, she teamed up with singer Roy Panton and they became one of the island's most prolific duos, scoring a major hit with 'We'll Meet'. Blackwell took an interest in the singer after releasing some of those records in the UK on his fledgling record label, Island and brought her to London in 1963. Small was enrolled at the Italia Conti Stage School for speech training and dancing lessons and she toured the UK before cutting 'My Boy Lollipop' with a group of London session musicians - Small claimed that Rod Stewart played the harmonica solo, but he has denied being present at the recording. Released in February 1964, it made her an international star and helped popularise ska music around the world. 'It is the ska equivalent of Elvis' 'Heartbreak Hotel' or The Sex Pistols' 'God Save The Queen' - the disc that popularised a sound previously considered to be on the margins of mainstream consciousness,' wrote music historian Laurence Cane-Honeysett in Record Collector. At the end of 1964, Small made her acting debut in an ITV special, The Rise & Fall Of Nellie Brown. A light-hearted musical, it cast the singer as Selina, a young Jamaican who flees her humdrum Liverpool lodgings in search of her glamorous London cousin, played by Elisabeth Welch. However, Small was never able to replicate the success of 'My Boy Lollipop', scoring only one further chart hit, a soundalike called 'Sweet William'. But she continued to tour and record, and appeared frequently on 1960s pop shows like Juke Box Jury and Ready Steady Go. 'My life seemed very normal to me - even though I was only seventeen, I took fame in its stride,' she told the Daily Scum Express in 2016. After leaving Island in 1970, she recorded for legendary reggae label Trojan, where her first single was a cover of Nick Drake's 'Mayfair'. However, it was the b-side that attracted greater attention. Called 'Enoch Power', it was a defiant response to Enoch Powell's inflammatory, anti-immigration 'Rivers of Blood' speech. Small's lyrics, which captured the mood of the UK's Caribbean population, received a rapturous response when she played the song at the Caribbean Music Festival at Wembley Arena, a month after its release. Soon after that single and the accompanying LP Time Will Tell, Small stepped away from music, saying 'it was the end of the dream and it felt like the right time.' In later years, she lived in Singapore and New Zealand before returning to London, where she concentrated on writing, painting and raising her daughter. When 'My Boy Lollipop' was re-released in 1987 to mark Island Records' twenty fifth anniversary, the singer gave a rare interview to Thames TV, where she revealed that she had, at one point, been penniless and sleeping rough in London. However, she took the hard times in good grace, explaining: 'That's all experience. It was great. I didn't worry because I knew what I was doing. I saw how the other half live. It's something I chose to do.' In 2011, Jamaica's Governor-General made Small a Commander in the Order of Distinction for her contribution to the Jamaican music industry. The singer is survived by her daughter, Jaelee, who is also a musician based in London.

The soul musician Hamilton Bohannon, who backed many of Motown's greats before starting a respected solo career, has died at the age seventy eight according to the Newnan Times-Herald newspaper in the Georgia town of his birth. Bohannon was born in 1942, the son of a working-class family who ran a barbershop and cafe. He started drumming - initially on family furniture - and began playing professionally after moving to Atlanta following high school, including alongside his friend Jimi Hendrix at the city's Royal Peacock venue. He was hired by Stevie Wonder as his live drummer and came into the orbit of Motown, who later employed him as a bandleader. His group Bohannon & The Motown Sound backed numerous label stars on tour, including Marvin Gaye, The Four Tops, The Temptations and The Supremes ('I've never been to heaven, but I bet that's pretty close,' Bohannon once said of the latter). After Motown moved to Los Angeles, Hamilton stayed in the label's first home Detroit and started his solo career, beginning with the 1973 LP Stop & Go and eventually released nineteen studio LPs by the end of the 1980s. He struggled to cross over in the US pop market - only one of his singles reached the Top One Hundred - but he became a mainstay in the disco boom of the mid-1970s onwards with songs like 'Let's Start The Dance'. He had three Top Forty hits in the UK: 'South African Man', 'Foot Stompin' Music' and 'Disco Stomp', the latter reaching number six in 1975. The following year's LP, Dance Your Ass Off was particularly highly regarded, the title song being subsequently covered by That Petrol Emotion whilst The Smiths' guitarist Johnny Marr was another fan. 'In the 1970s, there was a song by Hamilton Bohannon called 'Disco Stomp' - it was a real dumb pop record. When my mates were getting into real clever guitar stuff like Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin, I was obsessed by it.' He became a cult favourite among his fellow musicians, with Tom Tom Club respectfully chanting his name in 'Genius Of Love'; artists including Mary J Blige, Jay-Z, Justin Timberlake and Snoop Dogg have all sampled his music. He is seen as helping to pioneer the 'four-four' beat which powered disco and later house and techno and the octave-jumping groove of 'Me & The Gang' became the core of Paul Johnson's house hit 'Get Get Down', a top five UK hit in 1999. Defected Records, one of the world's leading house music labels was among those paying tribute, saying: 'Today we lost a legend ... Hamilton Bohannon, thank you for the music.' DJ Gilles Peterson heralded his 'lopsided rhythmic brilliance.' He is survived by son Bohannon II and daughter April, born to his late wife Andrea.

Pioneering Nigerian drummer Tony Allen, a co-founder of the afrobeat genre, died in Paris on Thursday aged seventy nine, his manager has said. Eric Trosset told NPR radio that Tony had died of a heart attack. Allen was the drummer and musical director of Fela Ransome Kuti's famous band Africa 70. Fela, who died in 1997, once said that 'without Tony Allen, there would be no afrobeat,' a genre which combines elements of West Africa's fuji music and highlife styles with American funk and jazz. Allen has also been described by Brian Eno as 'perhaps the greatest drummer who has ever lived.' Trosset led tributes in a Facebook post saying 'your eyes saw what most couldn't see ... as you used to say: "There is no end."' Flea, the bassist for The Red Hot Chilli Peppers, who spent time with Allen in London, called him 'one of the greatest drummers to ever walk this earth' and described him as his hero. 'What a wildman, with a massive, kind and free heart and the deepest one-of-a-kind groove,' Flea said on Instagram. Allen's career and life story were documented in his 2013 autobiography Tony Allen: Master Drummer Of Afrobeat. Allen, who was born in Lagos in 1940, taught himself to play drums when he was eighteen. He said that he learned his technique by listening closely to American jazz drummers Art Blakey and Max Roach. He then created the distinctive polyphonic rhythms of afrobeat and was said to be able to play four different beats with each of his limbs. Allen first met Fela Kuti in 1964 and they went on to record dozens of LPs in Africa 70, including Gentleman, Expensive Shit, Afrodisiac and Zombie. Allen left the band in 1979, after reported rifts with Fela over royalties. Fela needed four separate drummers to fill the void. Allen emigrated to London in 1984 and later moved to Paris. He collaborated with a number of artists during his long music career and was the drummer in The Good, The Bad & The Queen, with Damon Albarn, Paul Simenon and Simon Tong. His 1999 LP Black Voices, produced by the DJ Doctor L, mixed afrobeat with dub and electronica and helped Allen win a new young following. He was helped by Albarn, who sang 'Tony Allen ... really got me dancing' on the 2000 Blur hit 'Music Is My Radar'. Allen returned the compliment when he invited Albarn (along with the rapper Ty) to appear on Home Cooking (2002). In 1987 Allen married his second wife, Sylvie Nicollet. She survives him along with their three sons, and four children from his first marriage.

Former Glamorgan and England cricketer and broadcaster Peter Walker has died aged eighty four after a stroke. Walker played three tests for England against South Africa in 1960, finishing on the winning side each time. He spent his entire first-class career with Glamorgan and after retirement presented sports news on BBC Wales television. He was appointed an MBE in the 2011 New Year's Honours List and served as president of Glamorgan Cricket Club. Bristol-born Walker was a true all-rounder - he batted, he bowled spin and is widely regarded as one of the best close catchers in the game. In the 1961 season he completed the double of scoring a thousand runs and claiming one hundred first-class wickets and also took seventy three catches - many taken at his specialist fielding position of short-leg off the bowling of Don Shepherd. Walker's main strength was his consistency and he scored a thousand runs in a season eleven times during a career which started in 1955. On two of those occasions - in 1965 and 1966 - he achieved the landmark without scoring a century. He was a key member of the side - led by Tony Lewis - which won the County Championship in 1969. Walker retired at the end of the 1972 season to further his already-established career as a broadcaster with BBC Wales. The director of BBC Cymru, Rhodri Talfan Davies, praised his role as one of Wales best known broadcasters. 'Peter made the switch from cricket to broadcasting in the blink of an an eye - becoming a familiar voice to millions over almost two decades with the BBC,' Davies said. 'In a distinguished career, he introduced network television coverage of the Sunday League cricket as well as presenting BBC Wales Today and numerous sports programmes on both radio and television. Peter was always the consummate professional - admired for his warmth, intelligence and forensic all-round sporting knowledge. We extend our deepest sympathies to his family and friends.' In later life Walker was the founder and managing director of Merlin Television, which became the largest independent production company in Wales and was subsequently appointed chief executive of the Cricket Board of Wales, helping to introduce a nationwide coaching framework and plan the National Cricket Centre in Cardiff. In 2009 he was elected president of Glamorgan County Cricket Club, but resigned the following year in protest at the way the club was being run by its then-chairman Paul Russell. Current Chairman Gareth Williams said: 'Everyone at Glamorgan is saddened to hear this news. Peter was a club legend, a man who gave everything he could to the club he loved while playing and later in an off-field capacity. He gave so much back to the game.' Walker's former Glamorgan team-mate Alan Jones told Radio Cymru: 'He was one of the best cricketers ever to play for Glamorgan, Allan Watkins was a great, but for me Peter was the best. He was a great bowler, he took over seven hundred wickets for the county and with the bat he scored over fifteen thousand runs and as a fielder - close to the wicket, he was the best.'

Ex-England international defender Trevor Cherry has died 'suddenly and unexpectedly' aged seventy two, his former club Leeds United have confirmed. The defender joined Leeds from Huddersfield Town in 1972, won a league championship in 1974 and made four hundred and eighty six appearances for the club. He played twenty seven times for England, captained the side once and was part of the 1980 European Championship squad. He also holds the distinction of being only the third man to be sent off playing for England (after Alan Mullery and Alan Ball), in Cherry's case in a 1977 friendly against Argentina for the dreadful crime of being on the receiving end of a vicious right-hook from Daniel Bertoni, whom Cherry had felled with a tackle from behind. Trevor lost two teeth in the incident. Cherry, was also player-manager at Bradford, where he played ninety two matches. He managed at Valley Parade from 1982 to 1985, with former Leeds team-mate Terry Yorath as his assistant. Cherry guided the club to the Third Division title in 1985, a promotion overshadowed by the tragedy of the Bradford fire disaster on the final day of the season, in which fifty six supporters died when the main stand burned down. Cherry was heavily involved in the club's support for those bereaved and attended funeral services of those who died. 'Our thoughts and prayers are with Trevor's wife Sue, sons Darren and Ian, daughter Danielle and his five grandchildren at this difficult time,' Leeds said in their statement. Having progressed through the ranks at Huddersfield - he made his debut in 1965, aged seventeen, establishing himself as a classy defender who could play anywhere across the back line, making one hundred and eighty five appearances and winning the Second Division title - Cherry impressed Leeds boss Don Revie enough to seek him as a potential replacement for Jack Charlton. The versatile defender became a dependable figure at Leeds in a ten-year spell, covering for the injured Terry Cooper at left-back and then subsequently forging a partnership at the heart of the defence with Norman Hunter - who also died recently. He was part of a successful group of Leeds players to be given the freedom of the city in 2019, for their achievements on the field. Under Revie he played in the 1973 European Cup Winners' Cup final and also in the FA Cup final defeat by Sunderland that same year. The defeat against the Second Division side was famous for a remarkable double save from goalkeeper Jimmy Montgomery, the first of which denied Cherry's point-blank header. One of his most memorable performances for Leeds was the 1975 semi-final of the European Cup against Barcelona in which he brilliantly man-marked Johan Cruyff. But, he missed the final as Leeds lost of Bayern Munich, as an unused substitute. In 1976, Cherry became Leeds captain after Billy Bremner left the club and won his first England cap. He continued to play for Leeds until 1982, the year that the club were relegated to the Second Division. Bradford said they were 'mourning the loss' of Cherry, while Huddersfield described him as 'an inspiration.'

"We Have Heard The Chimes At Midnight ..."

It is another melancholy beginning to the latest From The North update Keith Telly Topping is very much afraid, dear blog reader. Because, to quote yer actual Peter Davison in The Five Doctors: 'Great chunks of my past [are] detaching themselves like melting icebergs.' Which is, you know, sad.

After a spectacular start to his TV career in the 1960s, when he played leading roles in two classics by Dostoevsky, the actor David Collings, who has died aged this week seventy nine, became a cult favourite of SF fans with appearances in UFO, three Doctor Who stories and, most notably, as the popular character of Silver in the 1979 supernatural detective series Sapphire & Steel. Although he started out as a stage actor, Collings did not consolidate his reputation there until completing more than a decade of TV appearances, after which he took a string of important roles for the Royal Shakespeare Company. At the Open Air Theatre in Regent's Park he was Polonius opposite Damian Lewis's title character in 1994's Hamlet, directed by Tim Pigott-Smith; David had first played a pretentious if benignly-intentioned Polonius for an RSC touring production with Philip Franks in 1987. Collings was a delicately-featured, red-haired actor with sensitive blue eyes who was equally good at playing neurotic and sweet-natured parts. On TV he also had a good line in eminent characters from history: Percy Grainger in Ken Russell's Song Of Summer (1968), Sir Anthony Babington in Elizabeth R (1971), John Ruskin in The Love School (1975), William Wilberforce in The Fight Against Slavery (1975) and William Pitt in Prince Regent (1979).

David Cressy Collings was born in Brighton in 1940 to George Collings, a greengrocer and his wife, Lillian. At Varndean Grammar School David enjoyed acting but had no intention of following the profession and, on leaving, started work as a designer in lettering, inheriting that interest from his father, a keen artist. From 1960 David was happily involved in amateur dramatics for the Withdean Players and the Lewes Little Theatre, but then was recommended by the actor Freda Dowie to director David Scase, who had been appointed to run the Liverpool Rep. After six months on Merseyside, Collings found himself pitched into TV through another unsolicited recommendation, this time from the actor John Slater, who thought he might be suitable casting in a 1964 Play Of The Week presentation of Crime & Punishment. Thus David found himself playing the impoverished Raskolnikov, murderer of an old pawnbroker, in a three-and-a-half hour existential epic alongside Steven Berkoff, Peter Bowles, Julia Foster and Sylvia Coleridge. Five years later he was in another Dostoevsky production, a six-part BBC adaptation of The Possessed, as the charismatic rabble-rouser Pyotr Verkhovensky, alongside Rosalie Crutchley, Joan Hickson and Angela Pleasence. In the same year he was the Clerk in a seven-episode BBC version of Canterbury Tales. Other early TV roles included a memorable episode of Gideon's Way - The Prowler - in which he played an emotionally disturbed man attacking young women. His movie debut came in an uncredited walk-on as one of the King's Messengers in 1966's A Man For All Seasons. David made a rare movie appearance as a lovable Bob Cratchit in the musical Scrooge (1970), with Albert Finney. In the same year as he was captured by aliens and imbued with superhuman powers in a very weird episode of UFO - The Psychobombs. In Doctor Who he was an unrecognisable alien, Vorus, with ideas of blowing-up The Cybermen with a home-made (stock-footage) rocket in 1975's so-bad-it's-brilliant Revenge Of The Cybermen, the robot-phobic Poul in the classic 1977 four-parter The Robots Of Death - which mixed an Agatha Christie-style whodunnit with hardcore SF elements straight out of Isaac Asimov - and, in 1983, the immortal title character in Mawdryn Undead. Mark Gatiss described Collings as 'the greatest Doctor we never had.' David finally got to play his own incarnation of the Time Lord in an audio adventure - Full Fathom Five - for Big Finish (2003), capitalising on his vast experience in radio drama.

Having played Legolas in The Lord Of The Rings on Radio 4 in 1981 and making a guest appearance in the final episode of Blake's 7, Collings joined the RSC for the first time as Newman Noggs in the 1985 revival of David Edgar's Nicholas Nickleby on tour and on Broadway. He also appeared in a star-studded chorus in the Don Taylor television script of Sophocles' Oedipus (1986), with Michael Pennington, Claire Bloom and John Gielgud. He voiced the eponymous lead for the long-running Japanese series Journey To The West, released in English-speaking countries as Monkey. The show was a popular hit and had a cult following, particularly with younger viewers. For the RSC subsequently, between 1996 and 2001, he played Thomas Cranmer in Henry VIII, Baron de Charlus in Tennessee Williams's Camino Real, Count Lerma in Schiller's Don Carlos, Sir Politic Would-Be in Ben Jonson's Volpone, Cardinal Pandulph in King John and Sancho in Lope de Vega's Madness In Valencia. After the millennium, he played a neat double of Sir Henry Green and the Duke of Surrey in Kevin Spacey's Richard II (2005), directed by Trevor Nunn at the Old Vic and graced a startling revival of Middleton and Rowley's Jacobean shocker The Changeling (2006) for Declan Donnellan's Cheek By Jowl company at The Barbican; the cast also included Will Keen, Olivia Williams and a then-unknown Tom Hiddleston. One of his favourite roles was appearing with his son, Samuel, in Toby Frow's 1950s revival of Marlowe's Edward II at the Royal Exchange, Manchester, in 2011; he was old Mortimer and Matrevis while Sam doubled as the king's lover, Piers Gaveston and his poker-wielding murderer, Lightborn. His CV also included guest-starring in Z-Cars, Holby City, Knock On Any Door, The Professionals, Danger Man, By The Sword Divided, Mystery & Imagination, The Troubleshooters, Love Hurts, Them & Us, The Regiment, The All Electric Music Arcade, The White Rabbit, Fame Is The Spur, The Strange Report, Take Three Girls, Breakaway, The Shadow Of The Tower, Special Branch, Sinister Street, Point Counter Point, Front Page Story, This Man Craig and Fall Of Eagles among many others. He was also noted for his children's television appearances including the role of Julian Oakapple in Midnight Is A Place. In 1989, he played the villainous Charn in Through The Dragon's Eye and had a recurring role as the headmaster in Steven Moffat's TV breakthrough, Press Gang. He was terrifying as the titular Lord Dark in Dark Shadows (part of the BBC's Look & Read strand). He also had roles in most of the major drama anthologies of the 1960s - Armchair Theatre and Play Of The Week on ITV and The Wednesday Play, Out Of The Unknown, Theatre 625, Omnibus, Play For Today and Thirty Minute Theatre for the BBC. David was married firstly to Deirdre Bromfield, whom he met at the Lewes Little Theatre, in 1962 (they divorced in 1975) and subsequently to the actor Karen Archer in 1983, from whom he was separated, although they reportedly remained close friends. He is survived by Karen, by their children, Samuel and Eliza, his daughter, Kate, from his first marriage and his sister, Nola. He was predeceased by Deirdre and two of their children, Matthew and Bethian. And, if you want to read a far better written obituary of David, check out Toby Hadoke's outstanding and touching piece for the Herald.

According to Wikipedia another of this blogger's favourite TV actors, James Garbutt has also recently died aged ninety four. Born in 1925, in Houghton-le-Spring, James worked as an art teacher at schools in and around Newcastle and was a key member of The People's Theatre in Heaton, during the 1950s and 1960s where his contemporaries included Alan Browning and John Woodvine. He made his TV debut in Sid Chaplin and Alan Plater's acclaimed 1969 Wednesday Play, Close The Coalhouse Door, an affectionate history of the mining industry in the North East told through family drama, comedy sketches and songs. His subsequent credits included: The Troubleshooters, The Borderers, Z-Cars, The Onedin Line, Warship, Doctor Who (in the 1975 serial Genesis Of The Daleks), Bill Brand, Juliet Bravo, One By One, All Creatures Great & Small, Soldier, Soldier (in the episode Band Of Gold which launched Robson Green and Jerome Flynn's brief-but-spectacular pop career), Boon, Between The Lines, Casualty, The Witch's Daughter, Woodstock, Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads?, Centre Play, The Stars Look Down Can We Get On Now, Please?, Play For Today, Floodtide, Rockcliffe's Babies, Gems, The Manageress, Spender, The House Of Eliott, Coronation Street, Badger and The Franchise Affair. He appeared in several movies including 1979's The Thirty Nine Steps (alongside David Collings), Superman (1980) and High Heels & Low Lifes (2001). He is probably best known as the proudly defiant socialist coal miner turned capitalist shop-keeper Bill Seaton in the first three series of When The Boat Comes In (1976 to 1977).

Another veteran actor and From The North favourite, Brian Dennehy has died aged eighty one. 'It is with heavy hearts we announce that our father, Brian passed away last night from natural causes, not Covid-related,' his daughter Elizabeth tweeted. 'Larger than life, generous to a fault, a proud and devoted father and grandfather, he will be missed by his wife Jennifer, family and many friends.' Born in Bridgeport, Connecticut in 1938, Brian entered Columbia University in New York on a football scholarship before enlisting in the Marine Corps from 1958 to 1963, including a brief stint on Okinawa. Dennehy was known on the big-screen for roles in films such as Cocoon, Presumed Innocent, Tommy Boy, Romeo + Juliet and Gorky Park. His breakthrough role was opposite Sylvester Stallone in First Blood. He was also a celebrated stage presence, winning two TONY awards for Death Of A Salesman in 1999 and Long Day's Journey Into Night in 2003. Dennehy also won a Golden Globe for the TV mini-series adaptation of Death Of A Salesman. He was long associated with the Goodman Theatre in Chicago for his many performances in adapted works of Eugene O'Neill. His last appearance on stage was in 2016's White Rabbit Red Rabbit. 'Theatre is something that I've always enjoyed and that I care about,' Dennehy said in 2016. 'But as you get older, it is harder and harder to do, but it's always worthwhile.' He also amassed six EMMY nominations throughout his career, most recently in 2005 for sexual abuse drama Our Fathers. He featured in episodes of The West Wing (albeit, sadly, not a very good one), Thirty Rock, The Good Wife, Miami Vice, Kojak, Serpico, M*A*S*H, Dallas and Hunter. He starred in the popular crime drama Jack Reed TV movies and also appeared as a recurring character in the NBC sitcom Just Shoot Me! Most recently he was in the NBC series The Blacklist and he will be seen posthumously on the big-screen in Son Of The South.
     'I don't look like an actor, I don't sound like an actor, I'm just another person,' Dennehy said in 2018. 'Which really is the whole point of acting, is trying to be just another person.' Built like a truck but with the capacity to be as gentle as a pussycat, Brian Dennehy was smarter than the average bear-like character actor. The six feet three inch performer made his screen breakthrough as an adversarial small-town sheriff in First Blood (1982), the thoughtful opening instalment in what would become the Rambo series. It was the first in his hat-trick of hits from that decade: he also starred as one of a group of aliens who have a rejuvenating effect on an elderly community in Cocoon (1985) and played a grizzled but amiable cop in F/X (1986), a highly enjoyable thriller set in the special effects industry; it was popular enough to spawn a 1991 sequel - F/X2: The Deadly Art Of Illusion - reuniting Brian with co-star Bryan Brown. Unusually for a character actor, Brian had a handful of movie leads, including The Belly Of An Architect (1987), a rare foray into arthouse cinema. Dennehy's range, from cowering vulnerability to a righteous fury, was given full rein in Peter Greenaway's otherwise austere tale of an esteemed architect dying of stomach cancer; the critic Janet Maslin called it 'one of the best things' the actor had done. He also gave a complex and probing performance as the serial killer John Wayne Gacy in the TV mini-series To Catch A Killer (1992). 'I've had a hell of a ride,' Dennehy also said in 2018. 'I have a nice house. I haven't got a palace, a mansion, but a pretty nice, comfortable home. I've raised a bunch of kids and sent them all to school and they're all doing well. All the people that are close to me are reasonably healthy and happy. Listen, that's as much as anybody can hope for in life.' He is survived by his wife, the costume designer Jennifer Arnott, whom he married in 1988 and by their children, Cormac and Sarah, as well as by three daughters, Elizabeth, Kathleen and Deirdre, from his first marriage to Judith Scheff, which ended in divorce in 1974.

Norman Hunter, who died this week aged seventy six, was labelled indelibly by Leeds United fans during the 1972 FA Cup final victory over Arsenal. The slogan on the banner - Norman Bites Yer Legs - became synonymous with one of the toughest, most uncompromising defenders of the post-war era. But, this actually did a disservice to an outstanding footballer who was known for his steel, but who could also produce silk. Gateshead-born Hunter moved to Elland Road when he was fifteen, forsaking a career as an electrical fitter. He made his first team debut as an eighteen year old in 1962, establishing a formidable central defensive partnership with Jackie Charlton and going on to play seven hundred and twenty six games in all competitions in fifteen years at the club. Only three men played more matches for Leeds - Charlton, Billy Bremner and Paul Reaney.

Hunter was a key component of Don Revie's talented but little-loved side which won the First Division title in 1968-69 and again in 1973-74, the FA Cup in 1972, the League Cup in 1968 and the Inter Cities Fairs Cup in 1968 and 1971. It was at Elland Road where Hunter wrote his name into legend, a man who epitomised the style and philosophy of Revie's team that won many plaudits and - sometimes grudging - respect within the game but also attracted fierce criticism for their ruthless, win-at-all-costs approach. Nothing, however, should detract from the stature of a man who was so highly regarded and respected by his peers that he was named the first winner of the Professional Footballers' Association Player of the Year award in 1974. Off the field, Hunter was a warm and friendly personality. He was hugely popular with all he met, enjoying a long career as an astute analyst and summariser of Leeds games for BBC local radio. He was also part of a group of hard men who populated the game in the 1960s and 70s, along with the likes of Liverpool's Tommy Smith and Chelsea captain Ron 'Chopper' Harris. When he sustained an injury at Leeds, Revie's veteran right-hand man Les Cocker was allegedly informed 'Hunter has broken a leg.' The coach is claimed to have replied: 'Whose is it?' The Norman Bites Yer Legs tag stuck after Brian Clough, later to manage Hunter for an ill-fated forty four days at Leeds, referenced it in his 1972 FA Cup final analysis. Norman himself, with his noted dry humour, called his own 2004 autobiography Biting Talk.

Hunter was as tough as nails and one of the most enduring images is his full-on fist fight with Derby County's Francis Lee (an England team-mate) that saw both men sent off at the Baseball Ground in November 1975. The result of the fight, if anyone is interested, was celebrated in a memorable chant heard across the country 'Norman Hunter chinned Francis Lee!' (somewhat ruder variants also existed). But he was also a defender of the highest calibre and was perfectly at home in the top flight, as well as the more nuanced surroundings of Europe. Revie's Leeds should have actually won far more trophies than they did but were dogged by misfortune. And, losing to Sunderland, obviously. One such occasion saw Hunter sent off when his frustration boiled over in the closing seconds of the defeat by AC Milan in the 1973 Cup Winners' Cup final and he decked Gianni Rivera with a vicious right-hook. It came after a series of highly questionable decisions by the Greek referee Christos Michas and fans inside the stadium in Thessaloniki threw missiles during Milan's lap of honour in protest. Michas was subsequently banned for life. Leeds felt similarly aggrieved when they lost to Bayern Munich in the European Cup final in Paris two years later, most notably when Peter Lorimer's volley was ruled out for a dubious offside call with the score still nil-nil.

Hunter was the permanent understudy to England's World Cup-winning captain Bobby Moore, limiting his career to a mere twenty eight caps when so many more would have been collected in the modern era. But Moore was immovable in the early years and squad rotation was seldom considered. Hunter made his England debut in a win in Spain in December 1965, yet while he was a trusted member of Sir Alf Ramsey's 1966 World Cup squad, he did not play a game. Only the eleven who played in the win over West Germany in the final at Wembley received a medal, although Hunter finally got one after a successful campaign to have them awarded for all members of England's triumphant squad at a Downing Street ceremony in 2009. Hunter was also in England's squad when they defended their crown in Mexico four years later, making a solitary appearance as an eighty first-minute substitute for Martin Peters against West Germany. Sadly for Hunter, his England career is best remembered for an uncharacteristic mistake which led to their failure to qualify for the 1974 World Cup in Germany and Ramsey's subsequent sacking. Hunter had been picked ahead of Moore, whose form had been indifferent and who had also made an error leading to a goal in England's two-nil defeat in Poland. In the return game at Wembley, England needed to win but were being thwarted by Poland's eccentric but brilliant goalkeeper Jan Tomaszewski. In the second half, Hunter missed the sort of routine tackle on the half-way line that he had completed thousands of times, allowing Grzegorz Lato to run clear and set up Jan Domarski for the goal that, ultimately, stopped England from qualifying. There is an infamous image of the inconsolable Hunter trudging from the Wembley turf.
    A small piece of social history: On that same day - 17 October 1973 - in response to the escalating Yom Kippur war, OPEC, the Arab oil producing countries, summarily cut production and quadrupled the world price of oil. This, effectively, ended the relative affluence upon which, as Ian MacDonald would subsequently write in Revolution in the Head, 'the preceding ten years of happy-go-lucky excess in the West had chiefly depended.' It's a less sentimental suggestion for 'the day the Sixties (conceptually) ended' than some symbolic musical event perhaps, but, it's probably a much more realistic one. The resulting financial crisis in Europe sent inflation spiralling and led to all sorts of ramifications in unexpected places - not least, the virtual destruction of the British film industry for the next decade and a vinyl shortage which meant the record industry almost went the same way. It was the chilling moment where the Swingin' Sixties turned, overnight, into the 'Sober-and-Soon-to-be-Unemployed Seventies.' That this occurred on the same day England's football team failed to reach the final stages of a tournament they had won eight years previously may seem insignificant to some. But, just as that famous 'some people are on the pitch...' victory in 1966 appeared to encapsulate the spirit of an era - when England (and, specifically, London) was, quite literally, on top of the world - so the gloom that settled over the country during the winter of 1973-74, with its three-day weeks, powercuts, 'Cod War' with Iceland and general austerity amidst national strife and whispers of a right-wing military coup in the offing, was inextricably tied to the failing fortunes of Sir Alf Ramsey’s ageing side. And there are many that will still tell you it was all Norman Hunter's fault for missing that bloody tackle.

Hunter's final England appearance came, fittingly, in his mentor Don Revie's first game as England manager, a three-nil win over Czechoslovakia in October 1974. Hunter left his beloved Leeds for Bristol City in a forty thousand quid deal in October 1976, playing more than one hundred games for The Robins in three years before a brief stint at Barnsley. Hunter succeeded his former Leeds team-mate Allan Clarke as Barnsley manager in October 1980 and guided them out of the former Third Division in the 1980-81 season, staying at Oakwell until February 1984. He also had a spell in charge of Rotherham United and in more recent years contributed his expertise on radio, as well as a successful after-dinner speaker. Hunter's enduring footballing image may be as the archetypal hard man but those who saw his career in the wider context will attest that he was an outstanding player, one of the finest ball-playing defenders of his generation and a man who deservedly attained legendary status for his magnificent career at Leeds. In 1968 Hunter married Susan Harper and the couple had two children, Michael and Claire who survived him.

It was Peter Bonetti's sad misfortune that, despite his outstanding goalkeeping agility - his nickname 'The Cat' was well deserved - and despite the many matches he played (more than seven hundred for Chelsea), he is remembered above all for one disastrous day in Mexico in 1970. A match in which Bonetti, who has died aged seventy eight, should not even have been playing. It was the quarter-final of the World Cup against West Germany, whom England had beaten four years earlier in the final. The first-choice England goalkeeper was, of course, Gordon Banks but on the morning of the match in Léon, scheduled absurdly for the intense heat of noon so it could be shown during TV prime time in Europe and at a breathless altitude, Banks was to be seen outside the England team hotel, pale-faced and being supported by the anxious England doctor, Neil Phillips. He was suffering from a nasty case of food poisoning. So it was that Bonetti played instead of Banks, though hardly in the ideal condition to do so, as he had not had a competitive game since the FA Cup Final seven weeks earlier. Nevertheless, he made several fine saves during the first hour. When England squandered a two-nil lead to lose, however, Bonetti was largely made the villain of the piece. He was undoubtedly at fault for the first German goal, when he allowed Franz Beckenbauer's low shot to squirm under his body and into the net. The equaliser, however, scored by Uwe Seeler, was a complete fluke. When Karl-Heinz Schnellinger lobbed the ball into the English goalmouth, Bonetti, off his line, was arguably out of position, but Seeler knew little about the back header with which he scored. As for the third and decisive German goal, it had as much to do with the defenders' weariness as with Bonetti's positioning. Terry Cooper, the England left-back, was too tired to prevent West Germany's substitute, Jürgen Grabowski, from crossing. Bonetti did not get to the high ball, Hannes Löhr headed it back and Gerd Müller volleyed home from close range. It would prove to be Bonetti's seventh and last game for England. But his international record, until then, had been excellent. The first match came in July 1966, a two-nil victory against Denmark in Copenhagen and before the Léon match he had conceded only one goal in his previous six.

Standing five feet ten inches tall and weighing eleven stone, he was something of a contrast with the giant goalkeepers to whom we have become accustomed over the last two decades, but Peter was brave and spectacular and, pre-Léon, had shown no signs of nervousness. He had also been a member of the victorious 1966 England World Cup squad, although Banks had played all the matches in that tournament. Born in Putney to Swiss parents, Bonetti moved with his family, as a child, to the Sussex coast, where his parents opened a cafe in Worthing. His talents as a goalkeeper were soon apparent in local schoolboy football and he was enlisted by Reading for its youth teams. Then, after his mother had written to Chelsea asking them to give her son a trial, he was signed at Stamford Bridge. In the 1960-61 season, at the age of nineteen, he became the first-team goalkeeper. Chelsea were relegated to the Second Division but, under the managership of Tommy Docherty, they bounced back in their first season. Initially, the young Chelsea team flourished under Docherty and in 1965 Bonetti played a significant part in helping them win the League Cup final, then a two-legged affair, against Leicester City. That achievement was outshone when his inspired goalkeeping enabled Chelsea, after a replay in the final against Leeds in 1970, at last to gain the FA Cup which had eluded them since their foundation in 1905. Bonetti was just as good when, in Athens a year later, Chelsea beat the formidable Real Madrid to take the European Cup Winners' Cup. His last game in goal for Chelsea was against Arsenal in May 1979 - his seven hundred and twenty ninth for the club, during which he had kept clean sheets in two hundred matches, conceding one goal or fewer in more than two-thirds of his appearances. In 1975 he briefly left Chelsea on a free transfer for a spell in the US with the St Louis Stars, but returned the following year. He played five games for Dundee United in 1979, and on retirement he lived on the Isle of Mull, where he worked as a postman. He then became a goalkeeping coach with Chelsea, Newcastle United, Fulham, Manchester City and the England team, and in 1986, at the age of forty five, appeared for non-league Woking as they beat Weymouth one-nil in the FA Cup. Latterly he worked on match days at Chelsea in the hospitality section. With his second wife, Kay whom he married in 1992, he had a son, Scott and he had four children - Suzanne, Kim, Nicholas and Lisa - from his first marriage, to Frances Jennings, which ended in divorce.

After all that death and depression, dear blog reader, this blogger rather fancies something nice to eat. One wonders if this lady does takeaways, for instance.

On Thursday of this week, this blogger knocked off from work at 6.30pm and at 6.30pm and about three seconds he rang up the local takeaway for a nice, fattening king prawn and beef curry with boiled rice. Which was subsequently delivered to the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House inside twenty minutes and scoffed almost immediately it came out of the tin-foil carton. Seriously, this one hardly touched the sides of yer actual Keith Telly Topping's stomach on the way down, this blogger was so utterly Hank Marvin at the time. Note to self for future reference; never try to get through the day on a bag of crisps, a bottle of pop and one (one!) Rich Tea biscuit. On a scale of one-to-ten in terms of how much this blogger deserved this, with one being 'I sort of quite deserve this but I could live without it' and ten being 'I REALLY, REALLY deserve this', well ... you do the maths.

So, another week of lockdown at the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House is over and this blogger currently has the novelty of two - yes two - days off in a row. First time that's happened in three weeks. This blogger must say, he is still rather enjoying working from home - the novelty hasn't quite worn off yet. The commute, in particular, is jolly impressive. But, there is one thing that this blogger misses about the office and that's when one has come off the phone from a particularly challenging or lengthy or sometimes, not even an awkward call but rather a touching or strange one, is it can be quite pleasant to turn to a nearby colleague and say 'you will not believe the call I've just had!' You can't do it when you're on yer Jack Jones, dear blog reader. Well, you possibly can, but you get locked up for talking to yourself. Hang on. I am currently locked up ... and I am talking to myself. See. Told you.

One of the most singularly melancholy aspects of wandering around a virtually deserted Newcastle city centre - as this blogger did when getting in the weekly shopping this very morning - was seeing all of those businesses that this blogger knows so well (many of them old, established firms going back decades) all completely shuttered-up. Pubs, restaurants, stores ... And this blogger couldn't help but wonder just how many of them will be reopening when all of this horrid virus malarkey is over. Because, this blogger is fairly certain that some of them won't be. Mind you, walking down Northumberland Street Keith Telly Topping noticed that signs saying 'We Are Closed' in McDonald's window were accompanied by all of the lights in the gaff being on. So, when all this is over, don't be at all surprised if the price of a Big Mac goes up by twenty pee. Cos, someone's going to have to pay for leaving the lights on.

Watching one of this week's official government Coronavirus briefing - this one led by the legend that never will be Alok Sharma - caused this blogger to reflect upon something. Listen, dear blog reader, this blogger is sure that yer man Alok is a really nice chap who is kind to his mother and all that but, every time this blogger sees him, he can't help but be reminded of Mad Frankie Boyle's description of Nick Griffin on an episode of Mock The Week: 'He looks like a shaved owl who's been fast-tracked for a management position at Greggs.'

And finally, dear blog reader, many, many (many) years ago, before most of you were born, this blogger will wager (we're talking about the 1970s, here), this blogger's beloved England cricket team spent an entire winter Down Under (when women glow and men chunder, they reckon) getting their bums thrashed and their knackers bruised by a Sheila called Lilian Thomson. Or something. It was right chastening stuff (particularly for poor Bumble Lloyd's googlies).

Nevertheless, this blogger still used to watch the Australian Broadcasting Company's nightly highlights programmes on BBC2 - introduced by Richie Benaud - which had been satellited over to the UK just to see if it was all as wretchedly horrible as the early morning radio commentaries made it sound (it was ... and then some). That said, this blogger became utterly obsessed with the theme tune from the highlights programme. It was a highly whistle-able jaunty little flute-and-synthesizer-dominated number - the Aussie equivalent of the BBC's use of Booker T's 'Soul Limbo' - and, this blogger presumed, it was some obscure instrumental either from an Aussie movie nobody had heard of or that it had been knocked up in a basement studio in Sydney by the Antipodean equivalent of a member of the BBC Radiophonics Workshop. This blogger doubted that he would ever hear it again but that tune haunted the edges of his memory for years and Keith Telly Topping tried everything he could think of to discover what the Hell it was and if it was commercially available. He wrote to the BBC. They couldn't help. He wrote - airmail - to ABC in Australia. Never even got the courtesy of a reply. He asked his cousins in Brisbane if they could find out. Nothing. It was a mystery this blogger thought would ne'er be solved. Cut forward now many, many (many) years to around 1995(ish) and this blogger was siting watching Midnight Cowboy late one night on TV (a film, let it be noted, he must have seen half-a-dozen times, at least, over the years) and blow me cornet stiff but, there it was - accompanying the Florida dream sequence of Ratso Rizzo and Joe Buck running on the beach. The end credits told this blogger the tune was called - not unreasonably - 'Florida Fantasy'. And that, far from being obscure or unheard of, it was an instrumental on one of the biggest selling movie soundtracks of the decade, had been written by one of this blogger's heroes - the legend that was John Barry - and had won a bloody Grammy! The point of all this, dear blog reader, is that sometimes, the really fun part of any search for knowledge isn't the discovery, it's the search itself.

So, here endeth yet another From The North bloggerisation update from the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House. Where life, just for the moment, has taken on an aura of rampant surrealism unmatched by anything in this blogger's experience. Except, possibly, that time this blogger - with a case of bronchitis that was threatening to turn into consumption - spent a day overdosed on Benylin watching Performance, Blow Up and Scream & Scream Again back-to-back. That was a bloody odd day. I must try to repeat it at some stage.