I actually played both sides for the first time last night - it’s billed on the sleeve as “A personal appearance recording” and indeed some of the crowd noises do sound a bit like they’re looped. Elvis just sounds confused. On the flip is a version of ‘Softly, As I Leave You’ which is almost entirely spoken while one Sherrill Nielsen does the actual singing. Odd.

I was in a youth hostel in Charlbury near Oxford when I heard, on the Wednesday breakfast show. I went up to London that day, and went to Rock On in Kentish Town Road for the first time. They were already re-pricing their stock…

“Way Down” wasn’t a bad song, and would probably been a sort of middling hit, but not as successful as “Moody Blue”. Around this time there was a gloriously OTT live version of his “Unchained Melody” floating about (Canadian 7″ on white vinyl), which might have been a better follow-up to this than his rather mediocre (and even then overly cheesy) “My Way”. Even at the tender age of 16 I wondered why the record company didn’t cash in better.

From some of Marcello’s comments, I am surmising he has read Robert Graham and Keith Baty’s terrific “Elvis - The Novel, (The Life He Should Have Led)”, which has him playing with John Lennon, and The Clash, , inventing the cheeseburger, shooting Colonel Tom, being a super-hero in Memphis, appearing in movies such as 1961’s “Little Girls Grow Up Fast and Grope Me” and recording classic, otherwise unknown tracks as “A Life Without Helicopters”, “On My Inflatable Dolphin” and “That Darned Shark.”

26th December 1970. More high spirits from Saville & Blackburn. In the studio; Christie, Dana, Hotlegs, Jimmy Ruffin, Mungo Jerry & The Kinks, plus Pan’s People - interpreting ‘Spirit In The Sky’

Neither show survives.

Perhaps I should have guessed that Don was Jimmy’s producer. Wossy has his own producer on Saturday mornings. It’s a moronic bloke who sounds exactly like Dudley Moore and he hangs on JR’s every word, constantly dissolving into helpless fits of giggles. It used to be too much to bear (and I can’t stand Ross at any price in any case) but in recent times, the acolyte has tended to give some back but it’s still pretty grim.

I personally think both Ross and that other clump, Evans represent everything that is wrong about broadcasting. It’s all very well saying “there’s always the off switch” but the fact is, we’re all paying for these clowns. And BOY are we paying!!

Case in point: last week’s Gold show played a Top 20 chart from February 1983 in full, with Eddy Grant (who was at number two in selfsame chart) as studio guest. Dale featured the same chart some months ago but concentrated on playing on all the boring/slow entries - it was all “Up Where We Belong” and Phil Collins and as my wife says it was like a Young Conservatives playlist from hell. Whereas hearing the full chart was an instructive (re-)education, a retrospectively bizarre world where Orville the Duck and Wylie the Wah! seemed to fit in equally with inscrutable but palpable logic.

Also we don’t get the useful corrective balance of Phil Swern putting in some of his own non-charting enthusiasms (such as Anne Peebles or The Impressions) which added a sense of balance and representativeness to the programme, I though.

Luxembourg’s sig tune for their chart rundown was the Sauter Finnegan Orchestra’s Doodletown Fifers, making this the earliest in a chain of highly evocative instros from At The Sign Of The Swinging Cymbal to Whole Lotta Love to Yellow Pearl.

I have several books of Luxembourg charts, namely the variously coloured Collins diaries in which I used to write them every Tuesday. If only I could find a publisher…