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Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council

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This prompts McKee to ask what the average age might be of a typical Fivepenny Piece audience.

Around my age probably, you know Pam, quite young. But some of those people will have been going to Fivepenny Piece gigs for thirty, thirty five years. Sadly, with all due respect to the current band, there’s only one original member left, and that’s George Radcliffe. But if you go back to the people who wrote the songs, they were original band members. Colin Radcliffe wrote the music and Linda and John Meeks who used to do the vocals also did some writing. Linda and John had that lovely sibling harmony, you remember. She used to put that scarf round her head and do all that patter, you know "George, come and meet me mother" and enact a little play in music. John and Linda left a few years ago and the band didn’t play together for a while and then Brian Durkin left as The Houghton Weavers manager and he started the band up again about ten or eleven years ago, sure there was still an audience for them. They only do ten or twelve concerts a year, but it keeps The Fivepenny Piece alive.

The concerts not only keep alive the band name but also perpetuate the stories the band tell and the times they remember. Warwick recalls a recent trip to the lights at Blackpool and how disappointed his parents were that the trams did not seem as well lit as they remembered them. All the way down the golden mile, said Warwick, he kept hearing in his head the chorus of The Blackpool Belle.

Yeh, we still sing The Blackpool Belle, a lovely song telling about that tram’s days as a "passion wagon" for courting couples and I do the whole explanation of how a few years ago you could go to Blackpool from any of the Northern Stations for half a crown. That got you to Blackpool and into The Winter Gardens for a dance, then a walk down the prom, or if you were a bit naughty a snog under the pier, for a bag of whelks. Have you ever chewed a whelk? Oh God, I chewed one for three hours once and didn’t like it. When I took it out of my mouth it didn’t even have any teeth marks on it.

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