The song was written by Howard Broadbent and Jimmy Smith from Bolton. Howard is a piano player and great golfer by the way. He’s a great character, standing about six foot four with the old Kevin Keegan perm and he wears a long Doctor Who scarf, even when he leads the pub sing along at the piano. The Blackpool Belle ran in his era and when he sings his songs he takes you back to those times.

Nostalgia not being what it used to be, McKee wonders where are the contemporary characters to inspire songwriters.

Most of them ring in to my radio programme I think. That’s where I discover the characters. When I do the after dinner clubs and tell the stories about the old days of tin baths and what have you there will always be people coming to me afterwards saying they share those memories. Often they are people who have become very successful in business, some even millionaires. And they say, "eeh Norman, tha’s put my feet on t’ground lad. Tha’s browt back memories!" You know, its one thirty in the morning and I want to go home and they want to tell me what they were doing in 1920.

That’s the great thing about our kind of folk music, and the kind of poetry you two do. I love dialect poetry, stuff like Dad’s Medals by Cliff Gerrard in his book of poems called Mild and Bitter. Cliff wrote for The Oldham Tinkers and lives in Wigan but comes from St. Helens and still supports that rugby team whilst living in Wigan. He’s a brave man. He writes about what you might call the barefoot days. And Cliff, and The Fivepenny Piece and Just Poets are communicating, through our memories and through addressing people in our own dialect, with even the way we talk being important in that communication.

We use local expressions and sometimes people phone in to my radio programme to explain the origins of those expressions. "Don’t mek me a fortnight cup o’ tea" means don’t make my tea too weak.

We all discuss the fact that it is up to the artists to preserve these characters for posterity. To illustrate the point Warwick recalls a story of having written a song called Easy Jack Easy. The song was written after reading the obituary of a concertina player in the Manchester Evening News folk column written by Don Frame. When Warwick’s group played the song for the first time in public another artist on the same night sang for the first time The Concertina Man, which he had also written about Joe Maley the concertina player. Mortified that his song should be held up to the light against a song by wonderful Alan Bell, Warwick was delighted to hear Alan say to the audience. "Two songs about one guy. That is how legend is born." Alan Bell, of course, wrote many songs that became identified with The Houghton Weavers.

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