For those members of the audience who remained in the auditorium, we as Just Poets offered what we hoped was complementary entertainment. However, we performed from the well in front of the stage and had to compete with an "in house" tape left playing in the sound booth. To those who could not hear us, we should perhaps apologise, and to those who could hear us, we should almost certainly apologise!

We performed three original works: - CUP FINALS EVERY NIGHT (memo to Norman Prince, I am the other Bolton fan!), MUSIC OF HEAVEN, (appropriately, given the quality of songs The Fivepenny Piece had provided) and STILL CHASING THAT RHYME (our own tribute to an American songwriting friend of ours no longer with us, the late Townes Van Zandt).

Immediately re-establishing the tempo with which they had closed the first half, The Fivepenny Piece recommenced with THE WILD ROVER. As this set continued the jokes became more protracted and the characters in them ever more identifiable. Where they "emanated" from only Alan Taylor will know, because as he drifted through what he confessed were "senior moments" he was "emanating" with jokes from everywhere.

There was more nostalgia for a Lancashire that people under forty would forget ever existed, were it not for these songs and for bands like The Fivepenny Piece. They reminded us of when mothers used to remind courting daughters to KEEP YOUR HAND ON YOUR HALFPENNY (these days a halfpenny isn’t worth what it used to be!) and of fathers who, in urging their sons to seek work, would tell them WHERE THERE’S MUCK THERE’S BRASS.

It was a song from the same genre that offered the comedic high spot of the night. As Norman Prince explained in another of those wandering introductions, he learned the song from Mike Harding, but as is typical in the folk world, Paul Johnstone learned it from another source. It was no surprise then that MY BROTHER SYLVESTE should be so uproariously shambolic. The timing and words and mimed actions were so out of kilter they could have only been the result of meticulous practice. It was so bad, or good if you get our drift, it might have succeeded where the Army and the Navy failed, "to put the wind up Sylveste!"

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