Picture from ITV

During the course of my radio appearance on Castle Rock on Tuesday, we made mention of the deaths of Raphael Ravenscroft and Mike Burt from Chas & Dave (although I found out later that he actually died without media fanfare on Sunday) and pondered on the fact that these things are supposed to happen in threes. Today the third musical death came along, as it was reported earlier today that Alvin Stardust had passed away. I suppose everybody who tweeted about taking extra care when crossing the road in his honour thought that they were the first, but a man has just died so let’s not argue about authorship.

To be perfectly honest Alvin Stardust didn’t really mean a lot to me. He was on a VHS my mum had when I still lived at home of Glam Rock highlights, like a home video edition of Top of the Pops 2 featuring the cream of 1970s pop legends, some of whom are not in prison or on trial. I found his music pleasant enough but there wasn’t anything life changing about it to have made a lasting impact on my world. When I was a child I found it hard to differentiate between Stardust and Gary Glitter, (I mean in terms of music and ‘heyday’ imagery rather than off duty behaviour), and I haven’t bothered to follow his career beyond just happening to catch him on television or radio whenever it happened while I was watching.

Just like people matter-of-factly telling you the urban myth about Bob Holness playing the saxophone on ‘Baker Street’ despite it being wrong, people are quick to say Shane Fenton when the subject of Alvin Stardust’s real name comes up. This is wrong as his parents gave him the not very showbiz name of Bernard Jewry. It is also believed that he is a Nottingham born singer, but he was born in London although he was brought up in Mansfield. Under the rules of the Nottingham music scene, living here is enough to get in. We did once talk about inviting him onto NottinghamLIVE (we also toyed with Paper Lace) as he did qualify, and sadly it won’t happen now. As I’m not an expert on Stardust and his work, I don’t know what sort of post-glory days career he had, or how he made the route to an appearance in Asda (Hyson Green branch) in 2009.

The Nottingham connection means that the Nottingham Evening Post (as I still call it) will squeeze several pages out of it tomorrow, no doubt along with their ‘hey, tweet us your words because we can’t be arsed and we have pages to fill’ call outs. Maybe Notts TV will make a programme about it to repeat on a tedious loop for an audience of three people who tuned in for their fix of the Bolero documentary. They’ll be looking for people to name the trams after once all the new tram lines have been finished, the tram naming team shouldn’t feel under any pressure of time to decide this as it’ll be several hundred years before this happens.

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