David Watts came from Rutland

If you watch the episodes of Top of the Pops from 1978 that BBC4 is showing, your enjoyment can only be enhanced by following Top of the Pops Fax on Twitter. He tweets relevant facts and trivia about the musicians while the show is on each week.

There was a terrific fact this week - it easily wins my Trivial Fact of the Day Award. And it is that David Watts from the Kinks' song was a real person and came from Rutland.

Really this should not have been such a surprise to me. Andrew Hickey reported it when reviewing the LP Something Else by the Kinks:

While it’s ostensibly about a schoolboy, David Watts was in fact a real person — a concert promoter in Rutland, who had once tried to buy Dave Davies from his brother for his own sexual uses. 

Once one knows that, lines like “And all the girls in the neighbourhood/Try to go out with David Watts/They try their best but can’t succeed” and “He is so gay and fancy-free” become not so much a gay subtext as outright gay text.

And having watched the Jam's version of David Watts on this evening's Top of the Pops gives me a chance to pay tribute to my mum, who has not been very well of late.

I remember watching this show with her when it was first broadcast in 1978. With all the authority of someone who had just got his A level results and was off to university, I explained that the Jam were a "new wave" band.

My mum watched them for a little while and said: "I see, it's a cross between punk and the mods." How cool was that?