My big Christmas present in 1973 was a cassette recorder, and I remember taping a run down of the best-selling singles of the year.
I can remember stopping the recording when Welcome Home by Peters and Lee came on because I hated it so much.
But Lennie Peters turns out to have been a more interesting figure than he had become by 1973.
Blinded in two separate accidents by the time he was 16, Peters still built a career as a singer and pianist. By 1960 he was a member of the Migil Five - some sources even describe them as his backing group.
Peters left to try his luck as a solo artist, but the Migil Five kept going.
There career highlight was reaching number 10 in the UK singles chart in 1964 with Mocking' Bird Hill. As you can hear, it was an early example of a white British band attempting to play something like ska - or 'bluebeat' as it was called in those days.
I've seen film of the band playing this, and they looked more like a trad jazz band than one at the cutting edge of pop, but in their way they were.
Early in their history, a drummer called Charlie Watts played some gigs for the Migil Five. In fact, it's sometimes claimed - not least in several Wikipedia entries - that Lennie Peters was Charlie Watts' uncle.
I can't find an authoritative source for this, and if it were true I think we would have heard more of it in 1973, when Peters and Lee became the first act since the Beatles to top the UK album and singles chart in the same week.
That didn't prevent me from pressing Stop though.
Later. Thanks to Richard James for telling me that Lennie Peters was married to Sylvia Eaves, whose sister Lilian Eaves was Charlie Watts's mother. So an uncle, but not a blood relative.
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