Alan Barton: July '69

This is a track from Barton's 1991 album Precious. If the lyrics remind you strongly of Candle in the Wind, that's because July '69 (a Nigel Tufnellesque title, it has to be admitted) is a tribute to Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones.

That makes the pipes on it appropriate - they're just the sort of unexpected instrument Jones used to bring to Stones tracks - but we are still left waiting for a big, power-ballad chorus that never comes.

So why have I chosen it?

Colin Gibb of Black Lace died the other day, and I was naturally reminded of a favourite piece of trivia. It was that one of the members of the band was the nephew of Jeremy Thorpe's co-accused George Deakin.

When I searched online, a worryingly large proportion of the results consisted of my repeating the story. But I know I didn't invent the tale: I got it from the reliable Twitter account Top of the Pops Facts.

So I did a little research and found that the story is indeed true, but that Deakin's nephew in the band was not Colin Gibb but Alan Barton.

The proof is in an amusingly garbled account of the Thorpe affair to be found in the book And Then Came Agadoo: Black Lace by another member of the band, Terry Dobson:

I quote, preserving Dobson's innovative punctuation:

Alan's Uncle George, George Deakin to the British public has a bit of a history to his name. 

Alan's family are from South Wales and in the business of providing gaming machines to clubs and pubs around the area, Alan's mum and Grandmother both work for the business owned by Uncle George... 

An attempt had been made to assassinate Jeremy Thorpe the Liberal Party leader during 1978, an accusation made that George had put up the money for the hired gun to do his dirty work... 

A lengthy court case followed, George seen on the televisions news programme wearing a different designer suit every single day of the trial, it had caught the eye of the press and TV producers alike.... so much so they had a competition between them to guess what he would be wearing or they would cheekily ask him what style and colour suit he would be dressed in the following day! 

When the trial eventually ended the jury acquitted George without charge clearing him off the offence of providing money to the would be assassin...

A plot to assassinate Jeremy Thorpe? I am reminded of Auberon Waugh's comment:

Poor Jeremy. He is his own worst enemy, but with friends like these he really has no need of himself. The only remaining mystery is why the Liberal Party policy committee decided to murder Scott rather than Jeremy.

Back to Alan Barton. 

After his time with Black Lace, which included singing the UK's Eurovision entry in 1979 as well as all those awful party records, Barton joined Smokie in 1986 as their lead singer. It's his voice on the version of Living Next Door to Alice that they recorded with Roy 'Chubby' Brown.

Smokie were a Chinn and Chapman creation who had a few hits in the Seventies and toured Europe successfully for many years after that. He died, aged 41, when the band's bus crashed in a hailstorm near Cologne.