In the mid-1960s, Dave Lee Travis and Jimmy Savile presided over the dance-halls of Manchester. Herman's Hermits brought the city its first ever No 1, and the Hollies had nine hits in a row ...

NEW contemporary music in Britain is to receive a pounds 1m-a-year boost from the Performing Rights Society, the music royalties collection agency. The PRS board agreed last week to set up a foundation to support new music, in response to critics angered at its decision last year to abolish a long-established subsidy of classical music.

Peggy Lee

SIR PAUL McCartney will today release a single and video by his late wife, Linda, despite a blanket ban on all airplay by radio and television stations because the song contains a profanity.

I attended the Monkees' concert in Manchester and can understand the reluctance of the organisers to continue to give out press tickets ("Cries and Whispers", Real Life, 23 March). The concert was entertaining, lively, and thoroughly enjoyed by the audience and the Monkees finished to a standing ovation. Two days later a less than lukewarm review appeared in the local paper.

They were rock's first manufactured band - and now they're making a comeback. Nicholas Barber remembers the Monkees

David Soul should be booked for his part in `Blood Brothers'. By David Benedict

`We were all right to start with but now we're ferociously good'

At 40 you were once considered past it, now you're not even middle- aged. Andrew G Marshall on growing old in an age of confusion

RICHARD SMITH

Surely Showaddywaddy don't still click their fingers Under the Moon of Love? Boney M must have taken a permanent Holi-Holiday from pop by now. And do Black Lace still push pineapple, shake a tree? Yes, they Agadoo-do-do, says Eleanor Bailey

YOUR leader, "Who'll champion the herbivores?" (22 October) asks why everyone is so beastly to Linda McCartney. I wonder myself whether or not she is still a photographer. To my mind , photography is not compatible with vegetarianism because photographic emulsions use gelatine, made from boiled bones. Perhaps she's an ardent campaigner for digital imagery.

From Cllr Tayo Oke and others

If you can remember the 1960s, they say, you weren't there. But you might be at the Solid Silver Sixties Show