I assumed any single-date gaps in our list, such as 20th February 1970, would have been Singers' and Musicians' nights, but maybe that's the date you're thinking of. I'll see if Trevor Charnock can dig some more info out of the treasurers' and minute books... sometimes people are listed as booked but not the date they're booked for.

From 1969-1979 there seem to have been very few Singers' nights at all... from a cursory glance, fewer in those 11 years than in a standard year now, when we have about one a month, plus all of August.

So I guess there was little of the August/summer festival circuit in the 70s, and August appeared to be just like any other month in terms of club bookings. Maybe people didn't go away on holiday so much either.

It's in the 1990s that August became a mainly guest-act-free zone, and in fact in the early 90s most of July as well as August was also local singers only.

Since 1999 it's been almost (but not quite) 100% rigid: if it is August, it is a Singers' and Musicians' night, if it is July 31st or September 1st it will be a booked act.

(For completists, August exceptions are 8th August 2002 with Stanley Accrington, and 31st August 2006 for Jim Malcolm with featured Support Pillowfish - though this latter was a special case, marking the opening of the Topic's 50th Anniversary Celebratory Autumn Season).