Yep, I'm in wholehearted agreement with Musket and Will - and in partial agreement with Jim. I used to go to a club where one singer sang the same three or four songs every time, reading the words from a loose-leaf binder. This went on for years, the same few songs, always reading. I couldn't understand, for the life of me, how they were incapable of learning four songs, in fact I'm astonished that, having sung them so many times, the words hadn't simply osmosed into their memory! Laziness, IMHO.

And regarding age and memory, we're not all the same. Telling us about a 95-year-old who has a fantastic memory for songs he learned fifty years ago is irrelevant. He isn't me, or you or anyone else, and people's memories and learning abilities don't all deteriorate at the same rate. You have my absolute, firm assurance that, although my long-term memory is still pretty good, my short-term memory is far worse, at sixty-nine, than it was ten years ago, and I have quite severe difficulty learning 'stuff' nowadays, even though many of the songs I was singing in the 1960s as a teenager are still crystal clear.

However, I work on learning songs, and much of the time I have reasonable success. If someone doesn't like me having to get the occasional line from my iPad mid-song, that's tough - I regard picking up a line and getting through the song flawlessly, as far as anyone else is concerned, is far better than stopping mid-verse and humming-and-hawing scratching my arse while I try to remember, or even worse, have to give up altogether.

As ever, IMHO, YMMV.