In my case the problem is old age and decaying brain cells, and it wasn't helped by the fact that I started suffering a lot of throat trouble. That put me out of the game for several years and when I got over the throat trouble I found I couldn't remember the words of most of the songs I knew.

Not to worry. Perseverance. I would think of a song that was lying in bits in my memory and try to reconstruct it by singing it over and over again until I had the whole thing dredged up intact. Sometimes the effort would be too much and I'd have to revert to hard copy.

By and large though, the struggle of forcing my brain to remember seemed to make the process of recollection a lot easier until now, when all kinds of stuff has been coming back to me fairly easily.

I thought I'd really cracked it the other day, when I managed a long and difficult ballad which I hadn't sung in about 20 years, and got it practically straight off. The only trouble is that I can't now remember which ****ing ballad it was!!!