IN PASSING, as it were, last week's column noted the death at 62 of the singer and actor Adam Faith. Keith Robinson, among Derwentside Council's top officers, offers the North-East - and the Hungerford Bridge - connection.

We'd noted that What Do You Want, Faith's first hit, had been the last number one of the 1950s and that What Do You Want To Make Those Eyes At Me For by Emile Ford and the Checkmates was the first number one of the 1960s.

John Worth, the man who wrote What Do You Want - and many more hits - has lived for the past 16 years at Benfieldside, near Consett.

"There are many wonderful places up here and I have many great pals among the Geordie lads," says John, now 71. He remains a Chelsea fan with a Cockney accent, however.

With a quartet called The Raindrops - Les Beedle, Vince Hill and Jackie Lee, who had subsequent hits with White Horses and Rupert the Bear - he had appeared, wearing a toupe, on Tyne Tees Television's opening night spectacular in 1959.

"It was a glued-on Perry Como wig," he says. "There were no shaven heads in those days and bald singers were unheard of. I was the only bloke with a widow's peak wig; I looked like a bloody cockerel."

Also on the first night bill was David MacBeth, a North-East singer who'd had a hit with Mr Blue, became a Tyne Tees stalwart and owned Greys night club in Newcastle. They became close friends.

Johnny Worth, already a song writer, met the young Adam Faith a few months later on the set of a television programme called Drumbeat. Though his first two records had flopped, Johnny recognised his potential - not least because he told him to smile.

"Others had told him to play the hard man but he was a lovely lad, always smiling, always with a twinkle in his eye. The best word I can use to describe him is winsome. He was a really winsome lad."

Faith, his name recently changed from Terry Nelhams, asked if Worth had a song which might suit him. What Do You Want just happened to be in his pocket.

He'd written it several months earlier, only added the still remembered "Bay-beh" notes at the end after long nights beneath Hungerford Bridge, aforesaid, across the Thames.

At the time he also played until 2am most mornings with the Oscar Raben Band at the Lyceum. Afterwards they'd wait for the night bus underneath the arches.

"The bridge had lots of holes, so usually it rained on you. You'd stand there freezing cold waiting for a bus which hardly ever came and you'd start to dream.

"The raindrops would make a pattern of three notes into a puddle. I thought it would make a super arrangement and before I got home on the bus had worked it out in my head."

Adam Faith had his number one. From the drip-drip effect, a star was born.

John Worth is a star, too, penned many hits for people like Eden Kane, Anthony Newley, Shirley Bassey and Petula Clark and also sang and produced under the pseudonym Les Van Dyke.

Van Dyke, as in Whitehall 1212, was their London telephone exchange - "It was quite funny, he recalls, "the New Musical Express said they'd discovered that Les Van Dyke was a school teacher living in Blackpool."

He also made a lesser known record with the Go-Gos called I'm Gonna Spend Christmas with a Dalek ("I think I was the Dalek on that one") and made several recordings on Embassy, the Woolworths label.

Remember Embassy records? Four shillings, or something, when everything else was 6/9d.

After an expensive divorce and with David MacBeth's encouragement, he moved to Co Durham with his second wife Catherine. "We were living above a second-hand car saleroom in London when suddenly I had this vision that we should find some countryside and some fresh air."

Catherine died from lung cancer last year, Vince Hill headlining a charity concert in her memory. His elder son from his first marriage died three years ago.

"Sometimes you feel guilty about still being alive," says John. "David has been an absolute rock through all this business. I wouldn't have made it without him."

He'd last seen Adam Faith when Faith played Chorus Line at the Sunderland Empire. "We spent a glorious day together, just like the old days, sitting in a corner of a workmen's caf drinking coffee and swearing.

"Everyone who came in recognised him, and he was good as gold with them all. It's no age to die at, 62."

He himself remains musically active - "I don't think 71, I don't act 71, I won't say I don't look 71" - helps with the Stanley and Allensford Blues Festivals, tips a Whitley Bay lass called Susan Fegan to be a big star and is enthusiastic about his own son Christos, a promising bass guitarist.

Keith Robinson's also among his friends. "A brilliant bloke," he's said and so, abundantly, it proved.

THE greater interest last week had been in Emile Ford and whether, as Mr John Briggs suggested, he had a Blackhall Colliery connection.

We'd also carried a 1980 picture of Emile with Beryl Hankin, owner then as now of Guru Boutique in Darlington, soon after she'd restarted Ford's fan club. There have been three developments:

1. Mr Briggs refuses to admit defeat. "I'm sure I've a book at home," he says.

2. An e-mail from Darlington lad Phil Westberg, exiled in South Africa - "my attention has been diverted, with both England and South Africa out of the cricket World Cup" - reckons that Emile Ford was last heard of flogging his patent sound system in California.

3. We have spoken to Beryl Hankin, celebrating 30 years of Guru. Fans having largely blown away, she lost touch with her hero soon after the picture was taken.

"It was a teenage crush which somehow carried on. My parents would take me to all the shows and I'd stand at the back screaming with the girlies," she says. "I inflicted Emile on everybody."

And the North-East connection? "He always said he came from Barbados. I don't think he mentioned Blackhall Colliery at all."

ANOTHER musical note: last time we encountered Canon Bill Broad, ebullient Team Rector of Newton Aycliffe, he was essaying a sort of one man band rendition of Mozart's Horn Concerto (Flanders and Swann version). Another paper now reports that Bill is to become priest-in-charge of Chilton in addition to his duties at Grey Aycliffe. It's possible they meant Great.

LAST week's note on Ringtons Tea - "Makes you pee," as the bairns' doggerel supposed - proved timely for Freda Bostock.

There was also a note from Chris Eddowes in Hartlepool. "I thought it was old age. Now I know it's drinking so much Ringtons," he says.

Just the previous day, Freda had firmly denied to buy anything from the Ringtons man, despite his polite persistence. Finally he asked why.

"Because when we lived in the Northallerton area," said Freda, "I found another Ringtons tea man peeing in the garden when he thought I was out."

It mightn't have been what the bairns had in mind, but it didn't half shift the salesman.

...and finally from this seat of learning, two e-mails about dags which (preposterous to relate) is the New Zealand term for those bits of matted wool around a sheep's backside.

Pete Winstanley in Kimblesworth says that in Australia they're called dingleberries; Chris Greenwell in Aycliffe Village supposes that in Co Durham they're called winnets. "The bits," he adds helpfully, "that simply winnet come off."