Don McLean watches Mick Jagger carrying on singing whilst Meredith Hunter is stabbed to death by Hell's Angels. His reaction? Repressed violence.

...of American Pie referring to Altamont? I'd always assumed it to be more about the general satanic image that The Stones were cultivating, but now that you mention it, it might make more sense.

Although from where he's sitting, it's very easy for Don McLean to judge. We'll never know whether things would have got even worse if Jagger had stopped singing and the band had walked off, reflecting on the way that the decision to hire The Hell's Angels as security was a somewhat flawed one. His attempts at quelling the violence ("brothers and sisters, why are we fighting?") certainly didn't do any good, but I'm not sure what else he could have done.

I think you're right. Although Jagger can look idiotic at the wrong time like no one else, I'm not sure what else he could have done. I'm sure that the Stones couldn't have stopped what happened that day; although, from the stage, Keith Richards' confrontational anger certainly seemed far less naive than Jagger's pointedly outdated Woodstock idealism: "Relax, let's all get into a groove, etc".

I had someone painstakingly explain Mclean's lyrics to me, step by step, about twenty years ago. Not sure if she was right, but it all made sense and she claimed that Altamont was the reference here. That said, she's one of those people who was quite happy to wax lyrical about 'the jester' but couldn't abide Blonde On Blonde.

There used to be a trend for pop stars to appear on the front of magazines swinging their fists in the old one-two punch combo. It was nauseating at the best of times (Bono springs to mind - as if he needed more ways of looking like a tit), but when my favourite waste of space Bobby Gillespie - who looks as if my octogenerian mum could fill him in - adopted that posture, the deathless epithet "fist magnet" was my first thought.

On a different tack, when Graham Norton made a crass and unfunny comment about Maurice Gibb, who'd either just died or was in intensive care, Robin issued a threat that he'd sort him out if he ever bumped into him. My sympathy is entirely with the Brother Gibb, but, well, he doesn't look very scary does he?

...which he insisted was only owned for the sole purpose of driving to the coastal defences in Norfolk and...well, you can fill in the rest.