It began when he was 13, ten shillings a night for playing the piano after the darts match at the pub down the road.

Now he plays three nights a week at the Ramside Hall Hotel, outside Durham - altogether grander surroundings and a few bob more in his pocket, too.

In between he was a Butlin's Redcoat, ran his own cabaret club, was a North- East workmen's club musician when they'd queue half way down the street to get in, had a BBC Radio Cleveland show for 15 years and for another 15 wrote the "Clubs" column in The Northern Echo.

These days most clubs, their glass half-empty, have little need of musicians.

"They can't afford to pay them, but if they have an act they use backing tracks and the following week probably the same backing tracks. It's only karaoke, really," he says.

"A lot of the musicians are also very poor. They're getting money under false pretences and the clubs are like the rest of the licensed trade, really struggling."

Only yesterday, Durham CIU secretary Mick McGlasham warned that 15 of the county's 230 surviving clubs could close in the next 18 months. He chiefly blamed the smoking ban.

NEIL Harris was one of seven children, his parents local reps for Singer sewing machines, none of the family musical.

Trying shortly after the war to sell a machine to a hard-up farmer's wife, Elsie Harris announced that they had a new system by which the buyer could pay a deposit and the rest in weekly installments.

The lady couldn't even afford the deposit.

"You must have something I could take instead," said Elsie, and was told that there was only the old cottage piano in the corner.

Thus, stitch in time, the Joanna found an improbable new home. "I thought our Neil might like to have a go," said Elsie.

One Singer, one song, as they used to say in the concert halls. He was ten.

Taught for three years by the local church choirmaster, half a crown a time, he then started giving his own lessons and was able to charge five bob.

The RAF turned him down on medical grounds, perforated ear drum, instead he became a Redcoat at Pwhelli - "the next best way of getting into uniform" - for £10 a week and all found. They were, says Neil, among the happiest days of his life.

In the winter he played pubs and clubs around Manchester - "Not just low dives, I had residencies at a lot of classy clubs" - and at 25 was asked to take over the Carlisle Club in Eccles.

Artists like Jimmy Tarbuck, Engelbert Humperdinck, Don Estelle and Freddie Star stopped there on the road to stardom. The Beatles didn't. "They wanted £15 a night. I could get local groups much cheaper and still fill the room," he recalls.

When the club was gutted by fire in 1965 he moved to the North-East, where clubland was thickly populated and good pianists could still call the tune.

He became pianist and organist at the Lion Club in Hartlepool, was spotted by BBC presenter Graham Aldous and began Everybody Sing, an award-winning outside broadcast.

It took them around the region, never more memorably than the night in a North Yorkshire village hall where the piano was so helplessly out of tune it barely played at all.

Determined that the show must go on, Neil was thus disconcerted to see the front row - all elderly ladies - streaming, screaming, for the door.

"I didn't think I played that badly, but then I noticed a family of mice who'd been living quite happily in the bottom of the piano and decided that enough was enough."

Many also remember him as resident musician at the workmen's club in Stillington, a small village near Stockton, which attracted dozens of big-name acts.

"We used to have coaches come from all over the region, people queuing from six o'clock. The concert room held 280 and it was always full, but then they extended it to hold 400 and still just 280 turned up. It seemed half-empty, and it killed it."

He also played at the Royal County Hotel in Durham. "They wanted a cocktail pianist and they held auditions.

They said they'd had 17 piano players but only one pianist; I got the job."

These days he lives in Shotton Colliery, near Peterlee, edits an entertaining parish magazine, plays the organ for funerals, has no plans to close the lid on a tuneful career.

"I love the piano. It's always been my first instrument and it's been a very good friend to me. Why on earth should I stop now?"

SERENDIPITOUSLY having bumped into Neil Harris at Ramside Hall - bar and piano stool being in close proximity - we returned the following evening for a dinner and bumped into John Burton, Tony Blair's former constituency agent in Sedgefield.

Phil Wilson, Blair's successor as MP, was there, too - so greatly troubled by a back problem that he'd periodically to stand up during the meal. "It's what comes of being 6ft 2ins," he said.

Already the subject of a biography by Keith Proud, also a Northern Echo writer, the engaging Burton is set for centre stage in a second, expected later this year, by former Tyne Tees television journalist Eileen McCabe. He has co-operated with both.

That much was mentioned in a Sunday newspaper diary item on December 9 last year. Burton's line, it said, would cause "shockwaves" because he would claim that his old boss - despite much speculation - had no plans to become a Roman Catholic.

"John says it's simply not going to happen. There wouldn't be any point," a friend' was quoted as saying.

The formal conversion was announced the following week.

John shrugs it off. "I always told people that, it was the standard line," he says.

"Mind, I didn't expect it to be about three days later."

The story, it should be noted, was in The Observer. It's the Sunday Times which has the Insight column.

Chapter and verse

CHAPTER and verse, starting tomorrow, a group of churchgoers in Darlington plan to read the bible - aloud - from start to finish. Text messaging, as it were.

The event's at Elm Ridge Methodist church, involves around 100 people and isn't sponsored. They hope to reach the last Amen by Tuesday.

"We feel the church is really growing, but we are experiencing spiritual attack in terms of the number of people who have health problems," says the Reverend Phil Clarke, Darlington's superintendent minister.

"We just want to tell God we're still going for it."

The Bible, written over 1,500 years, has 55 books, 1,189 chapters and around three-quarters of a million words. Using the New International edition, Elm Ridge hopes to break about 2am each day and to start again with an early breakfast.

Looking forward to it? "Yes, of course," says Phil.

MARGARET Nicholson, who has died at the age of 85, was a lovely lady, an enthusiastic member of Methodist church and Townswomen's Guild and a proud wife and mother.

Few may remember the time when she also became secretary of the Northern League.

Gordon, her husband, had been league secretary since 1966 and was an occasionally acerbic critic of the Football Association, the game's governing body. In 1978, the FA (in its wisdom) decided that he had gone too far and suspended him from football for six months.

Instead - "to the astonishment of some but the wry amusement of most,"

the Northern League's history recalls - Margaret was appointed in his place.

It says much for the closeness between them that their style, and even their signature, seemed so remarkably alike.

Margaret's funeral is at Bishop Auckland Methodist church at 11am tomorrow.

JANET Chapman, a former curate at St Cuthbert's church in Darlington - her husband Peter was head librarian at the Echo - has been appointed Canon Liturgist at Birmingham Cathedral.

The post has responsibility for the worshipping life of the cathedral. Other cathedrals call it a precentor.

Clearly fit for high office, Janet also has a letter in the hallowed columns of this week's Church Times on the benefits of regularly working out at the gym.

They include being able to lift "the heavier babies and toddlers of today's baptisms".

Presently vicar of Banbury, in Oxfordshire, Janet also reports many pastoral encounters and conversations in the gym - "often given added depth in the showers".

She's learned lessons, too. "Just going into the gym and being daunted by the array of machines reminded me what it must be like to come to a church service for the first time."

WITH tales of bicycles made for two - he and his wife rode tandem - the Rt Rev Martin Wallace, Bishop of Selby, addressed the annual cyclists' service at Coxwold on Sunday.

It's not that about which service organiser Eddie Grainger rings from Middlesbrough, however, but about his son Neil's appearance in Heartbeat on May 25. He plays a Yorkshire farmer, who gets arrested.

"He seems to get arrested quite a lot on television," muses Eddie.

Filming took place around Goathland last November. Eddie, proud father, went to watch - inevitably on his bike. "The last scene was shot at six o'clock, by which time it was dark and freezing. By then I was back in the hotel, in the bath."

THE Church Times also notes the story, pinched from the tabloids, of the chap who in the foil top of his cider bottle - bought at the Tanners Hall pub in Darlington town centre - saw the image of Christ, complete with beard and crown of thorns.

"It gave me goose pimples," said Michael Cartwright, a Middlesbrough taxi driver. "I'm not sure what message Jesus was sending, and maybe we'll never know."

The Echo appears to have missed it.

There's a moral there somewhere.

BENEATH the strapline "Still with us", meanwhile, the Oldie magazine has a two-page piece - what in the trade is called a cuttings job - on Dr David Jenkins, the former Bishop of Durham.

Dr Jenkins - now living in Cotherstone, Teesdale - is described as "a perfectly ordinary man". He may have been called many things in 83 tumultuous years, but never that.

Speaking of cuttings jobs, someone - in exchange for a tenner - has sent The Oldie a news report from the Echo.

"An overheating light bulb triggered a fire alarm in the City Art Gallery in York yesterday afternoon. Fire crews were not needed."

It's in the section headed "Not many dead: important stories you may have missed".

10:33am Thursday 15th May 2008

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