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Prelude may have made it on to Top of the Pops with a Neil Young hit, but they never did strike it rich

ON the same bill as the Bay City Rollers, Prelude played to an audience of 12 million on Top of the Pops. It was 1974, and the still-haunting song was called After the Goldrush.

After the goldrush, what then? On the same bill as a young lady called Sarah, they played two saturated Saturday nights ago at the 9 Kings Bistro in Barnard Castle.

Again it was pretty much a full house.

There were around 38 of us, dining from the same menu on four long tables. The sound seemed as 18-carat as ever.

Prelude were from Gateshead, in the beginning - Brian Hume, Ian Vardy and Irene, Brian's wife. Sung unaccompanied and in perfect harmony, Goldrush made number 21 in the UK, 12 in the USA and was number one in both Australia and Canada.

There was a fanfare blowing to the sun that was floating on the breeze Look at Mother Nature on the run in the nineteen-seventies Brian's now 61. Irene, still terrific in jeans, will be 60 shortly. "I know I'm a bit biased, but I still look at her and at other women who are 60 and I'm impressed,"

he says.

It was a Neil Young song, not theirs.

They never did strike it rich. "I can't afford to retire," insists Brian. "You get to 60 and you suddenly start thinking about pensions and all that mallarkey.

"There's always a desire to finish, but we really couldn't think about it for another three or four years. Besides, if you stop, what are you going to do. It beats pruning the roses."

The 9 Kings Bistro is in Barney's main car park, its name owing nothing to a Hanoverian family tree or to some sort of Christmas story in triplicate and everything to the postal address. It's 9 King Street.

Music evenings happen once a month.

Including a three-course meal - golden vegetable soup, minted lamb cobbler and a very tasty cheesecake with chocolate sauce on this occasion - an evening with Prelude is £19.50.

"It's just like playing in a big sitting room," says Irene as they come on stage, joined these past few years by Chris Ringer, who lives in Darlington and still works for the passport agency in Durham.

It might even, Irene supposes, be like their kitchen back in Gateshead, only eight times bigger. They rehearse in the kitchen.

We sit next to a nice couple who live up near Stang Forest, on the Durham/North Yorkshire border. She's a bit of a mushroom buff who reckons that Santa's reindeer only seemed to be flying because of something they'd eaten in the forest.

The reasoning's a bit hazy now, but it could explain Rudolph's very shiny nose, an' all.

For three years in the late 1980s, Brian and Irene effectively retired from the music scene, moved to Cotherstone - just up the road in Teesdale - while Brian taught at Branksome School, in Darlington. He even won a fun run in Barnard Castle. "I got my picture in the Teesdale Mercury," he recalls.

After three years they could no longer resist the foghorn of the Tyne and moved back to dear old Gateshead.

"We'd sort of dropped out of the music scene and decided that we missed it,"

says Brian.

Musically they're still wonderfully together; the crack's good, too. After the Goldrush, they recall, was simply the song which came to mind while they were waiting for a bus in Stocksfield, in the Tyne Valley, after a swim.

There were supposed to be pike in the river, says Brian. They didn't have swimming costumes, either. The song was originally an afterthought on an LP.

They also recall childhood days, the arrival of the family's first radiogram - "a sort of 1960s iPod" - and playing by the River Team, in which the only thing Gateshead's young 'uns were likely to catch was bubonic plague.

"It was so polluted," says Brian, "you only had to look at it and it would explode."

Though numbers at 9 Kings are necessarily limited, they're used to the small time now and to singing for our supper. Future bookings include Sedgefield Cricket Club (this Saturday), Moorsholm Village Hall, near Guisborough and the Causey Arch Inn near Stanley.

They're said to be pretty big at Middleton- in-Teesdale Masonic Hall, too.

"It's all about the sound," says Brian.

"If we still make a good sound, that's the buzz."

The sound's fantastic, everything from Reason to Believe to All Shook Up to Platinum Blonde, with which they also made Top of the Pops in 1980. They perform for two hours, sell a few CDs, happily chat thereafter.

No longer a goldrush, but digging it, nonetheless.

■ The 9 Kings Bistro, which by day trades as the Teesdale restaurant, opens seven days from 9-5pm and on Thursday-Saturday evenings. The next music evening is on April 26, with Jez Lowe. Details on 01833-638624.

SHE'S been on holiday; again. Honest.

Breakfast was thus taken at Café Unique in Darlington town centre - all day, £3.70 - a pleasant place with plenty of options. Simply asking for a scone prompts the litany of whether it's to be eat-in or out, buttered or unbuttered, strawberry or raspberry jam. "Too many questions at this time of the morning," said the blearycheery lady at the counter, but if that's intellectually demanding at 8am, how about trying to open the brown sauce sachet? You need good teeth to be a breakfast bachelor.

NATIONAL Express has taken over the East Coast main line, and thus the catering, too.

Though it seems little distinguishable from the last lot, reading the sandwich menu could pass a journey between Darlington and York.

"Chicken tikka and lentil dahl with tomatoes, coriander, chickpea and sunflower seeds on rich malted grain bread", perhaps, or "hot smoked salmon with honey, horseradish, cremé fraiche and watercress on thick malted wheatgrain."

There are crisps, too, and not just crisps (as they say in the M&S ads) but Pipers handmade crisps - 95p a bag - which may be Anglesey sea salt, Somerset cider vinegar, Cheddar cheese or Biggleswade sweet chilli. The last one, Biggleswade flies again, may be someone's idea of a joke.

It's all immodestly described as "mouth watering" - but when you ask, of course, all they have left is the standard issue ham and cheese toastie, for £3.75.

The toastie is deplorable. A Newcastle train crew would call it kizzened, a London crew immolated. It's served, as always, in a transparent wrapper with a piece of gold-coloured cardboard. There may be a National Express epicure award for any who can tell apart the cardboard and the sandwich.

First class also offers bottles of Laurent- Perrier Brut for just £43.95. Though National Express is to be wished bon voyage, it would be premature to raise a glass just yet.

A READER with an elephantine memory recalls our visiting Saltburn in the early 90s - surely back since? - and concluding that it was "gastronomic wilderness". "We've improved," he insists, and sends a list of restaurants including Rapp's - a continental café due to open yesterday on the site of Samuel Rapp's pre-war stationery store. Another day by the seaside shortly.

...and finally, the bairns wondered if we knew how to start a jelly race.

Ready, get set.

9:53am Tuesday 8th April 2008

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