The black leather jumpsuit, the comedy quiff and sideburns, the bejewelled manacles and the rings worn outside the black leather gloves… hysterical. Especially as it wasn’t even him singing.

 

Not only were there two Alvin Stardusts – Peter Shelley and Shane Fenton – but there were two Shane Fentons. And neither of them was called Shane Fenton. And I’ve only just found this out nearly 50 years later.

 

The “Alvin Stardust” who wrote, produced and sang My Coo-Ca-Choo was called Peter Shelley – no, not the Buzzcocks bloke – but a fellow who had worked behin the scenes for years in the music biz.

 

After a solitary TV appearance (a sadly erased performance on Live With Ayshea) he decided he didn’t like the limelight – and that his own ‘look’ – more like an accountant than a leather-clad rock star – was hardly likely to help the song get to the top of the charts.

 

So her persuaded his manager to hire a new Alvin – another old-timer, but one who looked the part – and by the time he was on Top of the Pops a week later, Shelley had been replaced by the guy in the video here, “Shane Fenton.”

 

Shane Fenton and the Fentones had enjoyed success as far back as the late 1950s. But Shane Fenton wasn’t real either – it was a stage name taken from a popular Western film (Shane) and a local printing firm in Mansfiel (Fenton’s) – and there were two of them too.

 

Back in 1961, the first Fenton, Johnny Theakston, had just recorded a demo tape for the BBC when he suffered a recurrence of childhood rheumatic fever and died. He was only 17. But the Beeb had liked the demo enough to give the band an audition on the radio.

 

At Johnny’s mother’s request, his friend Bernard Jewry – the band’s roadie – took over as front man for the radio show. When it went own well, he carried on as the new Shane Fenton until the Fentones broke up in 1964.

So no one had heard of him for almost a decade when he got the gig as Alvin Stardust 2.0 in 1973.

 

The original Alvin, Peter Shelley, was also a music biz veteran. He had started as a plugger with publishers Chappell Music, worked in production at EMI and was a talent scout at Decca, discovering King Crimson, Amen Corner and Ten Years After.

 

Eventually, he decided to have a crack at this pop lark himself. First he he knocked out My Coo-Ca Choo, inventing the alter ego of Alvin Stardust to perform it. Then, after recruiting Fenton/Jewry to take over the comedy Elvis persona, Shelley wrote two more Stardust hits, Jealous Mind and You You You.

 

He also found time to compose and perform two more top five hits – Gee Baby and Love Me, Love My Dog – under his own name the following year.

 

After that he founded Magnet Records, which became home to other rock’n’rollers including Matchbox and Darts, as well as Bad Manners and Chris Rea, making a tidy profit when Warner Bros bought the label in 1988 for £10 million from Shelley and his partner, Michael Levy.