He has played Las Vegas and anywhere that people will stand still

He has played Las Vegas, and “anywhere that people will stand still long enough”.”I’ve finished a new album, Rock Island Line Rocks On,” he said last week. “We’ll be going on a 40th anniversary tour.”Half-Scottish, half-Irish, and brought up in London’s East End, Donegan began his career by bending his high-pitched nasal tones round the classic songs of American blacks. Taking the blues classics of Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie, he dusted them down with jangling guitar strings and a drummer on overdrive and introduced them to a country which had scarcely heard of either.The hits stopped when fans shifted from skiffle groups to beat groups to rock bands; the purists could obtain the original records by Leadbelly. His last big hit was in the autumn of 1962.However, in the intervening three decades he has done well enough to fund three marriages and homes in Malaga and Florida with sales of around 10 million records. One group, calling itself The Worried Men, featured a young Adam Faith. Another band of strummers, The Quarrymen, included John Lennon.Lonnie’s hits included “Don’t You Rock Me Daddy-O”, “Cumberland Gap”, “Putting on the Style”, “Battle of New Orleans”, and the novelty numbers “Does Your Chewing Gum Lose its Flavour On the Bedpost Overnight?” and “My Old Man’s a Dustman” (who wore “gor blimey trousers” and lived in a council flat).

Guitars were strummed: the skiffle group was born.They sang “It Takes a Worried Man”. Thousands of young people reproduced its catchy tunes, using a washboard thrashed with thimbled fingers for a rhythm section and a tea chest fitted with a broom pole and a single string as bass. Almost forgotten in these days of house, garage, funk, techno, hip hop, trip hop and Brit pop, skiffle was the music style that swept the nation at the time of Angry Young Men and the Suez Crisis.
Lonnie, with a string of nearly 30 hits from “Rock Island Line” (1956) onwards, was its ruler; simplicity was its success. The King of Skiffle is eligible for his bus pass. Lonnie Donegan, whose mixture of trad jazz and pop inspired the Fifties beat boom which led to the Beatles, is 65 tomorrow. According to the Department of the Environment, protection of the landscape must be balanced against “unnecessary burdens on industry”.. The Government has now drawn up a code of practice requiring operators to give more notice of their plans.Despite promising to clamp down on abuses, however, it has now published proposals which would result in an extension of permitted development rights, allowing larger satellite dishes and radio-telephone aerials to be erected on buildings without planning permission.

Vodafone declined to disclose what Lord Carnarvon is paid for the mast on Beacon Hill but said a yearly rental of pounds 1,000-pounds 3,000 was typical for rural sites.Critics of the system include Tim Yeo, the former Conservative Environment minister, who recently launched a fierce attack in Parliament on mobile- phone masts. there is little sign of a co-ordinated and systematic approach … in many instances, separate masts owned by different operators can be found within a short distance of each other”.One industry insider told the Independent on Sunday that many mobile- phone operators deliberately erected masts higher than 15 metres without seeking planning permission, relying on councils not to prosecute when the breach of law came to light.The four main networks – Vodafone, Cellnet, Mercury and Orange – often refuse to share sites, and thus avoid duplication of masts, because of “short-term commercial reasons”, he added.The cash incentives offered by the networks have also proved divisive. The Council for the Protection of Rural England argued that under the Government’s own planning guidance on sites of archaeological importance, it should have been protected.