In the olden days, you could listen over and over again to your musical heroes doing their thing, yet go for years without hearing them speak. The songs themselves gave few clues to the real accents of the singers. Singing seemed to iron out regional vowel sounds so that, in song, everyone sounded the same – rather American. I was aware that Slade and (half of) Led Zeppelin were from the same neck of the woods as me, but I struggled to pick up any trace of Walsall in Noddy Holder’s singing voice or any hint of West Bromwich in Robert Plant’s. It was years before I heard........

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