Few now recall that early Beatles gigs would have placed them on the same bill as a comedian, a troupe of dancing-girls, a juggler, a tight-rope walker and a troupe of performing poodles. Tribute is paid to many such acts- such as the "Blue" comedian Max Miller- on the Sgnt. Pepper's cover.

Who now remembers the great British broadcasting institution that was "Sunday Night at the London Palladium"- a famous West End theatre- for anything other than the Beatles topping a bill of just such acts?

The Stones (naughty boys, as ever) created a national scandal by refusing to appear on the revolving stage, displaying all that night's acts, at the end of the show. Their excuse was that they had to avoid their fans, but I'm sure they secretly considered all that showbiz stuff to be old hat.

I remember an early Beatles TV appearance on just such a variety show when they were interviewed alongside the buck-toothed, crazy-haired Liverpudlian comedian Ken Dodd.

Doddy was asked whether he'd ever considered going into the music industry and he replied, quite sensibly, that if he ever did he'd have to change his name to something earthy such as "Rock" or "Cliff".

To which John sarcastically responded:

"Yeah: Sod Gravel".

It was at that point that you knew that the times were indeed a-changin'.

See, too, the contemporaneous John Osborne play "The Entertainer", in which the decline of the music-hall is presented as a stage metaphor for the decline of Empire.

Many of the old music-halls were actually called "The Empire". The Hackney Empire still survives.

And all that followed from the music-hall:

1. The Crazy World of Arthur Brown's "Fire" was a fire-eating act with a rock n roll accompaniment.

2. Elton John dresses as Donald Duck when he performs in Central Park.

3. Peter Gabriel dons a red dress and a fox's head and Genesis become famous overnight.

4. Mick Jagger sings "Starfucker" mounted on a huge inflatable penis.

Eventually, even the Yanks get the general idea and Alice Cooper decapitates babies with a guillotine on stage and performs with a boa constrictor.

Let us take a large step back in time to medieval England, say to the year 1300. Hackney is now just a place-name embedded within London, north-east of the City, but then it was a small village. It lay on the west side of the River Lea but separated from it by a large area of marshland (to be commemorated about 550 years later by a music-hall song whose refrain went: “With a ladder and some glasses / You could see the Hackney Marshes, / If it wasn’t for the houses in between”).

The countryside around Hackney was pleasant, open, good-quality grassland, which became famous for the horses bred and pastured there. These were riding horses, “ambling horses”, as opposed to war horses or draught horses. Hence hackney became the standard term for a horse of this type.

Because such horses were often made available for hire, the word also came to refer, about the end of the fourteenth century, to any horse that was intended to be hired out. Later still, the emphasis shifted from “horse” to “hire”, and it was used for any passenger vehicle similarly available, especially the hackney coach or hackney carriage. This last term became the usual one for a vehicle that could be hired — today’s London black taxis, with not a horse in sight, are still formally referred to by that name.

Horses of the hackney type were often worked heavily, in the nature of things that were hired out to all and sundry. So the word evolved in parallel with the previous sense to refer figuratively to something that was overused to the point of drudgery. By the middle of the sixteenth century, hackney was being applied to people in just this sense, and was abbreviated about the start of the eighteenth century to hack, as in hack work; it was applied in particular to literary drudges who dashed off poor-quality writing to order — hence its modern pejorative application to journalists.

Hackney horses were also widely available and commonly seen, to the extent that they became commonplace and unremarkable. So yet another sense evolved — for something used so frequently and indiscriminately as to have lost its freshness and interest, hence something stale, unoriginal or trite. The adjective hackneyed communicated this idea from about the middle of the eighteenth century on.

By the way, it was thought at one time that this whole set of words derived from the French haquenée, an ambling horse. The first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary considered this to be so, but modern writers are sure that the French term was actually borrowed from the English place name, so great was the reputation of Hackney’s horses even in medieval times.

Interesting, is that Flemish? Was the song ever performed in English?