#bwncvs

The outtake has its own outtake, by the way - there's a pretty good alternate version drenched with the unmistakable harmonica of Sugar Blue (born James Whiting), the guy who played on The Rolling Stones' Miss You.

Appropriately enough, the backing musicians on the Basement Tapes have a strange naming history themselves. They're now called The Band on official recordings from Dylan's infamous 1966 world tour and the Basement Tapes, but they never took that name until after both were completed. It was in part a reference to the fact that they were always just called "the band" when they were with Dylan, and before that with Ronnie Hawkins, although they were actually The Hawks (and briefly Levon & The Hawks after they stopped working with Hawkins.)

Grossman was never indiscreet about his clients and never wrote a book, yet he is referred to scathingly as a kind of model for muck-raking mud-slinging unreliable rockstar biographers. All of which would make perfect sense provided Morrissey actually meant to name instead the infamous Dylanologist A J Weberman, known for stealing and studying Dylan's garbage and for, unsurprisingly, having a bitter feud with him.

George Clooney used to be in a show called E/R. It was a creaky Elliott Gould sitcom that was no one's finest hour and lasted one season in the mid-80s. In the UK pre-satellite it was only ever shown after sensible people had gone to bed. A few years later Clooney was one of the stars of a very different show called ER that was lots of people's finest hour and a huge success.

The story has always gone that FGTH took their name from a magazine headline, possibly in Variety. Wikipedia partially corrects this, pointing out that they got it from a Guy Peellaert picture - in his hugely influential book Rock Dreams - showing that headline. But to be more precise the headline in the picture is "Frankie Goes Hollywood".

The philosopher or sorcerer in question, Nicolas Flamel, is probably the only person mentioned both in The Da Vinci Code and in the Potter books. He and his wife Perenelle were real people but there's a better than even chance they did not actually live for 600+ years thanks to the magical stone.

The Velvet Underground recorded the Lou Reed song Stephanie Says in 1968 but it remained unreleased - apart from on bootlegs - until 1985. Meanwhile Reed released two songs with the same tune as Stephanie Says on his 1973 solo album Berlin: Caroline Says I & II. The second of these shares some lyrics - including the title character's nickname Alaska - with Stephanie Says.

The Jackson Five usually had six members, on stage at least, so when Jermaine left they could really have kept the name. They only changed into The Jacksons because when they changed label, Motown kept not just Jermaine (who was married to the boss's daughter) but the name The Jackson Five as well.