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Mr Velvet arrives in a suit at four in the afternoon for an interview in an empty function room and apologises twice for the state of the carpet, which is not his responsibility.

You’ve been in this room four nights a week for three years. Doesn’t it get old?

It’s not the same room. Wednesday is a different room to Saturday. Wednesday you get the regulars and the ones who’ve had a bad week. Saturday you get engagements and arguments. Same carpet.

Neville Marsh called what you do “Preston Baroque.” He didn’t mean it kindly.

No. But he keeps coming, and he pays, and he sits at the back on the left. Whatever he thinks he means, he’s wrong about, because if he was right he’d have stopped.

We had it put on the poster. Ron didn’t like it. Ron’s never liked anything that worked.

Some people would say the act is a bit —

Say it.

Old-fashioned.

Everyone in that room on a Wednesday night is somebody’s mother or somebody’s widower or somebody who has just been told something they didn’t want to hear. They are not there to be surprised. They are there to be handled gently for two hours by people who are dressed properly. That’s not old-fashioned. That’s a service.

And “The Girl from Ipanema” runs fourteen minutes.

Fourteen and five. It was six when we started. Nino added a bit. Then Barry added a bit answering Nino. Then the girls found a thing they do in the fourth chorus. Nobody has ever taken anything out, because you’d have to tell somebody their bit was the bit going.

Where does it end?

It doesn’t. That’s the point of it.

I flew eleven thousand miles on the strength of a reissue. This is the sort of thing you do once in a career and spend the rest of it justifying, so let me get the justification over with: Songs for an Empty Function Room is one of the best records I have heard in fifteen years of doing this, and it was made by a swimming pool salesman in a caravan, alone, because his band had stopped existing and he had nothing else to do on a Tuesday.

What I was not prepared for was the band.

Hartmut Bell says the reissue has sold four thousand copies in Europe. Did anyone tell you?

Velvet: He sent a letter. Bettina read it out at the Thursday. Then we did “Volare.”

That’s it?

Auguste: He put the letter in his jacket. It is still in the jacket. I have seen it.

Del, you joined last year from a church. What is the difference?

Auguste: In a church, if you play something beautiful, nobody says anything, because they are being polite to God. Here, if you play something beautiful, a man in the third row puts his drink down. That is the entire difference and it is not a small one.

There are people writing about you now who weren’t born when you started.

Velvet: They’ll get over it.

Auguste: He does not mean that.

Velvet: I mean it kindly. Every ten years someone finds us and thinks they’ve found something. What they’ve found is a Tuesday. We do this on Tuesdays. We did it last Tuesday and we’ll do it next Tuesday, and when they stop coming we’ll still do it.

Do you understand why people respond to the record?

Velvet: No.

— long pause —

Velvet: It was a bad time. I had no band and I was selling pools to people who didn’t want them. I made that thing because it was that or the television. I don’t think it’s good. I think it’s true, which people mix up with good, and I’ve had eleven years of being told about it now and I still can’t listen to it in the car.

On the fourth night, in a bowls club in Preston, he sang “Empty Function Room” to about sixty people, most of whom were over seventy, none of whom had heard of Nocturne Reissues, all of whom knew every word. I have not been able to stop thinking about it.

We sit in the same room, under different management and better lighting. He is sixty-two. He apologises for the carpet, which is new.

Thirty-three years next month. In this room.

Different carpet.

What’s changed?

Nino’s dead. Barry’s dead. Marjorie’s dead. Ken went in ’09 and Lorraine in ’15. The rest is the same. That’s what changes: the people, and nothing else.

The band has had thirty-one members.

And I’ve never once picked one. The one leaving picks the one coming. It sounds like nothing. Every other band I know broke up over an audition.

Bettina Croll was nominated by Nino eight months before he died. Did you know?

No. Del had the letter. She sat on it because he asked her to. He wrote it in March and he played until October and he never said a word to me about it.

He knew I’d have argued. He was right. I’d have argued.

You’ve called the new record The Long Goodnight.

It means the last song is always slow. That’s all it means.

People will read it as a farewell.

People read everything as a farewell after sixty. We did a Farewell Forever Tour in 2018 and we were back in fourteen months, so nobody should be taking my word on it. I’ll stop when the room stops, and the room hasn’t stopped. Friday nights. Coburg. Come and see.