Listener No 4428: Classic FM Track by Aelfre
Posted by Dave Hennings on 30 December 2016
Aelfre (as Aelfre) had his last Listener back in 1994, but (as someone else) appeared in November last year with a TS Eliot theme. This week, we had a gramophone record to complete… how quaint. Only twenty radials, and of the variety where no entry shared letters with a neighbour.
My initial reaction was “Not another LP that will trip me up… like my woeful Yellow Submarine entry”! In a way, I hoped that the title would lead us to a piece of true classical music although the requirement for a BAND in the centre made that unlikely.
The radials went fairly well, with REUSED, ENCODE, ASIANS, HAMLET, IGNARO, ORCHEL and HEROIC. These were followed by about half of the Arc clues which were all four letters. After that, the solve went fairly quickly, although several clues needed careful deconstruction (I think I like that word). For example:
| 4rad | LEGLIN | Nigella nearly stewed in Ayrshire bucket on ravine NIGELL(a)*, def ‘Ayrshire bucket’, LEG (on, as in cricket) + LIN (ravine) |
| 9rad | MALONE | Cheers boss, Sam Beckett’s moribund character? 2 meanings: US sitcom Cheers character Sam Malone; Beckett’s eponymous character from Malone Dies |
| 22arc | ERAS | Times mostly scratch a monster’s head off def ‘Times’, ERAS(e) (scratch, mostly), (t)ERAS (monster missing first letter) |
| 43arc | SCAT | That is in dropping of savage (not male) SC (that is) AT (in), def ‘dropping’, SCATHE (savage, vt) – HE (male) |
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