Even Saints, or rather Tom van Vollenhoven, tapped into this market with the fabulous Vollenhoven Calypso in 1968, sold in aid of his Testimonial Year at the club.

That is a record still remembered fondly by a certain generation of Saints’ supporters.

I wonder how many of you remember a second Saints-related disc, called Saints Alive by a trio who called themselves Fingers, some 10 years after that Flying Springbok classic?

Saints Historian Alex Service did a little bit of research and after meeting up with Danny Allender has dug out a great little story.

Danny, who worked at the club at the time as Assistant Commercial Manager to Ken Heeley also had a voluntary role in the Social Club at Knowsley Road as a member of the Organising Committee.

He tells the story of this record, which has become a unique piece of memorabilia for aficionados of the red vee: “It was Social Club Manager Dave Newman who originally booked the group.

"They were from Buxton in Derbyshire and they were talented lads for sure.

"The keyboard player, Steve Sayer, wanted to be a songwriter, from what I remember.

"They went down well at the club, and we booked them for three successive Thursday nights.

"I talked to them about rugby but really it wasn’t their cup of tea.

"Anyhow I asked them about the possibility of writing a song about the game and Saints in particular.

"Dave Newman picked up on the idea too.

"One time when they were setting up Steve handed me this sheet of paper and asked me what I thought of it.

"It looked like a piece of poetry rather than song lyrics but then he played an accompanying tune on his keyboard to go with it.

"I told him it didn’t seem quite right in its raw form.

"He said he would work on it for maybe a month or so and get back to me."

Meanwhile, Dave Newman had signed up the group as the Saints’ Social Club’s resident house band.

"They had to be good when you think about it," Danny added.

"They had to provide the backing for a whole variety of different artistes, including Dave Newman, who specialised in yodelling songs like Frank Ifield.

"They would have to ‘read the dots’ from the sheet music each artiste provided them with.

"Steve then played his latest version of his Saints’ song to me, and I must confess it was quite good and he later gave me a floppy ‘demo’ disk to listen to."

The DJ played it at the club to gauge opinion generally, but the feedback wasn’t that great.

"We didn’t give up on it though and Steve said to me that he had a contact in Rochdale who had his own studio and we could get a ‘proper’ record made but it would cost £1,200 [about £7,000 equivalent today] to hire the building.

"Dave Newman came up with the prospective title: Saints Alive," Danny added.

The next step was to get the finance to make the record with club secretary Geoff Sutcliffe liking the idea.

Danny said: "We put it to the Board and to our amazement, they agreed to go with it!

The band duly went ahead and laid down their backing track and invited us down one Thursday evening to help out with additional vocals.

So off we went to the engagingly named Ratchet Studios in Rochdale, in Dave Newman’s Citroen.

"It was full of the equipment you would have expected in such a place and the Studio Manager told us to sit down and he would call us when he was ready.

"It was after 10 o’clock at night when we made our contribution, basically just cheering which they over-dubbed and we also had to chant ‘St Helens St Helens St Helens.’

"Steve produced the record and we had around 2,000 copies pressed.

There was no launch as such.

"The records were delivered to the club and that was it.

"It wasn’t a total flop, selling about 800, but didn’t trouble the charts, put it that way.

"Looking back, it was brilliant to be involved in such things at the Saints’ Social Club and I have many happy memories of the many good times we had.”