Listener 4731 Whatsername By Ifor

[HawkCrossword]

Am I the first to post for this one? A superb puzzle - thanks, Ifor!

Challenging throughout, but well-paced, and with a nice moment when it all started to make sense. I'm happy with my final Answer, but I think this is an ambiguous area.

[Eagledave]

Disagree that the final answer is ambiguous as the question is very specific

[emcee]

Another excellent puzzle. The clues were fine and I had no difficulty with the Answer, however a couple of the thematic items took quite a while to tease out; one certainly wasn't obvious from the lyrics.

Many thanks, Ifor.

[Dim16]

Enjoyed completing the grid.

Unable to parse about half the clues so won't be completing the puzzle, which is a shame since it sounds fun.

But them's the breaks.

[upsetter]

Grid filled, items highlighted (40 cells), song and singer identified.
But only have three of the seven entries with words that differ from their clue answers.

Apart from that a great work out - thanks Ifor.

[Cruncher]

Coming in a little behind Upsetter at the moment with more work to do on the endgame. Am always astonished at how much information setters can pack away below the radar until the pennies start to cascade.

[sunny-dave]

All done, and I'm happy with the final grid and highlights.

This is definitely one which would have been all but impossible in pre-internet days - a relatively obscure song and fiddly lyrics that you need to be precise with.

Thanks Ifor - another one in the current run of good puzzles.

[Dim16]

Damn.

Against my better judgement I persisted with parsing the clues, so that I reckon I've now identified the question, not that it helps.

So now I have the joy of trawling through hundreds of synonyms in the vain hope of identifying an obscure song.

Great.

[upsetter]

@Dim16 - to be fair the song would be obscure to most people under 90.

I can say that the title of the song is a synonym for the title of the crossword (although not the other way around in Chambers).

[Scorpius]

I'm afraid I don't share the enthusiasm for this puzzle at all. I thought it was very contrived and unnecessarily convoluted. Finding the theme took me three times as long as filling the grid after a lot of guesswork and time-consuming Googling. Some of the synonyms were pretty obscure, and I would never have worked out the birth name by the route outlined in the preamble. I back-solved it after finding an obscure song title that predates my birth by two years.

The clues were good, so I did enjoy the gridfill, but that's the only positive thing I have to say about it.

Upsetter, you might wish to review your final grid. The preamble is not inaccurate in respect of changed entries.

[upsetter]

@Scorpius - we got there in the end but until you get the lyrics the entry method does not become apparent.

[pushmi-pullyu]

I've identified the song and singer and answered the question. But I'm 3 cells short on the highlighting, not helped by the fact that I've found 2 versions of the song and a key word is different.

[Dim16]

This week's Inquisitor is a better puzzle for what my opinion is worth, but maybe that's just because I finished it.

[little_ted]

The song isn't *that* obscure: it's featured in the Home Front episode of The World at War, and thus was on telly yet again only a few days ago. (And every time it annoys me that it crashes into an ad-break rather than letting it run for 5 more seconds to the inspirational big finish.) I think two of the triplets have fairly clear synonyms, which luckily must belong together, and googling the combo gives immediate result.
But I'm still stuck on the full details of the endgame, which seems to me to be rather GWIT.