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Richard Lester has been taking the plaudits this year for A Hard Day's Night on its 50th anniversary. It's one of the great British films of the sixties - and the soundtrack isn't too bad either. Two years earlier, Lester had made a film with a very different soundtrack. It's Trad, Dad! came out just ahead of the Mersey explosion and right at the end of the Trad Jazz boom.

Yeah, nice fella, but a lousy trombone player!

Kenny Ball on Brian Matthew

I've always thought of Brian Matthew as, primarily, a jazz fan. "Yes, that's true", he says. "In the initial stages of Saturday Club we'd have a set pattern. A house group for that week who would accompany two or three of the artists that we'd got on the show. Then we would have a trad band, because it was at the tag end of the trad age. It was beginning to fade, but there was still enough for us there. We'd always have a band on, such as Kenny Ballor Acker Bilk. So I got to know quite a lot of the guys that I'd idolised, and they became workmates - that was nice."

The term 'trad' (it's usually called Dixieland in America) was apparently coined by Terry Lightfoot, leader of one of the second-string bands behind the big trad trio of Ball, Barber and Bilk. Lightfoot later said his career highlight was playing UK dates with the New Orleans trombonist, Kid Ory, in 1959. "Terry Lightfoot... I liked him, and I thought he was a good clarinet player, actually, but he was never that big. People thought he was a bit of a semi-pro but he was not", says Brian, slightly agitated. "He was better than that - he was good. Of course he had the disadvantage of having a brother who was a fantastically good banjo player and guitarist." That was Paddy Lightfoot, who played in his brother's band until 1961 before joining Kenny Ball for many years.

Brian has a lot of admiration for Chris Barber, who brought Muddy Waters to Britain in the 60s as well as nurturing the talent of Lonnie Donegan in the early 50s. "He had good people in that band, old Chris, didn't he? Funnily enough, in profile we look very alike. We used that on some publicity material, with photos of us. Not identical, but very, very similar."

"Kenny Ball knew that I was trying to play the trombone - really badly - and he pulled a stroke on me at the Albert Hall. He gave me his trombone player's trombone and said 'Come on, join in with this' just as they were going on stage. And of course I hadn't a clue! He did that stunt on me a couple of times.

"Just before he died somebody met him. They said they were talking to Kenny Ball and he mentioned me, and he said (puts on broad cockney accent) 'Yeah, nice fella, but a lousy trombone player!' But he was a good friend, Kenny. I didn't mind him saying that, because it was true."