THESE gentlemen posed a third of a century ago in the grounds of the Blunsdon House Hotel.

They were The Blunsdonairs, and the image is taken from the cover of their first and only album, Breakthrough.

It was discovered in the local interest section of IDL Records, one of two shops in Swindon’s tented market selling all kinds of music on vinyl.

The cover image is very much of its time, but the disc itself is filled with beautiful a capella six-part harmonies.

About 100 copies are thought to have been pressed in 1981 to be sold at live performances, and we’d love to know how many survive.

The sleevenotes say: “What have two college lecturers, two village shopkeepers, a headmaster and a director of a plant hire firm got in common?

“If you ventured into the sleepy North Wiltshire village of Blunsdon on any Thursday evening and listened very carefully, you might hear the answer to this riddle.

“For wafting on the breeze might come the sound of the four-part unaccompanied male voice harmony that you hear on this record or, alternatively, the gurgling of a rapidly emptying wine bottle.

“It is, I hasten to add, the unanimous love of singing that forms the primary bond between these men from different vocations.”

At least one other copy is known to exist in the wild. It belongs to Adver reader Vieve Forward. She put an appeal for information about it on the Adver’s website last year, which caught the attention of founder Blunsdonair Stephen Nicholls.

The Adver got in touch once more after the latest discovery of a copy.

Now aged 75 and living in Suffolk, Mr Nicholls still sings with a local community choir. He was a village shopkeeper during his Blundsonairs days, but left the group and the area in the late 1980s.

He told us: “When I gave up being clerk to the Blunsdon Council I had time on my hands and decided to form a quartet.

“I believe I advertised in a village publication, and six men applied. There was no particular ‘harmony singing’ scene in the area that I can remember.

“It was a magic moment when we six met up at one of our houses and started singing.

“I had planned on dropping two of the six so that we would be a true barbershop quartet, but we sounded so good, we all remained in the group.

“We sang and gave all our profits to the Roughmoor Centre for the Deaf. We did gigs all over the place – even singing Myfanwy in Welsh in Wales.”

A photo in the Adver archive shows a later incarnation of the group, a four-piece including original members Colin Scott and Peter Holmes plus Peter Watts and Roy Poulton.

Googling the group yields references on harmony enthusiasts’ sites as distant as the Czech Republic and the USA, plus a YouTube spot for Yes Sir That’s My Baby, a track from Breakthrough.

We’d be delighted to hear from other Blunsdonairs and people who own a copy of their record.