Tuesday, the 20th of February 1973 to Tuesday, the 19th of February 1974

Peters and Lee

Welcome Home

Charting in the year of 1973, on the 20th of May, is Peters and Lee with the single “Welcome Home”.

This song was everywhere…

…well that’s what I recall anyway.

I remember these two being on TV a lot singing this. That also shows how middle aged my parents were by this time, and the programmes they were watching. Then again, there were only 3 TV channels, so there wasn’t that much of a choice.

Any entertainment show, whether it be a game show, comedy show, music show etc. If it had a half-way musical segment, this was on it.At one point, they even had their own TV series themselves, ”Meet Peters and Lee”.

Lennie Peters and Dianne Lee…

…had teamed up together a couple of years before in 1970.

Before then, Lennie, who had lost the sight in one eye at the age of 5 from a car accident, and had then lost the sight in the other eye at the age of 16 from a brick which had been thrown and had tragically struck him on the head, had since earned his living playing piano around the London pub circuit and had already released a few singles in the mid-to-late 1960’s.

Dianne was an actress and dancer who, at 21 years of age when she’d met and teamed up with Lennie, had been 18 years his junior.

Before they officially became a duo, Diane would provide backing vocals for Lennie’s’ solo performances, while she also earned a living part time as half of a dance act duo with one of her cousins.

Shortly afterwards, Diane would join Lennie at the front of the stage and they became known as ‘Lennie Peters & Melody’. It wasn’t until their management company suggested using both their surnames, thus giving Diane equal billing, that they became ‘Peters and Lee’.

They entered the talent show Opportunity Knocks a couple of years later and proved extremely popular, winning the show an impressive 7 times. That sort of publicity naturally led to a recording contract, a suitable song was found for them, and soon after, “Welcome Home” went into the charts at No.46 in the late Spring of 1973. It subsequently leapt up twenty places to No.26 the following week, broke the Top 20 by June, and leapt up to the Top 5 mid-way through that Summer month.

On the first day of July, it had eaten up a few more places to take it all the way to No.2, where it would sit behind Slade for two weeks before it seized its chance, and became the biggest selling single for the week, hitting No.1 between the 15th and the 21st of July.

The week after, it got knocked back to No.2 by Gary Glitter but stayed at that position all the way until mid-August.

It eventually left the Top 10 at the beginning of September, and began to slowly slip back down the chart, as Autumn took hold, before leaving altogether at the beginning of November, by which point it had accrued 24 total weeks in the U.K. Singles Chart, and had sold over an astonishing 800,000 copies.

An album followed, selling a quarter of a million units in itself.

A few more hit singles and TV appearances…

…kept them buoyant throughout the seventies until they eventually split in 1980.

Diane Lee went back to the theatre and embarked on some acting projects while Lennie Peters once again became a solo artist.

A few years later, after missing the success of their glory days together, the pair eventually teamed up once again in the mid eighties, releasing new material and becoming a regular live act once more.

Sadly, Lennie Peters passed away in 1992 from Bone Cancer. Dianne Lee carried on entertaining and eventually married music artist Rick Price, with whom she would perform as a duo once again until Rick died in 2022.

Personally I always thought Lennie Peters looked suspiciously like the british sports commentator David Vine, and those glasses were a disguise to try and hide the fact that, a few days after appearing on Top of the Pops, he’d be back on the TV presenting Ski Sunday.