As brawls go, it was unique in Britain. Certainly, the combatants were older than usual. Umbrellas were brandished and handbags swung menacingly as 6,000 people tried to squeeze into a marquee big enough for only 4,000 and fights broke out over queue-jumping.

‘Their children would be ashamed if they could see how they’re behaving,’ said a sweating police officer trying to keep order.

One man was in tears. He was the figure they were all trying to get in to see in concert. Not one of the usual suspects, not a pampered pop star but an idol of a very different kind, a man nicknamed The Party King, The King of Corn and, of course, the Maestro of Muzak.

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In demmand: James Last was the figure that people physically fought each other to see in concert

Personality: While he was known as a fantastic musician, it was his performances and character on the stage that set him apart from many other of his contemporaries

This was James Last, the big band leader whose trademark dance-along and sing-along music gave him album sales in Britain that are still only just behind The Beatles and Elvis.

The original marquee for this particular concert, in Hampshire in 1986, had been damaged in a storm and the replacement was not big enough. In the end, the concert began two hours late, with a second one arranged by the promoters for the disappointed. But as Last raised his baton, he felt this was one of the worst professional nights of his career.

He wanted fans at his concerts always to enjoy ‘the best concert of their lives’.

James Last appeared in the spring for around the 90th time at London’s Albert Hall as part of a sell-out tour. But he will never perform there again.

His death at his home in Florida, aged 86, comes after he’d been selling records in extraordinary numbers — mainly to people above the age of 30 — in 150 countries for nearly half a century.

There can’t be anyone who hasn’t heard his music, even if the titles of his albums have sometimes been cringe-making — Trumpets A Go Go, Non Stop Dancing (umpteen of these), Sax And Violins A Go Go and so on.

The outpouring was relentless — an album a month, sometimes two. Yesterday their total sales were well past 100 million, not bad for a German boy brought up in World War II in heavily bombed Bremen, whose father, a postal worker, was told by his piano teacher when he was ten: ‘Your son is totally unmusical, Herr Last. Make him stop playing.’

Not bad for a boy who learned his music from the Wehrmacht, the German military machine that tried to conquer the world. Well, conquer the world he certainly did, though not quite as Hitler intended.

He wasn’t James then — that came when he signed with an American record label. He was Hans, Hansi to his friends for his entire life.

Hans, or James, overcame the talent issue in an unusual way — he switched to the double-bass.

Everlasting: The composer continued to perform well into his 80s. Here he is on stage at 'The Last Tour' at the Stadthalle, Vienna, Austria, in 2013

One more: This 2013 tour was billed as his last ever and pulled in sellout crowds all over the world

When he was not practising, he was running messages to anti- aircraft command posts during Allied air raids.

But whatever his old piano teacher had thought, music was always going to be his life — it was in his family, they all played something.

And at 14 he got a place at the Wehrmacht’s Buckeburg Military Music School, learning the double bass, piano and tuba.

When the war was over, he fled the military influence and joined the dance orchestra in Radio Bremen.

Every week I listen to the top national and international hits. I find out what’s on the music scene, and then make my choice. James Last says there is no secret to his success

But the Wehrmacht Military Music School wasn’t his only influence. As the war ended, Bremen was flooded with American servicemen. Some of them played jazz and other exciting music which he absorbed by listening on the radio to the American Forces Network (AFN).

So began an astonishing career that was to make him the most successful bandleader of our times.

He had fan clubs not only in Britain, but also in places as culturally diverse as Japan and Mexico, Saudi Arabia and especially Canada, where at one stage his music accounted for five per cent of all music album sales. So what was Hansi’s secret? A rather ungainly 6ft man with a drooping moustache and, for most of his career, a trademark goatee beard, he denied there was one.

‘Every week I listen to the top national and international hits,’ he said. ‘I find out what’s on the music scene, and then make my choice.’

In contrast to many pop idols, who sometimes spend two years and more creating a new album, having chosen the songs that he wanted to record Last would retire to the seclusion of the music room at his ocean-side ranch in Florida, where he would write the arrangements quite quickly.

(He’d compose his own songs, too, sung by artists including Elvis, Eddie Fisher and Andy Williams.)

He’d then gather his orchestra in his own studio attached to the house and set about recording each track with a minimum of fuss. And, having hit upon two basic formulas — one that made people want to dance, the other that made them want to sing — he never allowed the lush, rich sound of his orchestra, often with additional strings and choir, let them go.

Man and boy: James Last, pictured left, in his younger years, then again in 1998, right

His first album in 1959 was Tricks In Rhythm. Six years later, after aiming with modest success at the German market, came Non Stop Dancing. It was 1965, at the height of the endless Sixties party of permissiveness and The Beatles. Even Elvis was feeling the draught of the new-wave music.

Yet Non Stop Dancing, with its relatively traditional approach, exploded like a firecracker all over the world. Some believe James Last had unwittingly tapped into the unspoken desires of the middle-aged, always having to keep up with the youngsters while privately searching for something of their own.

And suddenly here was this music that made everyone want to dance. It wasn’t fashionable, it wasn’t chic. Most of all, it wasn’t pop.

By the time of his death, James Last had recorded almost another 30 Non Stop Dancing albums. People loved them. They really did dance to them. They, and the sing-alongs, became the staple music at birthday parties and anniversary celebrations around the world.

Happy life: James Last and wife Christine Last pictured in March, earlier this year

James Last didn’t mind in the slightest being called the Maestro of Muzak as he became universally famous and incredibly rich.

His work was his life, and he loved his musicians, too, paying them generously. For their part, as one of them said: ‘It’s the way he treats people — we are a band of friends.’

When he introduced classical music, it was infused with his own modern rhythmic ‘drive’ — hell for purists, but heaven for millions.

When he first played a piece of Mozart at the Royal Albert Hall, the audience, he recalled, ‘sprang to its feet with enthusiasm — 7,000 people can’t be wrong.

‘It’s the same whatever we play — our music comes from the heart and I want it to go into people’s hearts, whether it’s German folk songs, marches or polkas, The Beatles songs, Blood Sweat and Tears, Bacharach, the Bee Gees or Bartok. Good music has no limits.’

Even when diagnosed with a life-threatening illness a few months ago, and embarked on what he knew would be his final tour, he remained his usual boisterous figure.

Friends said this had much to do with the drabness of his youth during the Hitler regime and the fact that one of his two brothers had been a prisoner of war.

There was more suffering when his wife, Waltraud, whom he married in 1955 when he was 26, was so badly burned in a car crash that she refused to go on the beach in Florida because of the scarring.

His solution was to buy a boat so she could enjoy the water afloat. She died in 1997, and he later married again.