It is perceived as a pleasant town, but Ilkley has a darker past that would shock and astound some of its more sophisticated residents.

And a new book, On Ilkley Moor: The Story of an English Town, by former resident Tim Binding, highlights some of the spa town's shadier - and intriguing - moments in its history. They include bank holiday prostitution and a grisly, unsolved murder.

Two chapters deal with a couple of events nearly 40 years apart: the murder of Mary Learoyd in January, 1929, and a Sunday night in March, 1967, when a three-piece band called the Jimi Hendrix Experience rolled up in a battered van to play the Gyro Club at the Troutbeck Hotel.

Tim Binding pitches the Mary Learoyd story in the present tense, taking us through the events of the day when the unmarried Mary, sighted in various places in central Ilkley throughout the day, failed to return home. He builds a compelling and eerie chronicle which makes it clear that Ilkley was a place to which men and women came for sex - the latter expecting payment.

"There seems to be something grotesque about that weekend, as if the town is besieged by deformity and lust, sneaking round Ilkley's alleyways, sitting in quiet corners, drinking Ilkley's beer, watching, waiting for its moment, and thus not simply that weekend but all of Ilkley's weekends..." says Binding chillingly.

And hopping ahead several decades, he says of that Jimi Hendrix performance: "There is a suck of air, a collective intake of breath as the audience burst into flames. This man is an incendiarist. He strikes his tinderbox and they burn swiftly. He is heat and energy and they are consumed by his strange and compulsive beauty."

At that moment Sergeant Thomas Chapman got on stage and told the gallant 600, squeezed into the space where 220 should be, that the show had to stop.

"Though they know it not, they have all entered the record books, witness to James Marshall's shortest ever performance."

Jimi went off to claim a place in immortality, while the owners of the Troutbeck tried unsuccessfully to untangle themselves from a legal wrangle which cost them a total of £245 in fines.

Neither Hendrix nor the Experience played Ilkley again.

l On Ilkley Moor, by Tim Binding, is published by Picador in hardback at £16.