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I’m glad you got there, Loge. It’s always an eye-opener how what seems obvious to one solver is obscure to another, and vice versa. Gitto, 9a has the letter pattern 1231124526. Only one word conforms to that. The pattern of 33a, 123121, helps to confirm it. Your method sounds much cleverer!

Thanks for the reassurance, Quisling, as I'm certainly feeling rather dim this week! Perhaps at a later stage people may reveal in more detail what methods they used, as I still can't see any logic to the substitutions. I've worked out the significance of the title but am not sure how much help that would have been while solving.

At last I seem to be getting somewhere. Looking at letter frequencies I made a some educated guesses at what might code to E, A and R. So far it seems to be holding water - I even have a word for the infamous 9a. Time will tell if I am going down a blind alley! I still don't have any idea about the hip-hop artist though, more of a David Bowie girl myself.

That’s something I can help with, Planks. The hip hop performer isn’t a name but two letters that often precede the perpetrators of rap. Put that outside a standard crossword priest to get the grass.

Thanks loge

I've cold solved most answers, got the single/double arrangement but can't get started. I think I can see where substitutions are to be made but with so much inconsistency with clashes, I don't understand how you begin to know what to enter. Help!

All done, thanks to 9ac pattern only having one matching word.

However, I can't see how X is encoded. It seems to occur only once, in the original solutions, and it's encoded into a digraph, the second character of which is unchecked. So how to find its coding?

Dylan, it appears twice in my original solutions. How about 21a?

Thanks for that- it's one I hadn't solved!!

DSC - THINK CO - STAR