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Thanks again, all makes sense now

Enjoyed this a lot. Yes I had to solve more than half the clues before confidently entering anything in the grid - but when clues are in alphabetical order of their answers it is not completely cold solving.
I needed the misprints to identify the theme and then the story unfolded in a very satisfying way. My favourite of the ytd.

Finally finished after taking a break and coming back to it with fresh eyes.

As others have said, the cold solving is rather daunting at first but, once you manage to place a couple of the 9's, everything falls nicely into place.

I knew the song from a recent TV programme where a guy sings it while merrily working away.

I particularly liked the endgame and how the "late arrival" married up with the relevant name.

Thanks to Aragon for a thoroughly enjoyable puzzle from start to finish:-)

Well I did say 10 minutes or 10 days - it was actually about 3 hours - 2 wasted yesterday and an hour of enlightenment this morning. I didn't read the wiki page properly at first and wasted a good 30 minutes this morning trying to display the essential contents of the first 2 and last 2 lines of the song - doh!!! Another wonderful puzzle.

Although I now have four of the 9-letter answers, I'm still struggling with the 360 possible variations of where they could be entered! A tip on the 8-letter solution would be appreciated, and could the blank cell occur anywhere along the entry?

The blank square for the 8 letter answer is at the end of the word unchecked.

Dylan, the misprint is in the first word of the clue. 3-letter word for turn (noun, as in performance) inside word for to force (verb)

The solution is a letter short, which I think suggests the most likely place for the blank cell?

I spent a long time cold-solving before I could make a stab at entering anything into the grid, but I think there were just about enough clues for me to begin in the right place, and then the rest of the fill was reasonably straightforward. Inevitably I had wrongly identified some of the misprints, but the correct ones were clearly better than those I had chosen. I spent a bit of time before I discovered the song (which I first thought must be some pop number I had never heard of) and carry out the jumbling. Typically I then wasted about 15 minutes looking for a nine-letter name which wasn't there before seeing that I was on the wrong track. Actually it was very nearly there but not in a systematic order.

An excellent puzzle and no ambiguity, which is always a good thing.

Dylan, the intersecting letters should help. There is only one nine-letter answer which begins with the third letter of another.

My way in was through the three letter words. There are only 4 and the uppermost one needs to match the penultimate letter of a 9 and start off 2 of the sevens. That in turn fixed three of the 6 letter words for me. The lower 3 has similar constraints.