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I am staring at the extra words and am completely at a loss as to what they mean or refer to. I am also struggling to parse 20a,28a and 3d. Any hints would be greatly appreciated.

Parsed 28a now.

Unless you are a superfan of the artist this isn't doable without Wikipedia. If you google "hit songs" along with the extra words you have this should identify the artist, hence the chart positions and the album. From there a little more Wikipedia needed to get to the final shading, but the final result is well worth the effort.

3d is 2 homophones; there's an extra word here

20, a generic name for "minister" plus a specific (biblical) minister, both losing the standard 1-letter "current"

Thanks buddy (@4), is the album 3,8 by 4,4? If so, is the historic character the one linked to track 9 on the album?

Better to go to the wiki entry for the assistant if you want to avoid a lot of unnecessary reading.

I think this is yet another IQ that puts Listener in the shade - great clues, a fine theme and a brilliant endgame (and some truly horrible history into the bargain}.

I agree drxx, a really good puzzle and another of a current great run of IQs. Took me a while to work out the "key elements" and what they spelled, so many thanks to Mr Wiki!

Full grid and then a hard stop. I must be way too uncool. Norrasausage.

Fairly sure if the subject, but missing a few of the extraneous words. Is the artiste a bit hippy dippy and once put out a song claiming that clouds were pretty wonderful thing to behold?