IT was the afternoon of January 2, 1971, and Fraser Bruce and his friend Alan Morris were in Glasgow’s famed Scotia Bar in possession of a couple of tickets for that day’s Rangers v Celtic match at Ibrox Park.

Both men were in their early 20s and were regulars on the folk scene. It was just after 1.45pm when they asked bar manager John Rowan to call them a taxi.

Rowan could see both men were keen to continue the music session they were leading, and offered them free drink if they carried on singing.

“We’d been given the tickets as a present,” Bruce recalled this week, “but Alan wasn’t much of a football fan and I didn’t support either side, so when John Rowan made us his offer of free drink we didn’t have to think twice.

“We were both young guys and you didn’t get that offer very often, so we just stayed on and kept the music going.

“Then we were due at a New Year’s gathering in Rutherglen so we got a taxi just before 5pm and as we’re going along we asked the driver if he knew the score.

“He turned on the wireless, as we called it back then, and on came the news that two people had been killed at Ibrox.

“I think it was Archie Macpherson who then came on and confirmed the news and by the time we got to Rutherglen the death toll was up to 20.”

The two men forgot to phone their wives “and we got a rollocking for it” as Bruce said.

“Then the toll kept on rising all night, and as we learned later, 66 people had been killed in the crush on Stairway 13.

“Our tickets were for the Rangers end and that was the exact stairway we would have used to get in and out.

“We had planned to leave just before full-time to avoid the crowds and of course that was when the crush happened, so we would probably have been caught up in the disaster.

“I think about it often. If it wasn’t for that free drink we might well have been killed.

“It was one of those life-changing moments and I have always thought back on how lucky we were.”

Bruce went on to become a noted singer-songwriter on the Scottish folk scene and a few years ago he decided to write a song in tribute to those who died. It’s called Big Al an’ Ibrox and is one of 14 tracks on his new CD on Grentrax called Every Song’s a Story – his first release for more than 20 years.

With six grandchildren and turning 74 next month, Bruce has plenty of stories to tell, and other tracks include a song about Celtic’s John Thomson, the Prince of Goalkeepers, killed in an accidental clash with a Rangers player at Ibrox in 1931.

Another poignant song is about the Iolaire disaster in which 201 men returning from the war drowned when their ship sank outside Stornoway harbour in 1919.

On a lighter note, there are songs about a proud grandfather out walking with his three-year-old granddaughter, and about the emigration of Scots on a £10 ticket to Australia.

“The CD was supposed to be out much earlier but production was hit by Covid-19,” said Bruce. “It’s entirely a coincidence that it’s come out just before the 50th anniversary of the Ibrox disaster, a day I’ll never forget.”