LAST week I told the story of how Glasgow group The Beatstalkers became so famous in their home city that they were known as Scotland’s Beatles. Like the Fab Four, they inspired riots by teenage girls, most notably in George Square on the afternoon of June 11, 1965.

Once again, I have enlisted the help of one of the band’s founders, Alan Mair, who is still going strong and making music.

He recalled last week how the press reacted, and on Friday, June 11, both the Evening Times and Evening Citizen rushed out late night specials to cover the extraordinary events in George Square. The Citizen revealed that a special meeting of the Council’s parks committee had been called for the following Monday to discuss the riots, which had ended with the five Beatstalkers escaping via the City Chambers, while their mostly adolescent girl fans rampaged through the hallowed halls of the municipal headquarters.

The Citizen headline said it all: Pop Girls Run Riot In City Hall. Glasgow’s lord provost Sir Peter Meldrum, who sadly died just a few months later, expressed the wish that the concerts in George Square could continue but The Beatstalkers would never be on the bill again.

The following day’s papers did indeed carry reports about the George Square riots, but most led with the news that The Beatles had been awarded MBEs in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List. Could The Beatstalkers ever emulate the Fab Four in that way? They were certainly going to try.

Life in Glasgow was becoming very difficult for them because their fans found out where they lived, and Alan Mair distinctly recalls how they would camp outside his family home.

He said: “Every morning when you got up, there were already girls in the common stairway outside. You had to sneak under the front door window into the kitchen to have a cup of tea before it all started. My mum got to know a lot of the girls – she’d bring them in, give them tea, and tell them it was time to go home before their families wondered where they were.”

Everywhere the band went in Scotland they caused a sensation, and the Scottish press duly recorded every last tumultuous event.

In an interview for the book The Beatstalkers, written by the band and superbly put together by journalist and author Martin Kielty, singer David Lennox recalled: “It got to the point that if there wasn’t some kind of rowdiness, I was disappointed.

“If we only got the kind of response that other bands usually got, we thought we’d done something wrong. One time I was late to a gig and a rumour had gone round that I’d been knocked down by a bus and killed. Thousands of girls in tears! We put in a great show that night – that would have been me making it up to them.”

The Beatstalkers’ followers adopted a Beatles fan tune and sang:

“We love you Beatstalkers,

"Oh yes we do, and where you go-o-o, we’ll follow you.

"We’ve been to Barrowland, the Palais too,

"Oh Beatstalkers we love you!”

There was another kind of attention the boys definitely did not want. Alan Mair explained to The National: “After George Square the gang thing got really bad. There were times when I didn’t like walking about on my own. A lot of the gangs were getting aggressive because their girlfriends were watching us and screaming, so they didn’t like us.

“The leading Tongs, Divot and Vinnie, had become good mates. They wanted to align with us because we had so many females in the following. But if there was any trouble we knew they’d jump in or step in.

"We couldn’t really prevent it – these two guys were very tough. When they became friends with you, you thought, ‘I’d rather that than them being enemies’. Backstage, some gang members would turn up and quite flamboyantly show you the latest razor they’d bought, and you’d have to go, ‘That’s a cracker’.

"But you’d rather not have this. They’re chatting away and I’m saying, ‘How can you just cut someone’s face with that?’ But the gangs wanted a piece of whatever we were.

"Because the Tongs were hanging around with us, the Maryhill Fleet were automatically against us. If we played the Maryland or certain other clubs there was always a bit of tension. We were always waiting for something to come flying through the air.

“We were playing the Bagatelle for four or five nights each month, and the Tongs said, ‘We’ll come with you – the Bagatelle’s getting a bit of a reputation’. One night we were leaving at 3am. Our roadies would always back the van right up to the door. We had an ex-police Morris J2 Black Mariah, so people couldn’t smash the windows.

“So we’re in the Black Mariah along with Divot and Vinnie. We take off and get to a set of traffic lights. Suddenly the Maryhill Fleet are around the van, banging the windows, showing blades and going, ‘We’ll get you!’ The lights were about to change – we could have gone off quite happily, but Divot says, ‘Shall we go?’ and Vinnie goes, ‘Yeah, let’s go’.

"They had long leather coats on and I didn’t know what was underneath them. They opened the back doors, got out, pushed the doors shut and pulled out these big long swords. They shouted, ‘Tongs, ya bass!’ There are six or seven people and all you can see is blades swinging, and we’re thinking, ‘We only want to play rock’n’roll …’”

The band was making decent enough money but to make the big time they would need a record deal as they had not yet cut a single. The Glasgow Square riot got them noticed by the London record companies, so the time was ripe for the move south they had long thought about. Word got out that they would be leaving from Glasgow Central after a concert at the Dennistoun Palais – it was of course a complete 2000 sell-out – but this time the police were a little bit more prepared.

Mair recalled: “They estimated there were 2000 fans in the station. By the time we arrived it was chaos, there were hordes of screaming, banner-waving teenagers mobbing the platform. The fans ripped and tore our clothes; they were pulling our hair and trying to kiss us. Part of the police cordon guarding the platform from teenagers rushed forward and grabbed us. Slowly we fought our way through the mob to the train while police carried scores of teenagers from the train after we locked ourselves in the compartment. Porters and railway workers jumped on the tracks to rescue beat-crazed fans who tried to board the train from the track. Fans fainted and were trampled underfoot.”

Amazingly there were no arrests, but the police were fed up. Mair recalled: “When we got to London, (manager) Joe Gaffney had a message to phone the chief of police in Glasgow. So he calls and the chief says, ‘We’re not going to put up with that situation again. There were more than 40 policemen used at the station. When you come back, the train’s going to stop outside the station and we’ll get the band off’.

“It was a level of chaos no other band was reaching.”

THE band landed in London in the middle of the swinging 60s, and their reputation as live performers had gone ahead of them so that they got booked for a residency at the Marquee and also toured in support of bands like the Kinks.

They went home to Glasgow convinced they could make it, but there was a message waiting from the police that they were not to leave from Central Station again, so the band decided to fly from Renfrew Airport, then in its final year as Glasgow’s airport.

Mair recalled: “Once all the other passengers had boarded, we were told to make a run for the plane, a British European Airways (BEA) Vanguard. When we ran out to catch our flight, the fans, many of them in tears, burst through the police cordon and pinned all five of us under the plane. For 10 fantastic minutes police, aided by scores of airport workers, battled with the girls to free us. Many of the girls had to be torn bodily from us to get free.”

While the band still wanted to record material that they were doing live and knew their fans loved, Ken Pitt, their new manager in London, had other ideas.

Mair recalled: “He introduced us to a young songwriter he was managing by the name of David Jones. He was later far, far better known of course as David Bowie.

“Ken brought in Bowie while we were thinking, ‘What’s he got to offer? He’s just a budding writer, writing kind of slightly odd songs that sounded more suited to Anthony Newley’. Although one of his songs and currently the biggest selling single for The Beatstalkers is Silver Tree Top School For Boys.

“That’s a very complicated song, reflective of a story that had been in the papers about boys smoking dope in a posh private school. The song was not really a Beatstalkers-style song.

“That was a very strange time. Bowie was trying to teach our singer Davie to sing ‘When I’m Five’ in an English accent. How peculiar, eh? In the words of our singer Davie, ‘All Bowie’s songs were nightmares. I was glad they never got promoted. I was mortified – we should never have recorded them’.

“But Bowie had unbelievable confidence. I think most singer-songwriters are quite shy and they can’t make a judgement on their own songs. He would come in and say, ‘I’ve got this song,’ and he’d sing it like he was on stage, and he’d sell the song by being so confident.

“I can still visualise him, coming to the studio, saying, ‘Try it like this, this is how it goes’. Ken Pitt was quite a visionary – he was telling him to put on makeup and try things a bit more theatrical. He was on the right track, but Bowie was going, ‘I’m a hippy, I ain’t doing that’.

“And while this was going on our producer Denny Cordell turned down Hang On Sloopy, saying it was a three-chord trick. (It would be a No 1 hit in the USA for The McCoys). We also had the Kinks offering to write us a song. In retrospect I like the idea of Bowie being around at that time – but only with history. We thought, ‘He’s alright for B-sides…’ and that’s how we approached it.”

Success eluded The Beatstalkers, even though their debut single sold enough copies to sit just outside the Top 40. They continued to play live, both across the UK and on the Continent, but in 1969 their van with all their instruments and equipment was stolen in London.

Faced with a choice of starting again but with no hope of recording success, the band decided to call it a day.

Alan Mair started a boot company in Kensington Market where one of his first customers was David Bowie, who was served by Mair’s employee – a certain Freddie Mercury. Mair later enjoyed success with the Only Ones while Eddie Campbell played in Tear Gas and Davie Lennox joined The Joe O’Donnell Band in 1978. Jeff Allen went on to play for several bands and was drummer for numerous artists.

In 2005 and 2013, the band, who all remained friends, played successful reunion gigs in Glasgow. Their fans danced all the old favourite dances, but were probably a bit too long in the tooth for riots.

Still, for a brief time in the 1960s, The Beatstalkers lit up the Scottish music scene like no-one ever did before.