One of the key figures in Scottish rock and pop

SHOULD Alan Mair ever find the time to write his memoirs, they would be a fascinating read. Consider that as a young man he played bass guitar with the Beatstalkers, a genuinely talented beat group who at one time were described as the Scottish Beatles and who, in the summer of 1965, memorably caused a riot with a concert in Glasgow’s George Square.

Relocating to London, they came under the wing of David Bowie’s then manager Ken Pitt, who put them together with Bowie in the studio. The band recorded a number of Bowie-penned singles, including Silver Tree Top School For Boys, which was based on a true story about a scandal at a well-connected school.

When the Beatstalkers reached the end of the road – like many groups before and since, they regrettably never quite attained the success they deserved – Mair began making leather clothes and handmade boots. Among his many celebrity clients was Bowie himself. Lured back into the world of music, Mair joined The Only Ones, the Peter Perrett-fronted new wave group, whose best-known song Another Girl, Another Planet (1978) remains one of the finest singles of the 1970s.

Mair co-produced their second album, Even Serpents Shine (1979). They broke up in 1980 after their third album, Baby’s Got A Gun, and touring the States in support of The Who, who were playing their first gigs after the death of their drummer Keith Moon.

The Only Ones today are cult favourites and Mair himself is firmly on the latest chapter of his career, as a solo artist. His latest release is an excellent single, If I Gave The World a Turn, on which he sings and plays all the instruments. It can be listened to on YouTube and Spotify. “A top song and the video makes you watch again and again,” notes one admiring fan on Facebook.

Mair, now in his seventies, is one of the key figures in the story of Scottish rock and pop.

Interviewed for Martin Kielty’s book Big Noise: The Sound Of Scotland, Mair recalled his own introduction to music

“Rhythm was in my blood,” he said. “We lived with my gran, and I loved it when my uncles put Radio Luxembourg on. Even if I was meant to be in bed I couldn’t help dancing around if I heard a song I liked. The actual sound of guitars moved me too. My mum bought me an old acoustic one and I used to play it with my ear stuck to it, so I could hear a kind of electric sound.

“But when you go to 13 or 14, and you were just becoming aware of yourself, you realised it was cool to be in a band. That’s why everyone was doing it.” Elvis Presley’s Heartbreak Hotel was a turningpoint in his musical education.

The Beatstalkers, when they got going, were genuinely big news in Scotland, even if their employers didn’t always appreciate the efforts that the five musicians put into their craft.

“The singer Davie Lennox and I both worked at Dalglish’s as sheet-metal draughtsmen,” Mair told Kielty. “We’d been going for over a year by this point and we were doing really well wherever we went.

“We’d end up sleeping in the factory sometimes – if you were coming back from a gig in Aberdeen at five in the morning, it made more sense to go straight to the factory than try going home first.

“All the bosses took us in – all the bosses, the MD and everyone, and we were standing there with our heads bowed as they shook their fingers saying, ‘It’s not good enough – we know you’re sleeping here. If it doesn’t stop we’ll have to let you go’.

“We told them we were going to turn pro, but it just sounded like a big joke to them. No-one realised what a following we had all over Scotland.”

The remarkable scenes that greeted a free lunchtime concert the band held in George Square on Friday, June 11, 1965 brought home precisely how big the Beatstalkers were. “’Beat’ bedlam in the Square”, read the headline in the Evening Times that night. Outwith scenes that had greeted the Beatles and the Rolling Stones on their visits to the city, the riot was the biggest Glasgow had seen up until that time.

Beatstalkers’ gigs thereafter witnessed adulation on a similar scale. Once, the band sold out a 2,000-seat ballroom without even being present – it was billed as “Not the Beatstalkers”, and featured lifesize cut-outs of the musicians. On stage, a phone was held up to a mic so the fans could hear Lennox address them from the confines of a studio.

The band’s debut single, Everybody’s Talkin’ ‘Bout My Baby, sold a staggering 200,000 copies in Scotland.

Uunfortunately, things being what they were back then, there were only two chartregistered shops in Scotland – one in Glasgow, the other in Edinburgh – and this meant that a mere 5,000 sales were reported when the single had already sold 80,000 copies in the first week.

Similar ill fortune dogged their muchanticipated move to London. Although they had a lengthy residency at the celebrated Marquee club and toured with such names as Marc Bolan, their time with the Decca and CBS record labels left them feeling deflated, at the mercy of producers who thought their grasp of the band’s future direction outweighed the band’s own opinions.

Despite such difficulties, the band remained a superb live attraction, in the UK and countries such as Germany. But the theft of their van, which contained all their musical equipment, was the catalyst for their decision to quit.

As Mair told Classic Rock Magazine in 2018: “I’m a great believer in the time being right for things. We’d just been offered an appearance on the BBC, and we were starting to talk about buying new gear. [After the theft] I just said, ‘Maybe it’s time to stop’. We’d been thinking about it for a while. Davie and I had already been talking about what we’d do after the band ended.”

In 1970, Mair opened a number of shops in London, selling handmade leather stack-heeled boots. One of his managers was none other than Freddie Mercury, lead singer with the band Queen.

Mair remains proud of his time with The Only Ones, who despite their relatively brief original spell have been cited as an influence on acts as diverse as Nirvana, Blur, the Libertines, and the Replacements. He has been a driving force behind Only Ones reunions, at venues ranging from Inveraray’s Connect Festival to the O2 Wireless festival in London’s Hyde Park.

He’s also had an interesting solo career over the last decade, including a solo album, Field Of One, and several fine singles – Four Winds, Stairway To Hell, Eyes To The Sky, The Devil’s Porridge, and now If I Gave The World A Turn. This he describes as a reflection on life’s trials and tribulations, and what you could do if presented with the chance to rewrite your history. “It’s good to be back,” he told The Sunday Post in 2021. “I’ve taken a bit of time out but I’ve always been about the music and it’s a desire that has just kept coming back.”

Might he one day write a book? “I’m seriously thinking about writing my memoirs and did start writing them with Martin Kielty in 2017,” he told the Herald on Sunday. “But we decided that we should concentrate on the Beatstalkers part of my career, and we did the Beatstalkers book.”