GANGS YA BASS
Settling back into the Scottish scene after the excitement of the Germany and London outings strangely was quite easy and I really did enjoy working around the West of Scotland in 1966. The only major drawback at the time was the re emergence of the gangs from the housing schemes, into the dance halls . . . and into our lives. The gangs, with such wonderful graffiti names as Tong, Toi and Bundy were from various areas of Glasgow and could be particularly vicious on occasion. The famous pop singer of the 1950's Frankie Vaughan even became involved with them - no silly, not in the fighting but in trying to stop it all, and in fact he did a rather good job of it in managing to broker a sort of peace for a time and also managed to raise the money to build recreational centres etc.
Anyway that aside, during the dance whilst we would still be striving to work up an atmosphere, a gang member of the Milton area 'Tong' might welcome a rival from the Yoker area 'Toi' gang with the his verbal graffiti greeting, "Tongs Ya Bass" . . just prior to rendering the Toi boy unconscious by way of a "Glasgow Kiss". This was not really a kiss per se, this particular kiss was exclusively a product of the City of Glasgow and consisted of the meeting of ones own forehead with the other's bridge of nose both with precision and with force, thus rendering instantaneous unconsciousness. At this point, whilst the blood flowed on the dance floor, the band on stage would be urged immediately to play their next number [as if nothing was happening and whilst chaos ruled] and while the stewards [bouncers in the vernacular] re-established order in the dance hall. Meantime, unfazed, the girls would simply move their handbags to a less-bloodied piece of flooring and dance on. It was not unheard of to find gangs from both the female and what was termed at that time the "deaf and dumb" communities squaring up to each other.
Our closest shave by far however was re our visit to the hamburger van on the Clydeside at 2 am after our gig at The Lindella dance hall had ended. Some of the gang members who had been ejected from our gig suddenly appeared after noticing our easy to notice vehicle drive up - well the van was covered in scores of "I Love The HiFis" graffiti [thanks girls] - so we immediately shot off in the van hamburgerless as the rocks rained down on the van. That was actually where the hyenas in The Lion King got their line as they chased wee Simba off the Pridelands. "An' dinnae come back or wull kull ye". We didn't.