DAVID Colvin remembers the time as a teenager when he first heard Gordon Duncan playing the pipes. “I’d been playing the pipes since I was 12,” says the Fife-born actor who appeared in the National Theatre of Scotland’s acclaimed production of Black Watch. “I’d been trained in the pipe band tradition and I still absolutely value that upbringing, but when I heard Gordon Duncan I just thought, what is he doing? And I didn’t mean that in a bad way. I just couldn’t work out how he was getting an effect that I eventually had to slow down the recording to decipher.”

The moment stayed with Colvin. At the age of nineteen he went into acting. He’s worked with Communicado, among other companies as well as the National Theatre of Scotland, and at various points he shared the story that he kept in his head about the greatest piper who ever lived, hoping that someone would take up the idea and turn it into a play.

Then, two years ago, he and a fellow actor were having a drink in the Globe Theatre bar in London. When his colleague found out that Colvin played the pipes he produced his mobile phone and showed him a YouTube clip of a bagpiper playing Thunderstruck by AC/DC with flames coming out of the top of the drones.

“As wonderful as the plumbing on the clip was, this chap wasn’t playing Thunderstruck anywhere near the way Gordon Duncan, whom he was trying to copy, had originally arranged it,” says Colvin. “So with the bravery of a few beers I proceeded to school this other actor, John, in the guy who first decided that the bagpipes could be turned into a heavy metal guitar, and John said, you should write that story.”

Colvin took up the challenge and this weekend at Piping Live! in Glasgow his play, Thunderstruck receives its third performance, having been previewed at the Outwith Festival in Dunfermline last September and then given a run-through for Edinburgh Fringe companies in London. The Fringe booking he was hoping for didn’t come off but Piping Live’s representative’s response to the London performance has in fact brought the play to very venue, the Piping Centre, where its story takes place.

“It’s not biographical because I didn’t know Gordon Duncan personally and I wouldn’t presume to play him or to try and fill his shoes as a musician because I’m not that piper,” he says. “What I really wanted to do was show people the impact he had on my generation and on Scottish music in general because young pipers coming up today might think that people have always played that way – I didn’t, I couldn’t – and when you listen to the music he composed, it’s just so musical. I hear a lot of modern bagpipe music and it’s incredibly technical and its own way very impressive but it’s not necessarily musical, whereas no matter how complicated Gordon’s compositions get they’re still, at heart, wonderful tunes.”

Gordon Duncan died in 2005 in tragic circumstances and while the play has a lot of humour – the Gordon Duncan tales are legion – it tells his story sensitively and respectfully. It contains much bagpiping lore, since in order to show how Duncan broke all the rules, Colvin felt he needed to show people what the rules were in the first place.

“I didn’t want to create something that would only interest pipers because the piping world knows all about Gordon Duncan,” says Colvin. “I wanted to create something that everyone could take something from. It’s a homage to someone who is obviously a hero to me and to a lot of people but his genius goes beyond the bagpipes and goes beyond Scotland. He’s someone who should be celebrated globally.”

Thunderstruck is at the Piping Centre, Glasgow on Sunday. Piping Live! runs until Sunday for further information, log onto pipinglive.co.uk