ROCK musicians and others have been mourning the death of the great bass player, Jack Bruce, and recalling episodes from his eventful life.
Pete Wishart, Runrig-keyboard-player-turned-MP, gets things off and running by tweeting: "Great guy. I remember seeing him throw a promoter into a hedge when he suggested he should cut his set at a festival."
Fun times
READER John Neil steers us in the direction of an anecdote from Jack's biography, in which Bruce and his band were in Stornoway for a show.
"The gig," the book quotes Jack as saying, "was in a room at the back of the pub and people were coming in from all over the Western Isles.
"We got there for about 4pm, to play at eight or nine. We were ready to play, but the guy said 'Och, no, they're not nearly drunk enough yet'." By the time they got on stage, the whole audience was totally trashed. "It was a lot of fun," added Jack. "It was really fun to play those places."
Hands up who forgot
FIRST - and, in all honesty, probably the last - Diary item relating to the fact that the clocks went back at the weekend. Kevin Bridges tweeted: "An exciting time for the wee clock on my oven, about to be proven right after 6 months in the wrong. Stuck to its guns. Commendable."
To which Greg Hemphill replied: "Nice to know there are still ovens out there with the courage of their convections."
Still Game no more
SPEAKING of Greg Hemphill, one reader, Robert from Kirkcudbright, has been following our stories about what it is like to grow old.
"Getting old hit home," he laments in an email, "when I wore a Still Game T-shirt in Lanzarote and went for a pint with a pal, only for the barman to say, 'Are you wearing that T-shirt 'cos you two were the main actors?'"
Cost cutting
YESTERDAY's item about hairdressers having to trim customers' ear-hair reminds Robin Gilmour of the follically impaired bloke who complains about the cost of his all-too-brief spell in the barber's chair. "Sorry, sir," comes the reply, "but there was a search fee involved."
Do visit - some of us
TAKE a bow, Dundee uni Students' Union: you've got a name-check in John Cleese's autobiography.
Cleese discusses the many invitations he has received from "nice, polite, friendly people" and says he has only ever seen one rude invitation - from the union to Her Majesty the Queen, informing her that they had decided to invite her to the university "by 13 votes to nine". We can only imagine the Queen's response to that one.
Great in Theory...
CANADIAN rockers Theory of a Deadman, backstage at the SSE Hydro, tweeted a picture of a neon sign reading 'Gie it laldy' and said the first fan to tweet the meaning of the expression would win two free tickets to that night's show.
One fan managed to get it right but was sadly unable to pick up his prize, and for a good reason.
"I'm in Ohio," he explained. "My apologies."
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