YOU didn’t want to mess with Evan Love. You really didn’t.
Mr Love - “a husky six-footer with the heart of a lion and the kind of rugged good looks that discourage back-chat” - was manager and chief bouncer at the well-known Glasgow dancehall, the Locarno, in Sauchiehall Street.
“Some situations call for diplomacy and some for psychology, but there is only one way to deal with a troublemaker”, he told the Evening Times in December 1967. “I give him a firm warning and if he looks at me the wrong way his arm goes up his back and he goes down the stairs and out the front door”.
With ten policemen outside the entrance, Love and his team of bouncers frisked the Locarno’s youth male patrons (who, the paper noted, “squeeze in with their arms raised co-operatively, like someone with a Beretta stuck in their backs”). Bottles and weapons (knives, the occasional hammer, and, once, a gun) were removed, and drunks and known troublemakers ejected.
Girls’ handbags were searched, which is why a pile of unclaimed, sharpened steel combs could be seen in Love’s office.
“We always try to handle each situation with delicacy”, he told the reporter. “If you are heavy-handed to begin with you could cause a small incident to blow up into a proper punch-up. The idea is to try to talk them out of it, and this usually works. However, sometimes they go outside to finish off the argument. If the troublemaker persists inside the hall”, he added darkly, “we wait until he goes to the toilet and follow him. The message is then spelled out to him loud and clear”.
The Locarno’s distinctive frontage is seen here in 1962; the other photograph shows the finalists in the Twist competition at the venue the following year.
The Locarno belonged to a time when dancing truly was a major Glasgow pastime. In 1958, the well-known Glasgow journalist Jack House wrote: “Dancing is tremendously popular in Glasgow and there is a higher proportion of dance-halls to the population than anywhere else in the British isles”. There were more than 30 licensed dance-halls in the city, and a large number of halls where dances, as distinct from ‘dancing’, were held
“The standard of dancing was considered, up till 1940, the best in Britain”. House continued. “Experts now say that the standard has deteriorated because of such ‘foreign’ influences as the arrival of American soldiers and sailors”.
Herald columnist Jack McLean once wrote of his memories of the Locarno “back in the days when girls had sticky-out dresses and peep-toe heels and perfectly-seamed nylons and the boys dressed like Jack Buchanan for the big scene starring Rita Hayworth. Glasgow ever had notions of style above its station”.
The late Glasgow MP and Commons Speaker, Michael Martin, once said he had taken up piping as a boy, but dropped it because ‘’I was more interested in places like the Locarno.’’
Read more: Herald Diary
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