Don McLean (BBC Scotland, July 2004)

"The Glasgow Apollo was always a horrible place to play but the audiences were terrific and it was a cold, dark, place and I was usually solo and you'd walk up the steps and they were all full of food and things. You'd go out on the stage and the audience would roar and they would listen and the love and energy was unbelievable. In the seventies you'd come to Glasgow and you'd see these great big granite buildings with the windows boarded up and the place was in depression and as I've come back I've seen the place come back and become the city it is meant to be and it really is a vibrant place with people doing business. It's alive again and it's like bringing something back from the dead basically" Billy Sloan

Sally Carr - A Cut Above the Rest!

Middle of the Road singer Sally Carr tells us "...I used to work through the wall from the Apollo at a hairdressers ... I was only 15 at the time ... we used to listen through the walls with a glass to the dressingrooms to hear what was being said and what was going on..."  Obviously it didn't put Sally off from going into the music business!!!

Tom Morton, Scottish Writer and Broadcaster reminisces

"Everything began for me at the Apollo. The first rock concert I ever saw - the Rolling Stones, 1973. I'd had to do a runner from an over-protective granny ( charged with ensuring my sanctity while my parents were away) to get hold of tickets: A pre-dawn train from Troon to Glasgow, and then queuing for those two briefs.

I'd only seen "Christian" bands up to that point (I was 17) having been brought up in the fairly strict evangelical confines of the Christian Brethren (think gospel halls). There was a thriving scene of bands with names like The Gospelfolk, Deep Concern and the like, some of them pretty loud (one had a Marshall stack). Nothing had prepared me, though, for the Stones.

Great seats - front row of the first circle, next to the mixing desk. Billy Preston was OK, but then his massive array of instruments was hauled off and the minimal Watts kit brought on.

What can I say? Lights down, stage lights up, they wandered on…sauntered, like some wee pub band. None of this fanfare stuff. Keith, the bottle of Jack Daniels, the fag…the opening chords to Brown Sugar, and all the hair on my neck stood on end. And everything began.

Countless gigs ensured. Three years later, scared shitless in the upper circle as an inaudible Stones played far below and the whole balcony moved up and down by about two feet at a time…And the years with Melody maker, blagging tickets for everyone from Gary Moore to Frankie Goes to Hollywood.

But everything began in 1973. The world changed, and all because of those open-G chords, casually blasted out from that enormously high Apollo stage…."