In 1974 I was a boy of 16 and I cannot say I ever consciously listened to the Bay City Rollers. It was different for girls. And a few boys.

I once interviewed one of them: a gay American singer-songwriter, whom I shall not name, who surprised me by saying he had grown up with a fondness for Abba – and an abiding passion for the Rollers.

When I mentioned that, at the time we were speaking, one of them had just been arrested for possession of child pornography – news that had not reached New York, where he lived – he was agog. His first question was: “Boys or girls?”

I confessed I didn’t know but I thought it might have been boys. A wistful look came over his face and he rolled his eyes as he declared: “I wish I’d known THAT when I was 14 years old.”

I decided not to include that in the resulting interview.

But around the same time I used to frequent a lovely pub on the River Lea called the Anchor & Hope – to this day one of the few ungrentrified boozers in Hackney – where one of my fellow patrons was a chunky Scotsman called Les.

I was aware that he had been the lead singer of the Rollers, though it was not something either of us ever talked about. But when my friend Bill told me his wife was holding a fancy dress party and that she intended to dress up in her tartan garb to celebrate her childhood obsession with the Rollers, there was only one person I could bring with nme.

Despite the fact he was – and probably still is – at least 20 years older and twice the size as in his heyday, Les and I were barely through the door before she jumped into his arms screaming like a banshee.

Les is apparently back at the helm of the Rollers these days, and undoubtedly performing this song, which was apparently written to combine the classic songwriting style of a Phil Spector song like Da Doo Ron Ron with the clanging sounds of the Govan shipyards where songwriter Bill Martin grew up.

The clapping sound was created by his co-writer Phil Coulter banging two pieces of wood together, just as he had done on one of their previous hits, the England football team’s 1970 World Cup song Back Home.