THIS was something you tended not to see on a daily basis in Glasgow’s sedate Buchanan Street: a shoot-out involving two gunslingers. They were part of the Scottish League of Sharpshooters, who were taking part in the city’s first busking festival, and launching it with a bang – or, to be more accurate, some 500 bangs.

The gunslingers had names like Doc Holliday, Texas Rose, Smokey, and the Undertaker. Texas Rose, alias Margot Davis, a computer technician, told a Glasgow Herald reporter, “We are all experts in the league”, just as a dozen of them blasted off, causing half the passers-by in Buchanan Street to jump out of their skins.

“Oh, yes, we take it all very seriously indeed,” added Smokey, alias John Thomson, deputy marshal for the whole of Scotland, and a driver for Strathclyde Regional Council.

He said the blanks that the league’s 500 members fired cost £6.50 for 50, and that they could get through that amount in a matter of minutes. Nearby stood Doc Holliday, better known as John Kerley, of Penicuik; he remained tight-lipped, our reporter noted, and concentrated on scarin’ the hell out of the pigeons on the street.

The busking festival, sponsored by this newspaper, the Third Eye Centre and Interbook Media Services, was itself part of the Welcome Home to Glasgow campaign. The festival featured jugglers, jazz musicians, magicians, marching bands, guitarists and even someone who played the bagpipes on stilts.

There was a robotic mime artist; and there was also a 17-year-old magician who had started out nine years earlier with a Christmas present of a magic kit and a teach-yourself book. Now, given permission from the police, he was hoping to attempt his Dynamite Illusion. “It’s like Russian roulette”, he explained, “involving live detonators and my teeth”.

The festival’s official title was ‘Penny Geggies’, these being the travelling theatres that had once proved popular in Glasgow.