AS I wrote recently, in this roughly chronological history of Glasgow I have reached the year 1975, and I am still trying to get out of it.

Don’t worry, I still have a lot to write about before I close the series with columns on the year of Glasgow as the City of Culture in 1990. It’s difficult to move on, however, when so much happened in the city at that time.

One extraordinary night in 1975 saw a local comedian start his journey from Glasgow personality to global star and like many people at that time I can remember when and where I saw Billy Connolly make his first appearance on the Michael Parkinson show.

I’ve checked the date and it was February 15, 1975, and being already fans of Connolly and having seen him live on stage, our family stayed up late to watch him appear on Parkinson, our favourite chat show.

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He was, of course, quite brilliant and decided to risk telling the edgy park my bike joke – to the few people who have never heard it, it’s available on YouTube. The words “overnight sensation” could have been coined for Connolly that Saturday.

Interviewed many years later, Connolly recalled flying home to Glasgow Airport and as he moved to the exit the whole airport applauded him.

He said: “I think I’ve done something here. Whoosh, I never looked back from that moment.”

Until then the career of Connolly had been successful in a Glasgow and Scotland context, but now he went international, and next week I’ll give a strictly factual account of the later career of Glasgow’s most famous native son of all time – can you name any more famous Glaswegian?

He’s played a crucial part in Glasgow’s recent history and deserves that part to be put in context. Being on Parkinson in 1975 truly was a turning point for the man we already knew as the Big Yin, who began life in Anderston on November 24, 1942. His mother Mary, nee McLean, and father William Connolly were of Irish descent and Billy was raised a Catholic.

His mother left Billy and his elder sister Florence when Billy was just four. He recalled in his autobiography: “I can’t remember who found us alone in the house after my mother left. Maybe a neighbour. Anyhow, someone took us to a children’s home.

“I remember sitting with Florence in the foyer. It was all wooden panels and echoes, and I didn’t like it much.

“I was glad when my father’s sisters Mona and Margaret showed up and took us out of there.”

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(Image: Billy Connolly)

Billy and Florence went to live with their aunts in Partick where he attended St Peter’s Primary School.

It was there that he first realised he could make people laugh, though it was also a dark period in his life as he suffered abuse within his family. Moving on to St Gerard’s Secondary School in Govan, Connolly was 14 when the family joined thousands in moving to the new housing scheme of Drumchapel, which he once famously described as a “desert wi’ windaes”.

On leaving St Gerard’s he fleetingly worked for John Smith’s bookshop delivering books on his bicycle and then as a bread delivery man with Bilsland’s bakery, before he started an apprenticeship as a boilermaker and later a welder at the shipyard of Alexander Stephen and Sons in Linthouse.

He also joined the Territorial Army, serving in the Glasgow detachment of the Parachute Regiment. Connolly always said it was the shipyards that made him, and it was certainly a huge influence on his comedic storytelling, but he was already into music before he even started there.

He was heavily influenced by rock n’ rollers such as Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis, but also began to take an interest in folk music.

(Image: Billy Connolly)

He apparently saw a banjo being played on television and decided to learn the instrument. His comedy routines introducing songs developed when he began to play the banjo at folk music sessions in Glasgow, and in 1965 he formed a band, The Humblebums, with a fine guitarist called Tam Harvey. They were particularly popular at the Scotia Bar in Stockwell Street.

Connolly completed his apprenticeship and after a brief spell helping to build an oil rig in Nigeria he returned to Clydeside to work as a welder at the John Brown yard in Clydebank.

He and Harvey continued to perform several nights of the week and in 1969 they were joined by a musician from Paisley named Gerry Rafferty. Harvey left not long afterwards and Rafferty and Connolly went on to have minor success with a couple of albums for Transatlantic Records, for which the artist and playwright John Byrne designed the covers.

Rafferty, of course, would later find fame with Stealers Wheel before penning the worldwide hit Baker Street.

After The Humblebums split up, Connolly was advised to concentrate on his comedy by Nat Joseph, the head of Transatlantic Records.

By then Billy was already married to Iris, and they had two children, Cara and Jamie. Connolly devised a comedy revue called Connolly’s Glasgow Flourish which saw him play theatres for the first time and in 1972 he got together with poet, teacher and dramatist Tom Buchan to write The Great Northern Welly Boot Show, which a loose cooperative of actors including Bill Paterson performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. It famously received a review from Traverse Theatre director Michael Rudman who said it was “crap, but really good crap”.

Paterson later recalled how they turned that into a banner and the show proceeded to sell out the rest of its three-week run.

Connolly was now becoming a much-in-demand regular on the folk circuit, but all the time his introductions were becoming longer though his banjo and guitar playing remained a crucial element of his shows.

He also dared to go for subject matter where no other comedian went, and his language was often choice, to put it mildly.

His career was already flourishing when he met his first manager, Frank Lynch, the same man I wrote about in the column on the Apollo Theatre last week.

We’ll see next week how Billy Connolly progressed.