Daily Herald. Tuesday July 7 1964
'I Shot Jackie', Says Beat Star
"Beat star Chris Huston, 20, told yesterday how he shot his best friend - and put the Undertakers pop group out of action. 'It was my air rifle slug that hit him - but it was all an accident,' he said.

Jackie Lomax, lead singer with the group, had the slug removed from his neck in hospital yesterday. The group had to call off a £250 appearance at a Glasgow club after the accident. Back home at Rivington Road, Wallasey, Cheshire, Chris told me:

'We had been working pretty hard on our Scottish tour and decided to buy guns to do a bit of shooting in the country. We were on the banks of a loch and the boys were firing their rifles into the water. I aimed at a floating log - and I saw Jackie roll over. I cannot think what happened. I didn't fire anywhere near Jackie, but it was my slug that hit him.'

Said Chris: 'We picked him up and bundled him into the coach. Then we were told that the nearest hospital was at Paisley, 18 miles away. We set off there at 85 mph. We went through a radar trap at 80, but fortunately the Police did not stop us.'

Jackie is expected to leave hospital in a few days."

Well, there are the front page newspaper stories of the accident. As you can see, the first two accounts are totally different as if each newspaper wanted to get something in print and to hell with the details. All the major British papers covered the story but I only have these two press clippings, after all these years.

What really happened?
It was a beautiful summer's day, July 5th 1964, and we were at the end of a two week tour of Scotland. We were on our way across the equally beautiful Scottish countryside to play our very last gig at La Cave club, in Glasgow.

We had stopped in a little village and found the village store, intending to buy sandwiches and soda. The village store was like nothing we had ever seen before: one end was a butchers shop cum grocery store with the other end a hardware store. As you walked in, facing you was a Post Office and to top it all off, in the middle of the store was a huge round display stand with, amongst other things, bicycles and air rifles on it.

We asked about buying the really heavy-duty air rifles and were told that you need a license. "Oh!" we said. But the helpful clerk was quick to explain that the licenses could be obtained from the post office..."right over there!" "Oh!" we said and bought three of them for me, Brian and Bugs. The next thing was to find somewhere to try them out. After continuing our journey towards Glasgow we decided to stop off at Loch Killarney and test our new guns. Loch Killarney is a beautiful place, being a wide lake, and we wasted no time in looking for suitable targets, floating in the vast expanse of clear water.

We had been at it for maybe 20 minutes when I moved along the top of the hillside overlooking the loch and set my sights on a big log floating a little way across from the bank. As I pulled the trigger on my rifle I saw something move across my line of sight, in a blur of movement. I looked up from my position of squinting down the sights and saw Jackie. I just didn't know what had happened. He was about 30 feet in front of me, down the hillside at the edge of the water. Blood was already flowing from the area behind his right ear. I remember he said "Why did you hit me?" or something like that. Although I was 25-30 feet away, he at first thought that I had poked him with the rifle barrel. I guess the mind will do weird things at times like those, magnifying the distance between us, as if I was right next to him.

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