In the autumn of 1971, six weeks after entering the British chart at No. 37, a Bell Records single called Keep On Dancing reached No. 9, according to Official Charts, and a young Edinburgh band called the Bay City Rollers had its first Top 10 hit. The guitarist on that record was Neil Henderson, an 18-year-old from Glasgow, who died on September 20, 2026, at the age of 73, having played in two of Scotland's most successful pop groups of the 1970s.

He had joined the Rollers in 1970, in the group's early years on the Scottish circuit, and stayed about two years. His daughter Shona told BBC News that he walked away just after the band's second single because he was unhappy with the musical direction it was taking.

The timing looks extraordinary in hindsight. The Rollers' debut album, Rollin', arrived in 1974 and entered the UK album chart at No. 1, and the tartan-clad frenzy known as Rollermania carried the band around the world without him.

Henderson followed the music instead. By the start of 1974 he had become the fifth member of Middle of the Road, the fellow Scottish group that had topped the UK chart in 1971 with Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep and went on to sell more than five million records. He came in on guitar and took on songwriting as well, and Ultimate Classic Rock credits him with contributions to the singles Rockin' Soul and Everybody Loves a Winner. He was still on stage with the band in 1979, when a photograph published by Guitar Player caught him at the far right of the lineup.

When Middle of the Road announced his death, the band called him "our original lead guitarist, songwriter and friend," and sent condolences to his two daughters, Heather and Shona. From the other side of his early career came a tribute from Stuart "Woody" Wood, who played guitar in the Bay City Rollers during their biggest years. Wood wrote that he had never met Henderson in person, but that the band's bassist, Alan Longmuir, "spoke very highly of him."

Shona said her father's love of music stayed constant through every chapter of his life. After the death of the mother of his daughters, he set up a recording studio in his home in the west of Scotland, reasoning that he could finally get away with it.

He died at Crosshouse Hospital. His daughters invited family and friends to gather at the Hurlet Crematorium in Barrhead for a celebration of his life and of his love of music.

Neil Henderson stood at the start of one great Scottish pop story and in the thick of another. His guitar is on Keep On Dancing, the single that first put the Bay City Rollers in the Top 10. The songs he helped write for Middle of the Road, Rockin' Soul and Everybody Loves a Winner among them, remain in that band's catalogue. And in the west of Scotland there is the home studio he set up after his daughters lost their mother, the work of a man who never let music go.