Russell Mechan

Pipe Major Russell Mechan leads the Neilston & District Pipe band and has played all over the world. Russell is a popular piper who has played for Prime Ministers, Royalty, and local and foreign dignitaries piping at some of the most prestigious events in Glasgow & Edinburgh and throughout Scotland.  Russell is much in demand for corporate events, weddings, dinners, and international conferences.

Neilson & District Pipe Band History.

Reports of a band in Neilston date back around 200 years. Records of 1819 say that a band from Neilston played “Scots wha hae wi Wallace bled” at a rally of Scottish Radicals in Paisley on 11 September. On that occasion, the band sensed trouble with the police — a tradition we maintain to the present day — and escaped down Storie Street. However, it is equally probable that the band was double-booked — another tradition we maintain to the present day — and had to rush off to another gig.

In more recent times, a band re-formed in 1970, and that marks the start of today’s Neilston & District Pipe Band. It draws its members from the townships of Neilston, Barrhead, and Newton Mearns, 15km southwest of Glasgow. The band has a pipe corps playing the great highland bagpipe, and a drum corps of snare, tenor, and bass instruments. The ensemble is led by Pipe Major Russell Mechan, who has been associated with the band since 1974 when he was only 8 years old and was voted in as Pipe Major in 2020 after the death of long-serving Pipe Major Iain MacDonald.

Neilston Band Tours Abroad

The first time the band travelled abroad was in 1978 to the world-renowned International Bagpipe Festival, Strakonice in what was formerly Czechoslovakia — a tradition the band keeps to this very day as we still travel to this biennial festival. The band was there for 2 weeks and because the band was still in their infancy and most of the gigs they did were in Number 1, the Number 2 uniform consisted of kilts and denim shirts — thankfully we have moved on a bit from then. After this first trip abroad the band started to get a taste for traveling and so a few years later they travelled to Israel — which they did on a couple of occasions — and we have kept on traveling ever since. We have been very fortunate to play at festivals worldwide, from Barbados and Dominican Republic to Bangkok, China and Japan, and plenty of other countries in between.