WHILE teenage girls were dressing in tartan and screaming for the Bay City Rollers in Britain 30 years ago, four lads from Wirral had taken Japan by storm.

And last night three of their most fervent fans had travelled from the Far East and the US to be at the Pacific Road Arts Centre in Birkenhead to re-live their youth.

Former Buster star Rob Fennah, from Greasby, was performing with his band Alternative Radio at the Wirral venue. But although he is now best known for his involvement with the smash hit musical Twopence to Cross the Mersey, his Japanese fans remember him most fondly for the band he only half jokingly describes as “Bay City Rollers on acid”.

Rob said: “We were a rock band really, but RCA packaged us as a pop band – and it worked.”

Buster sold out Tokyo’s Budokan venue, made famous by The Beatles 10 years earlier, twice on Christmas Day 1977, and their arrival in Japan made the 10 O’Clock News. Their five albums were huge successes in Japan (as well as Germany, Australia and the Philippines, where Imelda Marcos invited them to perform). With their live album going gold, and several hit singles in five years, they were top of the charts.

When Rob joined Buster, his drummer brother Alan, at 12, was too young to join the band. But when Buster broke up, he created Alternative Radio and Alan joined. Since then, Rob has been involved in writing musicals, screenplays, music for TV with Alternative Radio and enjoyed success but nothing compared to their Far East reception.

It was to remember this period that prompted Yukie Minohara from Chiba and Mayumi Ikida, from Hiroshima, Japan, and Yoshie Hanson, from Philadel-phia, who met through a Japanese website, to pay homage to their favourite childhood band.

Mayumi Ikida said the Buster fan club in Japan was now hoping for a reunion tour by the band, and Rob confirmed he had just sealed a deal for their records to be released on CD for the first time on the independent label he had formed in the 1990s.

liammurphy