David Sye was eight years old when his father, Frankie Vaughan, showed him around the infamous Easterhouse estate in Glasgow. The singer was already a legend in the community after persuading rival gangs to agree to a weapons amnesty. The trip with his son in 1968 celebrated the opening of the Easterhouse project, a centre funded by Vaughan for poor teenagers.

“My dad told me about the gangs and the knife culture in Easterhouse but it was very far removed from my life. My first impressions were that it looked horrible. I thought, who would want to live here?” he says. “But my dad drummed into us that there was no difference between me and the kids in Easterhouse. We’re all part of the global community. He said if you contribute something, you will always be happy.”

Forty years on Sye is acting on his father’s advice. He is returning to Easterhouse to help set up a new community centre after the original closed and was burned down three years ago. Sye’s approach, however, is very different from his father’s. He plans to use yoga to heal Easterhouse residents.

“Yoga can be seen as a middle class indulgence,” he says. “But it is an art that has survived for 7,000 years and can make anyone feel better. It can take you from pissed to blissed. I’ve seen yoga turn psychotic prisoners into smiley idiots in 15 minutes. It is a deeply effective tool and I’m sure it will help people in Easterhouse.”

It would be easy to dismiss Sye, 48, as an idealistic hippy, but he has experience of teaching yoga in the most unlikely places. Since founding Yogabeats, his lively blend of asanas — body positions — and club music in London, Sye has led classes in notorious troublespots including Bosnia and the Middle East. He has worked with prisoners and drug addicts in London and engineered a meeting between Israeli and Palestinian women to practise yoga together in the American Colony hotel in Jerusalem. His only criteria for teaching is that all his students disarm before entering class.

Now he plans to bring yoga to one of Glasgow’s most deprived estates, starting with an introductory event in the city in February to raise money for the new Easterhouse community centre. He hopes that residents will join a mass yoga class expected to last for up to three hours. Afterwards he will help train teachers to take yoga into schools and run classes in the new centre.

“Wherever you go humanity is the same. We might be speaking different languages but we’re saying the same thing. To marginalise people because we don’t understand them is a mistake. As dad always said, there is a reason why people are the way they are,” he says.

Sye was living in London with his parents and brother and sister when he and his father first visited Easterhouse. The sprawling post-war estate, home to 40,000 people, was riven by gang warfare and social deprivation. Gang leaders controlled their territories and most people were afraid to go out after dark.

Sye was struck by the respect his father was shown, even by notorious hard men. “Dad left a significant mark on the community. They have not forgotten what he did to tackle violence.” Vaughan’s involvement in Easterhouse, which began when he donated money from a concert at the Glasgow Pavillion, is remembered vividly. He made many visits, including one to a pub where he sat with rival gang leaders to thrash out ground rules for a weapons amnesty. Government papers released in 2000 show that crime fell sharply after Vaughan, who died in 1999, convinced gang members to surrender razors and knives.

Richard McShane, chairman of the residents and tenants association, who started the Easterhouse project revival, says everyone over the age of 50 has a story about the singer’s visits, including a woman who says her children grabbed all the knives from the cutlery drawer to make them part of the amnesty and have their picture taken with Vaughan.

When Sye heard of plans to rebuild the community centre, he called McShane. “I said my dad had been there 40 years ago and I’d like to support the work. Richard said, ‘who’s your dad?’, and when I told him he nearly fell off his seat,” says Sye.

McShane laughs. “I thought someone was pulling my leg. When I realised David was for real, I couldn’t say yes fast enough. What his dad did here is still talked about. He saved lives. To have David following in his footsteps is tremendous.”

Easterhouse today is different from the 1960s when it was described as “a desert with houses”. The population has fallen to 11,000 and delapidated tenements have been replaced with council and privately-owned homes. Gangs no longer terrorise streets but the neighbourhood is still blighted by unemployment, underage drinking and knife crime.

“Yoga can help wean young people off drink and drugs,” says McShane. “It is perfect for a deprived area like this. He has people eating out of the palm of his hand after one of his classes. Their concentration is sky high. They are calmer.”

Sye says his individual style is better for hyperactive teenagers than conventional yoga that requires students to hold poses. “It's all about whacking on the music and having fun. It’s not about being skinny and bendy or putting your leg behind your head.”

Sye first used a soundtrack in yoga classes in Belgrade during the Bosnian conflict because it drowned out the sound of rocket fire. Now it is an essential part of his teaching.

The problems of Easterhouse, he says, are “the problems of any fractured community with kids getting drunk, violence and apathy because there is sod all else for them to do.

“They don’t have basic facilities and all the energy of young people is going sour. We have to harness that energy and turn it into something positive.”

Explore Music

• CD Reviews

• Live Reviews

• Classical

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010