LOOK out your tartan flares and platform shoes – Seventies pop stars the Bay City Rollers are set to re-form for a world tour beginning in Scotland.
The former tartan teen sensations are now nearly old enough to be collecting their bus passes but have patched up a bitter split to get together again.
Heralded as the biggest band since the Beatles, the Edinburgh group sold 70 million records at the crest of Rollermania.
Hits like Bye, Bye, Baby, Shang-a-Lang and Give A Little Love made them worldwide teen idols but acrimony between the band members and a series of line-up changes put the brakes on their success.
This was followed by the advent of punk which made the band look dated – although, ironically, the Ramones’ incendiary debut single Blitzkrieg Bop was inspired by the Rollers’ Saturday Night.
WRANGLING
THE group began when founding members Alan Longmuir, his younger brother Derek and lead singer Gordon “Nobby” Clark decided to change their name from The Saxons by throwing a dart at a map of America which landed near Bay City, Michigan.
Their first manager was the late Tam Paton, who was later alleged to have cheated the band out of millions of pounds of royalties. Legal wrangling over the payments has continued for years.
In the early days the band included bassist Dave Paton and Billy Lyall on keyboards who left the Rollers to become founding members of Pilot, an Edinburgh band which achieved limited success.
A cover of The Gentrys’ 1965 hit Keep on Dancing was the Rollers’ first chart hit in 1971 but the group remained largely unnoticed until 1973 when Remember (Sha La La) made No 6 in the charts. However Clark was unhappy with the musical direction of the band and left to be replaced by Les McKeown whose good looks helped drive the band’s rise to stardom.
By this time guitarist Eric Faulkner had also joined the outfit followed by 16-year-old Stuart “Woody” Wood.
With this line-up of Wood, Faulkner, McKeown and the two Longmuirs, their popularity rocketed and by 1975 they were one of the best-selling groups in the UK. A tour saw sell-out concerts of screaming, hysterical fans dressed in tartan and sparked a 20-week TV series called Shang-a-Lang.
Bye, Bye, Baby was at No1 for four weeks and was the biggest selling single of the year, selling nearly a million copies, while follow-up Give a Little Love topped the charts in the summer.
BIGGER THAN AN ECLIPSE
BY late 1975 the Rollers had topped the US Billboard Hot 100 with Saturday Night and reached No 1 in Canada in January 1976 with the same single. Their Bay City Rollers album also hit No1 in North America.
Fame spread to Japan and Australia where their fans were so intent on trying to see inside a TV studio where the Rollers were recording a programme that they missed a rare total eclipse of the sun.
“There were thousands of kids done up in tartan pants that didn’t reach the top of their shoes, constantly bashing on the plexiglass doors,” said director Ted Emery. “They would do anything to get into that television studio. There’s 200 kids bashing on the door and a total eclipse of the sun occurred. I’d never seen one. On this day we all stopped in the studio and the Rollers went up on the roof. We stood out there and watched the flowers close up and all the automatic street lighting come on. It was chilling, the most fantastic thing you’d ever see. Downstairs the kids never turned around, staring into the plexiglass waiting to see the Rollers come out of the studio, go down the corridor and into the canteen. They never noticed the total eclipse of the sun.”
BUST-UP
BY this time, Alan Longmuir was in his late twenties and the anomaly of being in a teen band together with the stress of fame proved too much and he left the group to be replaced by 17-year-old Ian Mitchell, from Northern Ireland.
The group still managed to make the charts with their cover of Dusty Springfield’s I Only Want To Be With You but their popularity had started to drop and despite Longmuir’s return in 1978 the writing was on the wall.
An onstage bust-up in Japan was the trigger for the departure of McKeown and the band sacked Paton shortly after. Since then various incarnations of the band have enjoyed tours of limited success and the memory of their heyday lives on in Los Angeles where there is a popular Bay City Rollers’ Day every April.
For former lead singer McKeown, the intervening years have been particularly traumatic as he has battled drug and alcohol addiction and confessed to secret sex trysts with a series of men while married to his Japanese wife, Peko.
After a period of rehab in California in 2009, he revealed he had been drugged and raped, aged 19, by another man at the height of the band’s fame.
“I tried to drink it away and push that memory into obscurity,” he said. “The knock-on effect was that I found myself attracted to men, and now and again I’ve taken action on that.”
Still with his wife, the mother of their son, he has attempted in recent years to patch up his differences with the other Rollers.
It’s good news for the band’s fans who will be only too pleased to rake out their tartan glad-rags and relive their teenage dreams.
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