Bay City Rollers’ Alan Longmuir
Alan Longmuir, who has died aged 70, was bass guitarist with the Bay City Rollers, the Scottish pop group who, somewhat inexplicably, reduced more teeny-boppers to hysteria than any British band since the Beatles.
Longmuir founded the group with his younger brother Derek in the 1960s while he was a teenage apprentice plumber, but it was not until the mid-70s that they became charttoppers, after their manager Tam Paton moulded them into a prototype boy band.
Paton repeatedly changed the lineup and the Rollers would usually mime in concert, musical ability being a less important requirement than a capacity for looking winsome in tight jumpers and three-quarterlength flared trousers festooned with tartan accessories.
Longmuir later claimed that he would ‘‘rip off all that garb and put on a pair of jeans’’ as soon as he was offstage, although sometimes the group’s fans – known as the Tartan Horde – pre-empted him. ‘‘I’ve had the shirt, trousers, shoes and socks literally ripped off me by crowds of girls,’’ he recalled in later life. ‘‘It could be bloody frightening.’’
The pallid, wire-haired Rollers looked unglamorous compared with their American chart rivals the Osmonds, and their singing sounded at best like a plucky imitation of the Beach Boys. They nevertheless enjoyed a run of nine Top 10 singles in the British charts from 1974 to 1976, including Remember (ShaLa-La-La), Shang-a-Lang, Summerlove Sensation, I Only Wanna Be with You and the two No 1 hits Bye, Bye, Baby and Give a Little Love. In 1975 they had their own TV series,
Shang-a-Lang, in imitation of the Monkees. Long after the Bay City Rollers had been consigned to the dustbin of 70s naffness in Britain, their music remained popular in the United States and Japan, and they have sold more than 120 million records worldwide. Yet although Longmuir rejoined the group several times over the years for reunion gigs, he was obliged to spend much of his middle age working as an inspector of drains or boilers to make ends meet, while engaged in legal action over money he thought he was owed from the Rollers’ heyday.
The journalist Simon Spence perhaps overstated the case in his book When the Screaming Stops: The Dark History of the Bay
City Rollers when he declared that ‘‘the story of the Bay City Rollers is a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions and complexity’’, but it is true that the group’s members proved unusually ill-starred.
Longmuir claimed in 1997: ‘‘If I had the time over again, I’d definitely choose the life of a plumber, find myself a good wife and have three, maybe four kids. Yes, I think that would’ve made me a very happy man.’’
Alan Longmuir was born in Edinburgh, the son of an undertaker. He decided he would become a rock’n’roll star after seeing Elvis Presley in Jailhouse Rock, and played in various bands with his brother Derek and their cousin, Neil Porteous, while he was training to be a plumber.
Deciding that they wanted a name with a Motown feel, they stuck a pin in a map of the US and lit upon Bay City in Michigan, adding ‘‘Rollers’’ in homage to the Detroit Wheels. The Rollers had a No 9 hit in 1971 with Keep
on Dancing but failed to gain momentum, so their label, Bell Records, hired the hitmaking songwriters Phil Coulter and Bill Martin to write for them.
Within a few years they had burst into the big time, the lineup in their prime comprising Alan on bass and Derek on drums, with lead singer Les McKeown and guitarists Eric Faulkner and Stuart ‘‘Woody’’ Wood.
In 1976, Longmuir left the band, feeling too old at 27 (he was obliged to pretend he was much younger) and depressed by the lack of privacy. The adulation bordered on the obsessive in some cases: one girl put cornflakes through his letterbox every morning to ensure that he would eat breakfast.
There were reports that he had attempted suicide, though he later denied it. He retired to a smallholding, sang with an amateur country-and-western band and became engaged to a local girl. But he rejoined the Rollers in 1978, admitting he missed the buzz, and the relationship foundered. In 1981 he played the lead in an action movie, Burning
Rubber, made in South Africa.
By the time he married Jan, a pub manager, in 1985, work in showbusiness had dried up. They ran a hotel together for a time, but divorced in 1990, Longmuir’s heavy drinking being a factor. In 2000 it was reported that he had paid no upkeep for their son Jordon for more than a decade.
He suffered a heart attack in 1991, aged 43, and a stroke five years later; in 2000 he was forced to withdraw from a reunion tour owing to further ill health. He was greatly helped in his recovery by his brother Derek, who had retrained as a nurse.
Latterly the Rollers presented rather forlorn figures, dogged by reports of infighting and squabbles over money, as well as rumours that Paton had exploited their fame to prey on vulnerable boys and men.
But from 2015 they enjoyed a series of successful comeback gigs, at which one critic observed Longmuir ‘‘looks like a retired plumber who can’t quite believe his luck . . . cranking out the hits with the slightly baffled air of a genial granddad’’.
Longmuir married secondly, in 1998, Eileen Rankin, who survives him, along with his son, Jordon. –
‘‘If I had the time over again, I’d definitely choose the life of a plumber ... Yes, I think that would’ve made me a very happy man.’’