WILL ROLLERS BURY THE HATCHET?
150m records, an army of teenage fans – then drugs, fights and claims of lost millions brought it all to an end. Today, the fresh faces may be gone but the world’s oldest boy band is back
WHEN the Bay City Rollers were big, there was no one bigger. As their star ascended briefly, everything they touched turned to gold, then platinum. They were the first and only music ‘ mania’ since Beatlemania as they wrapped the world in a giant tartan bow.
In the space of four years in the mid-Seventies, they blazed a trail across pop’s firmament, adored by legions of hysterical girls, selling 150million records worth up to £5billion in today’s money, topping the charts from the US to Japan with their sugar- spun pop confections. There were world tours, TV shows and a generation clad in plaid.
Then, almost as quickly, they crashed and burned. When the Rollers failed, they failed like no other band. From their rarefied status as first superstar boy band – decades before One Direction were a glint in a music producer’s eye – their music and image were suddenly twee and trite and no one wanted to know.
Their downward trajectory is spiked with horror stories: a fatal car crash, drug and alcohol addiction, heart attacks, strokes, penury, child porn convictions and suicide attempts, not to mention the apocalyptic fallings-out, mainly over money – the millions in missing royalties they claim they are all still owed.
It is a cautionary tale of fame and its toxic side-effects. In fact, if there is a manual entitled How Not To Survive The Music Industry, then it might look a lot like a biography of the Rollers and should be a set text for all tomorrow’s teen sensations. And yet, staggering from the wreckage of their seemingly cursed careers, three-fifths of the original line-up are back after announcing plans for Christmas gi gs at Glasgow’s Barrowlands.
Frontman Les McKeown, bassist and founder Alan Longmuir, and guitarist Stuart ‘ Woody’ Wood have decided that, 37 years after exhaustion and mutual loathing drove them apart, the time is right for one last tilt at glory.
As they hobbled into a press conference to the strains of one of their biggest hits, Shang-a-Lang, more than a touch of exhaustion and little of the boy-next-door sparkle remained following a lifetime of being rubbed up the wrong way by music executives and their lawyers.
But, their eyes still light up at the thought of once more sharing a stage – and another payday, as McKeown readily admitted. ‘Money is the glue that helped bond us together,’ he said. ‘It’s the constant thing here, although I did genuinely want to get back with the guys.’
It is hard to gauge the presentday appeal of these ageing popsters, whose carefully manufac-
year-old fan after she set up camp outside his home. The charges were dropped after a friend later admitted he had fired the shot.
By 1977, the Rollers juggernaut was running out of steam and internal rows became more acrimonious. As their albums were filled with more self-penned material, Wainman voted with his feet.
The final ignominy came in Osaka, Japan, in 1978 when 20,000 hysterical fans were unaware of McKeown’s growing frustration at the lighting technician’s inability to shine a spotlight on his face and decided to steal t he l i melight f r om his bandmates.
Woody recalled: ‘ There’s buggerlugs decides to walk along and stand in front of me. The stage was only about 10ft high, so I just kicked him right off. I don’t know what overcame me, I just couldn’t resist it. It was the way he was bending down and off he went flying into the audience.’
Punches continued to be thrown later in the dressing room and the band never recovered. By then, McKeown was travelling in a separate limo with his own security.
Within months the dream was over. Their fans had grown up and the band had grown apart. At least, they assumed, they would have their millions to fall back on.
In 1979, McKeown was fired and returned to Britain to find a £24,000 American Express bill awaiting him – with no money to pay it. His house was repossessed when mortgage payments were not met. Worse, his aged parents were evicted from the home into which he’d moved them from a Glasgow housing estate.
His fury was directed at Paton, he recalled: ‘We had been getting it in the earhole, “You guys are all millionaires, you’ve got nothing to worry about for the rest of your lives, I’ve got it all fixed up for you”.
‘What he meant was, “I’ve got it all sorted out for me and you guys are all screwed”.’ McKeown did his best to screw up his own life with drink and drugs as bitterness consumed him. Ten years ago, he was ordered to pay a court bill of nearly £2,000 and handed an 18-month ban after drink-driving in London.
In 2006, he was cleared of conspiring to supply cocaine. He later spent a month in rehab after realising he was drinking himself to death.
Alan Longmuir, who quit briefly in 1976 after a bout of depression before rejoining, went back to work as a plumber in 1979. His first marriage ended in acrimony and his drinking spiralled out of control.
He has since suffered two heart attacks and a stroke before marrying again and blames his poor health on the stress of living in relative poverty when pop should have made him a millionaire.
It is a gripe common to all ex-Rollers and the main reason they loathe openly gay Paton, who lived in luxury until his death in 2009 aged 70 from a suspected heart attack.
Woody, who lives in Edinburgh with wife, Denise, and is still active in the music industry, admitted he hid his gold discs in the attic as he could not bear to look at them.
In 1989, f ormer member Eric Faulkner, who is also still fighting former record company Arista for millions, summed up the curse when he saved a suicidal man with the words: ‘You think you’ve got problems? I used to play guitar with the Bay City Rollers.’ Now 61, he con- tinues to make music at small venues in the UK with his folk band.
In 2000, money was the least of Derek Longmuir’s problems. Employed as a psychiatric nurse at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, the former drummer, now 64, narrowly escaped jail for downloading child abuse images from the internet. McKeown blamed Paton for that too, claiming the 26-stone music mogul repeatedly made sexual advances to members of the band, who were terrified of him.
‘I’m convinced he made Derek the way he is,’ he said. McKeown, 59, claimed he once entered a hotel room in Melbourne in 1975 to find the band manager on top of a teenage Pat McGlynn, one of many replacement band members. Had he not arrived in time, he says, his bandmate would have been raped. McGlynn l eft the band soon afterwards.
Paton, who was jailed for three years in 1982 for gross indecency towards two teenage boys, was a divisive and controlling figure. Before his death in 2009, he suggested that the band members were their own worst enemies and blamed the famous curse on ‘greed, sheer greed’.
In a memorable encounter between former manager and frontman in 2004, captured by a Channel 4 documentary team, McKeown’s hatred for Paton is palpable. He screams: ‘Where’s my money – where’s my f****** money?’
In the same programme, Paton offered his own devastatingly frank opinion of the Rollers. ‘There was no musical ability there,’ he said. ‘The only way we were going to get anywhere was by selling an image – tight trousers, the bulge, how they looked, how they smiled. Really, the girls were all screaming because of the tight trousers. They weren’t interested in how they sounded or played.’
In 2007, six band members – the original line-up plus McKeown’s replacement on vocals Duncan Faure – launched a £65million lawsuit against Sony Music, which owns the Rollers’ former record label Arista Records. The case continues to rumble and involves claims for old royalty streams and newer ones from movie licensing, digital downloads and ringtones.
In 2010, former frontman Nobby Clark, along with McGlynn and fellow stand-in member Ian Mitchell, filed an injunction on their claim, demanding a share of the cash, although an appeal court judge ruled against them in 2013.
Despite decades of turbulence and ongoing money wrangles – or perhaps because of them – here they are ‘running with the gang’ again. At the press launch, McKeown joked: ‘We’ll probably never see a penny, it’ll be a repeat of the last 40 years.’
The mania lives on, it seems. The hope must be that the Rollers themselves are not the deluded ones.
‘They weren’t interested in how they sounded’