How Bay City Roller Alan went from chart star to sleeping rough
BAY City Roller Alan Longmuir was left sleeping rough at his lowest point after leaving the band, according to his autobiography.
The bassist and co-founder of the group wrote I Ran With The Gang shortly before he died, aged 70, earlier this year.
The book charts the rise of Rollermania to the break-up of the original Edinburgh band 40 years ago, as well as how Longmuir rediscovered happiness.
The Bay City Rollers became an international phenomenon and sold more than 120million records around the world.
But bad management and poor financial advice meant the band members themselves saw almost nothing from the millions their work generated.
In the book – to be published later this month – Longmuir describes ending up on the street after the break-up of his marriage to first wife Jan in the late 1980s.
The couple ran the Castle Campbell Hotel in Dollar, Clackmannanshire.
As pressure from the failing business grew, Alan turned to drink and his marriage ended when he was arrested following a confrontation with his wife after they returned from a night out to discover ‘staff strewn around the bar drinking the losses’.
Around the same time, an attempt to get money the band was due was going through the courts and members were also suing each other.
Longmuir wrote: ‘My dad died on February 1, 1989. He had suffered with vascular dementia but oesophageal cancer finally took him. I was 40 years old. It was my lowest ebb and it makes me want to cry, almost 30 years later.
‘The nadir was when I lost the flat at the [Dollar Arms] and had nowhere to go, so I kipped in one of the pub’s outhouses.
‘Only now, as I recall this, do I realise I was not only homeless but sleeping rough.’
Longmuir recalled: ‘I can remember being in that outhouse and looking over at my sole possessions: a black bag with a few clothes and toiletries and a guitar. If someone looked at me they’d think I was a tramp.
‘If I’d told them I’d appeared in front of millions of people on The Ann-Margret Show and quaffed champagne at the celebrity premiere of Grease with Olivia Newton-John they’d have laughed.’
He was rescued by a friend who gave him a room in his family home ‘for a few months to try and build myself up again’.
Longmuir also tells how he found joy again after meeting his ‘beloved wife and soulmate’ Eileen Rankin in 1994.
He died in July after a short illness, just as the book was nearing completion.
I Ran With The Gang: My Life In and Out of The Bay City Rollers, by Alan Longmuir with Martin Knight, is published on November 26 by Luath Press, £14.99.
‘They’d think I was a tramp’