The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Bay City Roller Alan ‘ran with the gang’ but ended up alone and sleeping rough
MUSIC: Bassist’s biography tells of lowest point after leaving pop band, being penniless and battling a drink problem
It was my lowest ebb and I feel sad now thinking about it. It makes me want to cry, almost 30 years later
Bay City Roller Alan Longmuir was left homeless and sleeping rough at his lowest point after leaving the band according to his autobiography, which is it be published four months after his death.
The revelation is made in I Ran With The Gang, which the bassist and founder member of the tartan-clad Edinburgh group wrote shortly before he died earlier this year.
The book charts the rise of Rollermania to the break up of the original band 40 years ago and how he rediscovered happiness in recent times.
It reveals how the Rollers became an international phenomenon and sold more than 120 million records around the world.
However, bad management and poor financial advice meant the band members themselves saw almost nothing from the millions of pounds their work generated.
And after leaving the band Alan hit rock bottom, homeless and, for a short time, sleeping rough. In the book, completed with his friend Martin Knight and published later this month, Alan told how he ended up on the street following 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 Jan after they returned from a night out to discover “staff strewn around the bar drinking the losses”.
Around the same time, a bid to get money the band was due was going through the courts and members were also suing each other.
Alan wrote: “I was rootless now. I stayed in friends’ rooms. Today they call it sofa surfing which puts a jocular spin on what is a miserable and humiliating existence. I eventually settled in a flat above the Dollar Arms, which was not ideal, and you don’t have to imagine too hard where most of my time was spent.
“I think that was 1989. I didn’t own a bean. I was drinking heavily. I had been celibate for a couple of years, such was my fear of entering a relationship.
“My dear dad died on February 1 1989. He had suffered but managed with vascular dementia for some time but oesophageal cancer finally took him. A painful time for my brother and sisters and wider family. I felt even more sorry for myself.
“I was 40 years old and an orphan. It was my lowest ebb and I feel sad now thinking about it. It makes me want to cry, almost 30 years later.
“The absolute nadir, though, was when I lost the flat at the pub and had nowhere to go, so for a few days I kipped down in one of the pub’s outhouses. Only now, as I recall this, do I realise I was not only homeless but sleeping rough.”
Alan was rescued by a friend who knew where he was sleeping and gave him a room in his family home “for a few months which gave me a valuable family environment to try to build myself up again”.
He added: “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 premier of Grease with Olivia Newton-John they’d have laughed. I thought about how, in a pub somewhere, someone was putting one of my records on the jukebox. Nobody would have believed it. I don’t think I really did.”
Alan, who had also worked as a plumber and Bylaws Inspector, died in July this year 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, price £14.99.