A ROLLER ATONES
Singer Les Mckeown plots comeback for 1970s teen sensation
Les McKeown wants to make it up to Bay City Rollers fans,
One only had to watch the ripple of retro-adolescent excitement that went through women of a certain age in the Star newsroom when word came down that Les McKeown would be in town doing interviews this past week to deduce that a 21st-century revival is well within the Bay City Rollers’ grasp.
The likes of the Backstreet Boys, New Kids on the Block and even 98 Degrees are cashing in on the reunion trail at the moment, after all, so surely there’s space within the current market for screaming-teen retromania for a little retro-’70s “Rollermania.” And yet, McKeown — the voice behind such indelible mid-“Me Decade” bubble gum staples as “Saturday Night,” “I Only Want to Be with You,” “Shang-aLang” and “Bye Bye Baby” — acknowledges that the 35 years since he parted ways with the Rollers have often been a thankless slog.
The Bay City Rollers didn’t get a lot of respect in their day, of course, as is typically the burden shouldered by youthful performers with a gift for engendering tearful delirium and mass fainting spells in throngs of teenage girls. But the Bay City Rollers also got screwed out of a lot of money. Millions upon millions of records sold during their heyday — a matter that’s still at the centre of much ongoing litigation — only compounded the resentment they felt towards the past and towards each other as their brief run of global pop notoriety receded ever further into memory. McKeown and some of his former bandmates — Derek Longmuir, Alan Longmuir, Eric Faulkner and Stuart Wood — have kept the Rollers flag flying off and on in “all sorts of fragments” over the years, but he’s now unflinching in his admission that the band’s lingering, faithful fans have mostly been shortchanged.
Indeed, McKeown views the tour that will see him fronting an otherwise Roller-less combo dubbed Les McKeown’s Legendary Bay City Rollers at Casino Rama on (yes) Saturday night as a chance to atone for years of half-assed appearances he made whilst deep in the throes of booze and drug addiction.
“It’s a way of life for me and it’s been a way of life for me — even when I was an alcoholic, it was a way of life for me,” says the affable McKeown, 57, over tea on Queen St. earlier this week. “I don’t know how I ever managed to get through those years.” McKeown emerged from a fourmonth stint in televised rehab documented by the U.K. series Passages in 2009. The experience had him shaking off not only his bad habits but also coming to terms with his long-closeted bisexuality, a revelation that came as an obvious shock to his wife and son but also gave him a new lease on life. Quite literally.
“It was a near-death experience,” he says. “And when I think back to it now, I think: ‘God almighty, I was f---ed up. How could the same human being see things so differently?’ It’s almost like I’m looking back to a possessed Les McKeown.”
Having finally emerged from long imprisonment in what he calls a “truth closet,” McKeown is now intent on giving the Bay City Rollers faithful the most authentic present-day approximation of the band’s tartan-clad golden years he can muster.
“We’re doing all of the classic stuff,” he says. “Part of the success of what I’m doing is not going out of there and messing with the arrangements too much or doing any rearranging, really.
“I’m really taking the songs back to what I believe they sound like to me — all the harmonies, all the bits that you remember, all the key elements of the songs. You’ll hear the guitar like it was played on the record, you’ll hear the harmonies that were there on the record. You won’t hear an ‘I don’t really wanna sing this song’ kind of ‘attitude’ version of it, you’ll hear a very good, positive version of it.”
McKeown is optimistic, too, that a genuine Bay City Rollers reunion might still be possible.
“I can’t blame all the guys for — some of them — feeling a sort of shame at being in the Bay City Rollers,” he says.
“But I think they’re seeing it now, because it’s starting to make a bit of noise, the way I’m promoting the gigs and all that stuff, and they want to be a part of it, which is good. So when I go back, I’ll be talking to those guys. “I would like to show them what’s out here. Because they don’t know.”