Bay City Rollers frontman whose life veered wildly between highs and lows

AS a consummate hedonist Les Mckeown ought to have been in his element as the lead singer of the Bay City Rollers. In the mid-1970s ‘‘Rollermania’’ seemed unstoppable and as the band’s teenage heart-throb, he had the pop world at his feet.

Hit records such as Shang-a-lang, Bye Bye Baby and Give A Little Love set the Bay City Rollers on the way to record sales of 120 million, generating income estimated at more than £5 billion in today’s money.

Everywhere Mckeown and his bandmates went they were mobbed by frenzied screaming girls, all dressed like their heroes in tartan trousers worn at half-mast, accessorised with a tartan scarf tied around the wrist.

The Rollers repeated their domestic success in the global marketplace, going to No 1 everywhere from the US to Japan. That they were, in terms at least of screaming fans, the world’s biggest band since the Beatles was no exaggeration, as even the Fab Four’s former producer Sir George Martin acknowledged. ‘‘Nowadays it is difficult to appreciate the excitement of the Beatles’ breakthrough,’’ he wrote in 1977. ‘‘My youngest daughter, Lucy, once asked me about them. ‘You used to record them, didn’t you, Daddy? Were they as great as the Bay City Rollers?’ ’’

For awhile Mckeown, who has died aged 65, relished the fame, the sex, the drugs and the money. Even from the fraction of the cash that filtered down after rapacious managers, agents, record executives and other hangerson had taken their cut, there was enough to buy a big house in Edinburgh, in which he installed his parents, and a turbo-charged Ford Mustang 351.

Then it all went horribly wrong, beginning with a day in 1975 when, at the wheel of his Mustang, Mckeown knocked down and killed a 76-year-old Edinburgh neighbour. He was initially charged with causing death by dangerous driving but subsequently convicted on the lesser charge of driving recklessly, fined £150 and banned for a year.

Those who knew him said he was never quite the same again but he was told by the Rollers’ management to get over it. ‘‘They didn’t see it from a helpful, human way,’’ Mckeown recalled many years later. ‘‘It wasn’t ‘We’re going to get through this together’, it was more, ‘We need you on stage tomorrow, so you better stop f...... crying’.’’

On the back of their American success, by 1978 the group had moved to Los Angeles, where an increasingly unhappymckeown spent much of his time taking cocaine with Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham and the Who’s Keith Moon, both of whom would be dead from their excesses within two years.

By then the Rollers’ popularity was tailing off, eclipsed by punk and disco. The offer of an American children’s TV series was eagerly accepted as away of reviving their appeal, but Mckeown objected. For his pains he was bounced out of the group. In some ways it came as a relief but, as he swiftly discovered, the fallout was cruel. The way the group’s finances had been set up meant he lost almost everything, including his house.

The only asset he didn’t lose was his sense of humour. He formed a new backing band, Leslie Mckeown’s Ego Trip, and his first post-rollers solo album was titled All Washed Up. He came to hate everything to do with the Rollers. ‘‘It wasn’t really me standing there having to smile on Top of the Pops,’’ he said. It was ‘‘someone created by amanager and Jackie comic’’.

His musical heroes were David Bowie and Freddie Mercury. He longed to be a cool rock’n’roll star, not a bubblegum pop marionette. Being in the Rollers ‘‘brought a darkness I can’t get rid of’’, he said in 2005.

By then he was drinking a bottle of whisky a day, sometimes two. He was convicted of driving while drunk and leaving the scene of an accident, banned for 18 months and fined £1000. Arrested for drug possession, he told the police he had no idea what the cocaine they found in his wallet was doing there because it should have been up his nose.

Living modestly in a two-bedroom flat in Hackney, his dark mood was not helped by a protracted legal dispute over unpaid royalties. It was the Bay City Rollers’ misfortune that their success came in an era in which only managers, producers and record companies knew where the money went and youthful pop stars were fobbed off with pocket money and discouraged from asking awkward questions.

It was suggested the band’s members were collectively owed £50m but when the legal battle was eventually settled out of court, it was reported that each band member received just £70,000.

Mckeown finally turned a corner in 2008 when he went into rehab at the urging of his Japanese-born wife, Peko Keiko, who survives him, along with their son Jubei, a martial arts instructor.

Leslie Richard Mckeown was born in Edinburgh in 1955 to Florence (nee Close) and Stephen Mckeown, a deaf soldier from Ballymena, who later became a tailor and helped to create the Rollers’ tartan uniform. He tried to join the merchant navy at 15. Instead he found work as an assistant in a recording studio.

When he was recruited to the Bay City Rollers at the end of 1973, he signed a contract without reading it and never saw it again. The band’s instant success swiftly turned into a nightmare of fear, loathing and exploitation at the hands of the manager, Tam Paton, who marketed them as awholesome boy band but was himself a notorious sex predator later jailed for indecency with teenage boys.

Paton drove the band relentlessly while he raked in the profits and plied his young charges with drugs to keep them going when they flagged. In what came to be known as ‘‘the curse of the Rollers’’, few emerged without scars. The collective history of band members in later yearswas littered with suicide attempts, heart attacks, bankruptcy, legal battles, mutual loathing and, in the case of one member, a conviction for possession of indecent images of children.

Ultimately, how five unremarkable teenage boys from Edinburgh with modest talent were groomed to become, for a brief time, as big as the Beatles remains one of pop’s most baffling mysteries. Yet Rollermania created the template for all of the manufactured boy bands which followed, from Take That to One Direction.

Given that Mckeown was stuck with his past, while in rehab he underwent hypnosis in an attempt to convince himself that being in the band had, after all, been a blessing rather than a curse. ‘‘I used to think the worst thing that ever happened tome was being in the Bay City Rollers. Now I think it is the best,’’ he insisted when he re-emerged. Whether he trulymeant it is anothermatter.

Being in the Rollers ‘‘brought a darkness I can’t get rid of’’. Lesmckeown in 2005