Yesterday’s Hero
Les McKeown, troubled idol of the Bay City Rollers, died on April 20.
INGING INTO a mike previously spattered with Marc Bolan’s spittle was almost too much for my wee head to take,” Les McKeown recalled in his 2003 memoir Shang-A-Lang: My Life With The Bay City Rollers. Having superseded original Rollers’ singer ‘Nobby’ Clark in November 1973, McKeown was at
London’s Mayfair studios replacing Clark’s lead vocal on Remember (Sha-La-La-La).
A UK Number 6, Remember was the first of four Rollers Top 10 hits in 1974. Phil Coulter and Bill Martin’s crisp, ’50’s rock’n’roll-indebted songwriting was key and session players grounded debut long-player Rollin’, but McKeown’s unaffected voice and easy smile undoubtedly boosted Rollermania, his
“Srelatable role in the band’s teen melodramas like that of a male Shangri-La.
Born in Broomhouse, Edinburgh in 1955, McKeown almost died of meningitis aged nine. His dad Francis and mum Florence were rag trade workers and made costumes for Threshold, a band covering Deep Purple and Free which McKeown quit school to join aged 15. Threshold made decent money, so joining the Rollers on £10 a week was a big pay-cut.
More street-wise than his bandmates, McKeown quickly grasped the gulf between the Rollers’ joyful, escapist songs and the dark, abusive underbelly of ’70s pop. Early single Keep On Dancing was produced by Jonathan King, and their label Bell Records also housed Gary Glitter.
But it was the group’s manipulative and predatory manager Tam Paton who McKeown sparred with daily. “I was the gobby one who had the
balls to defend himself,” he recalled.
Les was happiest in the Rollers circa 1975’s Once Upon A Star LP, wherein producer Phil Wainman allowed the band to play their own instruments. But the album’s success – and that of the band’s 4.20pm on Tuesdays Granada TV series Shang-ALang – were overshadowed by the defining, alcoholism-inducing tragedy of McKeown’s early life: In May 1975, he accidentally ran over and killed elderly Edinburgh neighbour Euphemia Clunie, and was convicted of reckless driving.
Punk and a decline in quality material did for the Rollers here, but US Number 1 Saturday Night sparked great success there in ’76 and ’77. McKeown left a warring, ailing Rollers in 1978, and his solo debut All Washed Up was a Japanese Number 1 in 1979. Eight more solo albums followed, and he periodically reconvened with BCR, but in the ’90s and beyond McKeown was reduced to MC Hammer spoof Ye Cannae Touch This and the ’70s nostalgia circuit.
McKeown died at home on April 20, aged 65, and is survived by his Japanese wife Peko Keiko and their son Jubei. Though he could never escape the Bay City Rollers’ tartan-clad legacy, Les wore it well: Shang-A-Lang, he joked, “was actually an old Gaelic battle cry first used by Robert The Bruce.”
“It was almost too much for my wee head to take.” LES MCKEOWN