Suicide, debauchery, drugs and the murky secrets behind ROLLERMANIA
They were 5 handsome wholesome boys... but their gilded lives masked a maelstrom of depravity, shocking even by the standards of rock ’n’ roll
ON a cold, grey Sunday in May 1975, 46,000 teenage girls dressed in tartan swarmed into a holiday park in Leicestershire and started screaming. The Bay City Rollers’ appearance at a BBC Radio 1 Fun Day was meant to be a closely guarded secret but the news soon leaked out.
Hordes of obsessed fans streamed towards the park to catch a glimpse of their idols – even jumping into a lake and running across a busy race track in attempts to breathe the same air as the hottest pop band on the planet.
Such was the crush, in which dozens of girls were taken to hospital, Radio 1 DJ John Peel could not believe what he was seeing.
He recalled: ‘I said, “Mark this well because you’ll never see the likes of this again in your life”. I thought, “If I live to be 200, I am never going to experience anything like this again in my life. As a kind of cultural event, this is almost without parallel in our century”.’
He was right. In 1975 Rollermania was at its explosive height. The single Bye Bye Baby had been at number one for six weeks and the band were halfway through a sell-out UK tour.
They had their own magazine, a weekly children’s TV show, a clothing range and an array of merchandise.
Everywhere they went they were besieged by dewy-eyed teenage girls who could not get enough of the five fresh-faced boys from Edinburgh. All things considered, they should have been on top of the world.
Yet the Rollers’ hype hid a dark secret: amid the band’s stratospheric rise to fame was a murky tale of drugs and debauchery, underage sex, rape, violence and suicide attempts. Now, author Simon Spence is lifting the lid on the worst excesses in a book, When the Screaming Stops: The Dark History of the Bay City Rollers.
While many of the band’s debaucheries have come to light in the years since the peak of Rollermania – in particular, the deeply disturbing sexual proclivities of their manager Tam Paton, which saw him jailed for sexual activity with underage boys in the 1980s and dubbed ‘the Scottish Jimmy Savile’ – Spence has dug deeper than any biographer before.
He interviewed about 100 individuals, including former band members, to uncover a grubby world where underage gay sex and rape were rife and drug use often led to spiralling addictions and depression.
Spence’s book details Paton’s obsession with giving the band drugs and reveals he once suggested they sleep with a male record producer to further their career.
It uncovers some of the sordid relationships inside his Edinburgh home, Little Kellerstain, his deep involvement in the city’s gangland and reveals he was robbed of £1.5million worth of possessions as he lay dying in the bath.
Just deserts, some might say, for a man the Rollers claim stole millions of pounds of their earnings.
SO toxic was the environment inside the Rollers during their fame, Spence estimates that about eight former members of the band – Paton was notorious for swapping members in and out if he went off them or they committed the heinous sin of getting a girlfriend – attempted suicide at one time or another, while countless others were damaged by his nefarious influence.
Paton, the band’s notorious manager and ‘sixth member’ – an overthe-top gay Svengali who, despite humble beginnings as a potato farmer in Prestonpans, had visions of himself as Scotland’s Brian Epstein – was the dark heart of the Rollers, selecting band members due to his sexual tastes and discarding them if they did not follow his orders.
‘To me,’ Paton once said, ‘they were a tin of Heinz beans.’
In the early days the band would rehearse at Paton’s parents’ house in Prestonpans. Spence’s book reveals that even Paton’s parents were not immune to his nefarious influence – he once spiked his mother’s mince with cannabis, grating it into the pot while remarking, ‘I’m going to give them a dinner they’ll remember.’
‘His mother was supportive, a lovely woman, just a normal down-to-earth person,’ said the band’s original lead singer, Gordon ‘Nobby’ Clark. ‘His father was quite a nasty character, drunk most of the time.’
One band member, Davie Paton (no relation), got out on the brink of the band’s success.
He said: ‘I couldn’t stand the lifestyle. I came to realise I didn’t want to be a Roller no matter how successful they became. I saw the way it was going. I didn’t want any part of it.’
Clark, the Rollers’ original lead singer, replaced by Les McKeown, spoke extensively to Spence and revealed that Paton was obsessive about controlling their movements – where they went, what they did, ate and wore, and who they slept with.
In 1971, long before they achieved mainstream success, Paton tried to persuade the band to have sex with a Radio 1 DJ named Chris Denning, who was later exposed as a paedophile and was jailed for 13 years last week for child sex abuse.
‘Chris would probably do more for us if one of us slept with him,’ Paton is reported as telling the band in front of Denning.
The incident, along with several others in which Paton would try to coerce band members into sleeping with him, convinced Clark that life in the Bay City Rollers was not for him.
Paton was later accused of sexually assaulting another band member, Pat McGlynn, while McKeown revealed after Paton’s death that the manager
had raped him and driven him to the brink of suicide when he was a teenager
Clark said: ‘After I left I looked back over the whole situation and the whole band was just a grooming situation, helping us to build up trust and once the trust is there…
‘Tam was not physically violent with the band but he was verbally violent. He was very disruptive. He was a bully, no doubt about it.’
Yet by the time the ‘famous five’ members of the band had been assembled – McKeown, Stuart ‘Woody’ Wood, brothers Derek and Alan Longmuir and Eric Faulkner – all fresh-faced, cute as a button boys specially selected to drive girls wild (even if their musical talents were negligible), violence seemed to have become as commonplace as their trademark tartan regalia.
Phil Wainman, who took the band to record at a residential studio in Oxfordshire in 1975, told Spence band members appeared for sessions with bruises and scratches.
He said: ‘Unfortunately, the boys used to come in bruised when Tam was around.
‘He did bash them about. I didn’t get involved in any of that… it was just very sad, very sad.
‘I was upset when I’d see a couple of the boys come in black and blue. It was only when Tam was around.’
It was also Paton who introduced the band to drugs, handing them a large lump of cannabis one day during a rehearsal at his parents’ house. For a band so squeaky clean not one of them even smoked cigarettes at the time, it was a shock.
‘What do you do with it?’ asked Alan Longmuir. Paton rolled a joint and gave it to them.
Clark recalled: ‘I always questioned what that was about.
‘I never really got to the bottom of that one but there was obviously something in Tam’s mind. It was a strange thing to do. There was a dark side to Paton that I’d begun to find quite disturbing.’
As the band’s success grew, so did his megalomaniac tendencies and his obsession with control – forcing the band to share rooms with each other (and sometimes with him), and barely letting them out of his sight. Drugs, meanwhile, became increasingly commonplace, with Paton regularly doling out Quaaludes, which are said to stimulate arousal, to band members, as well as other young men within his coterie, as well as cocaine.
By the time McGlynn joined the band in 1976 drugs were rife. McGlynn, who previously revealed Paton had sexually assaulted him the night he joined the Rollers, told Spence that Paton fed him a constant supply of amphetamine and cocaine during a promotional trip to New York.
He told him he was so terrified that Paton would assault him again that he slept with his clothes on. When he finally broke down and told his parents, his father beat Paton up.
McGlynn said: ‘I was going to expose him. I was threatening Tam and talking about exposing what really went on in the band.’
Despite reporting his actions to the police, nothing happened, and in the aftermath, Paton became even more open and brutish with his attacks and drug peddling.
‘He was so out of control by then, he didn’t seem to care what the press saw or said,’ recalled McKeown.
mcKEOWN finally had enough and left in 1978 and the remaining band members fired Paton in 1979. But their star was already in retreat, their brand of gooey-eyed pop having become passe in favour of harder-edged disco acts. Although there were other albums, they stopped touring in 1981.
In 1982, Paton was jailed for gross indecency with teenage boys – a charge which, when the age of consent was lowered to 16 in 2001, he was keen to point out would no longer have been valid.
On release he became, according to the book, something of a ‘Mr Big’ in Edinburgh’s gangland, with a large stash of money and drugs in Little Kellerstain, where he held regular orgy parties, kept several young men around, and slid into an openly sordid existence running his own drugs empire. He hired paid enforcers, according to the book, who stockpiled shotguns and handguns and acted as bodyguards.
When he died in 2009, the book alleges, £1.5million worth of drugs and cash was stolen from the house when he was found dying in the bath after a heart attack.
Two of his bodyguards were behind the heist and, as Paton lay dying, they stole from him.
‘The contents of both safes were emptied – cash, jewellery and drugs and anything else of value,’ one said, speaking for the first time.
‘There was over £1.5million of stuff and it filled several black bin bags. The bags were hidden in the field opposite the house. It took several trips.’
Life has not always been kind to the Rollers in the ensuing years. McKeown has unburdened himself in public, talking about the damage Paton inflicted on him, and not long ago appeared on a reality TV show receiving therapy.
He admitted that despite being married with a child he had engaged in numerous gay affairs over the years, a legacy he claims, of his days in the band. His wife stuck by him and today he appears happier.
Faulkner has gone on to carve out a successful career for himself as a folk musician, and Wood has also continued to make music.
Derek Longmuir, who retrained as a nurse, fell into public disgrace after admitting to possessing child pornography in 2000.
Last December, McKeown, Wood and Alan Longmuir (who retrained as a bylaws inspector after the band went their separate ways) performed a clutch of sell-out gigs in Glasgow and Edinburgh to swarms of adoring fans. Many were the same girls who had screamed their way through Rollers gigs of the 1970s.
In December there will be three more gigs in Glasgow, London and Blackpool, all once again expected to be sell-out performances.
Despite the darkness that continues to haunt the Bay City Rollers, for many loyal fans, the screaming never really stopped.
When the Screaming Stops: The Dark History of the Bay City Rollers by Simon Spence is out now published by Omnibus Press £25.