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Bay City Babylon

The Bay City Rollers
  • Posted at 12:07pm
  • 31 January 2008
  • by SarahDempster-RT

Anyone harbouring the notion that life in a pop band is but a giddy whirl of sequins, adulation, cash, tinsel, cameras, canapés, rainbows, butterflies and the infinite gratitude of attractive young women who've forgotten to put their tights on is advised to pack a light lunch, throw on a cagoule and make their way to www.bbc.co.uk/radio2 as quickly as their fingers will carry them.

There, surrounded by a constellation of the station's trusted yeomen – a waxen Terry Wogan, a triumphant Paul Jones, a benevolent Jeremy Vine - one will encounter, within a powder-blue box labelled RADIO 2 PRESENTERS AND SHOWS, the words "Bay City Babylon". Click on the words. Click on them immediately. For therein lies the Truth behind the pop-is-good myth, a Truth so shocking, so depressing and so cruel, your preconceptions will explode like an overripe melon.

Bay City Babylon (originally broadcast Saturday 26 January, 8:00pm, BBC Radio 2) was – and indeed, thanks to the aforementioned link, still is – a documentary about the Bay City Rollers. Obviously. (The Bay City bit was a clue.) But it's not only about the Bay City Rollers. It's about betrayal and appalling hair. It's about ferocious regimentation, drugs, the systematic removal of freedom, theft, stripy socks, depression, interminable court cases, acne, and the fate that can befall tipsy youngsters who sign enormous contracts when they can barely spell the title of their latest single. It's about tartan plus fours.

Above all, however, it's about pop, and how pop is - when you brush off the stardust, wipe off the fake tan and strip it all down to its greying M&S underwear - just a business: with all the greed, skyscrapers, paperwork, shifty accountants and brandy that that entails.

A raggle-taggle bunch of pasty Edinburgh tearaways, the Bay City Rollers – namely Les McKeown, Stuart "Woody" Wood, Eric Faulkner and brothers Alan and Derek Longmuir – had no idea what they were in for. Listening to them describe their brief tenure as one of Britain's most successful pop bands is to hear several middle-aged men wrestle with three decades of disappointment and regret.

"I was stoned out of my mind most of the time," says short-lived rhythm guitarist Pat McGlynn. "It wasn't a life," adds the soft-voiced Wood. Even Tam Paton, their notoriously controlling manager, professed to having been "quite lonely at the time". Singer Les McKeown, meanwhile, describes his time in the band thus: "One morning I woke up and five years later I went to bed."

If nothing else, the band's cataclysmically sleep-deprived/amphetamine-charged schedule would explain their decision to dress like Highland warriors who'd found themselves at a regional sports centre in 1974. It was an appalling look but it helped seal their extraordinary popularity, with record sales in excess of 60 million and America inviting them in for a slice of apple pie, a number one hit and their own TV series.

But by 1977 it was all over. Alan Longmuir left because, at 28, he felt "too old". He would later suffer a heart attack and a stroke. Les McKeown embarked on an ill-fated solo career and a drug addiction. None of them made any money, their missing millions having been funnelled into various "Byzantine" offshore bank accounts before seemingly disappearing into thin air.

The moral of the story is as bleak as it is similar to the song War by Edwin Starr. Namely: pop? Huh. Good God, y'all. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing.

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