| Subject: LES IN THE NEWS |
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Cathy
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Date Posted: 15:46:29 06/02/08 Mon
Les' life keeps rolling on
Paul Taylor
2/ 6/2008
"THE drugs don't work. They just make you worse," Les McKeown sings, mid-conversation, with a weak half-laugh.
That Verve song may sit awkwardly with the perky Shang-A-Lang pop of the Bay City Rollers' heyday, but the 52-year-old former teen scream croons it by way of explanation of how his own life turned out.
"I've been involved in a couple of really self-destructive things in my life. I'm talking about personal demons - drugs and drink and stuff like that," McKeown says. "You end up down some really dark alleys, and you don't know what you're doing or who you are."
Asked whether he's out of those dark alleys now, the man who was once the passion of millions of teenage hearts the world over says: "I think so."
He last touched cocaine three years ago, before a two-week court case in which he admitted using cocaine but was cleared of conspiring to supply the drug. Alcohol, he says, "still rears its ugly head every now and again" but McKeown stays close with his alcohol counsellor.
"I've been under 18 months of rehab," he says, candidly. "It's a voluntary thing. Originally, it was imposed by the court for four months, but I decided I like it. It helps me focus and stay away from the bad side of life.
"I am clean. I can also say I'm still in recovery because there's always that chance that something devastating will happen to you. Because the devastating thing that happened to me was my parents both dying within a couple of months of each other in 2002."
The Beatles
The Rollers started racking up the hits in 1974 - the biggest British band since The Beatles. Five Edinburgh lads in half-mast jeans, trimmed with tartan, they infected an entire generation with what, inevitably, was called Rollermania.
There were thank-you letters from Scottish tartan-makers, telling the Rollers they had saved the industry. There were, it is estimated, more than 100m record sales. They even made it in America - a feat which few British pop bands have managed since.
But, as punk arrived, the Rollers' popularity waned.
"Towards the end, I do not have very nice memories, because there were a whole bunch of demi-gods in the same band," says McKeown. "We all thought we knew what was right for ourselves and the band. We were neglecting playing live, we were neglecting the European audience, we were away over there and we had become Americanised with all the seductive night clubs and babes and exotic substances.
"America is the kind of country that could corrupt anybody. We were all corrupted in our own little way."
McKeown was the first to leave the band to start a solo career, but quickly realised that all those millions of record sales had not translated into millions of pounds in his bank account. It is one of pop's oft-told stories that the Rollers felt that they never got the fortune due to them. Even 30 years after he left the band, McKeown talks about it as a burning, live issue.
Commonplace
"All these years it was quite commonplace for Bay City Rollers to turn up going, 'We never got paid... boo, hoo, hoo.'," he admits. "But we never got together as a team."
Now the former Rollers are a "determined unit" with an American lawyer and a suit against record company Arista for which they are awaiting their day in a US court.
You wonder why it has taken the Rollers so long to find this joint purpose. You also wonder why they have not done more to exploit the nostalgia potential of a reunion. A reunited Rollers did play at the Millennium Eve celebrations in Edinburgh for a crowd of 700,000. But a reunion tour was stymied when bassist Alan Longmuir suffered a stroke.
As for the rest of the Rollers' most famous line-up, Derek Longmuir became a nurse, unwilling to be wooed back even for that abortive reunion tour, guitarist Stuart "Woody" Wood now produces Celtic music and guitarist Eric Faulkner has remained musically active, singing Rollers songs and also performing acoustic folk.
McKeown says Alan Longmuir is, "A wonderful guy. Out of them all, I get on best with him."
But he admits there is still some distance between the five men who shared that madness while becoming the biggest pop sensation of the seventies.
"Over the past ten years, one would have hoped we could have got back to friendship," says McKeown. "But one realises that we were like robot friends. The manager was very adept at keeping everybody at each other's throats - divide and conquer. That legacy has carried on."
McKeown is irked that one old band mate is doing some gigs billed as Eric Faulkner's Bay City Rollers.
"I'm not going to take him to court, but people want the Bay City Rollers band with the singer in it," he says. That niggle aside, McKeown believes it is not impossible that a reunited Rollers may one day go on tour.
For now, Les McKeown's Legendary Bay City Rollers - a form of words agreed upon with the help of m'learned friends in the nineties - continue to sing those old songs. They play at Stockport Rugby Club on Saturday, and fans will make the pilgrimage from as far afield as France, Germany and Slovakia.
"It's the same people, but they've grown up with us," says McKeown of those diehard fans. "People want to relive a bit of their youth. And there's nothing wrong with that."
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