Author:
wee goblinette
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Date Posted: 13:28:13 02/11/08 Mon
From The TimesJanuary 26, 2008
The Bay City Rollers roll on
Chris Campling remembers the Rollers
Say what you like about Mark Lamarr, he has a rocknroll heart. He may have a bit of difficulty dealing with the rest of humanity, but he treats those who strut and fret their stuff upon the stage with respect. And so it is no surprise to find him telling the story of Bay City Babylon (tonight, Radio 2, 8pm) with a sympathy rarely granted to its subject the Bay City Rollers.
I like the Rollers. On our first date I took my first wife-to-be to a Rollers concert, in Johannesburg in 1980. It was fantastic. At the end of a tour that even by Rollers standards had been a disaster (their tour organiser had legged it with the takings; they had spent some time in the company of the South African Police) they turned their amps up to 11 and blasted. And they could play, not like your modern-day boy bands, sunshine.
Earlier I had interviewed them, four of the originals Derek and Alan Longmuir, Eric Faulkner, Stuart Woody Wood, plus the multitalented South African Duncan Faure, who had taken the place of Les McKeown and watched them leaf through scrapbooks of memories that had happened to another band in another time. Photographs of thousands of hysterical fans, teenage girls then who were teenagers still. The decline of the Rollers had been that sudden, that calamitous.
By the time I met them, they had so lost the plot that they had released an album called Elevator with cover art that showed a very large chemical capsule in a lift. This was their attempt to appeal to a more mature audience.
Of course, the pages of pop are littered with examples of young lives warped but the Rollers were in a class of their own. Missing millions, internecine warfare, fatal accidents, drug busts... Lamarr gives us the grisly details. At the end you are sadder and wiser and, lets hope, a bit more sympathetic towards a fine pop band
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-- faith, 22:16:11 02/23/08 Sat