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The sad story of The Bay City Rollers
For a brief period in the 1970s, the frenzy surrounding the Bay City Rollers rivalled Beatlemania. But behind the scenes, their manager was abusing and exploiting them.
This article is going to briefly mention rape and sexual assault, as sadly it is a part of the Bay City Rollers’ story. If that is something you might struggle with, please check out one of my other blog posts.
That was Bye Bye Baby, one of their biggest hits - it and the band’s other huge hits would spark something known as Rollermania… This band was a HUGE deal
It began years before, when two brothers from Edinburgh, Scotland - Alan and Derek Longmuir - started a band with their schoolmates called the Saxons. They played good time pop, and made their debut in Edinburgh in 1967.
Over time, they started to get a young and enthusiastic following. They would play mostly youth clubs on their tour circuits, so they very quickly became popular with teens.
The only consistent members during this time were the Longmuir brothers and their frontman, Nobby Clarke. The rest of the lineup changed quite sporadically
By the time they had completed school, the band decided it was time to go professional. Part of this decision was a name change.
They studied a map of the US and threw darts at it. It landed on Bay City in Michigan, and thus the Bay City Rollers were born.
On the night of their professional debut at the Top Storey Club, they met Tom Paton. He was a local band leader, and he successfully argued his case for becoming their manager. This was possibly the biggest mistake the Bay City Rollers would make in their career, despite it giving them success in the short term.
So, they started to make themselves known in the Edinburgh scene, gaining even more of a following than before.
During all this, by the way, the three mentioned band members and Tom had a day job. They were working class kids. Alan was a plumber, and both Nobby and Derek were joiners. Tom drove a truck. The music, like many bands trying to make it, only came at night and days off.
Now, one night, a big shot scout happened to be in the city, visiting from London. He had come to watch a different band entirely, but afterwards had time to spare before he headed back to England. A local booking agent recommended that he go and check out the Bay City Rollers.
Legend has it - and I say that because it is purely rumour, but it's a great story - that the scout didn’t even get a chance to physically see the band, because there was such an intense crush of fans at the door. That was the evidence he needed to take back to London and sing their praises.
A producer by the name of Jonathan King took a chance, and a month later Keep On Dancing was released.
It was a hit in Britain, however, this was a bit of a false start. Their next two singles flopped, and so Tom decided some changes to the line-up were needed.
This took a while to get right, but eventually it was decided that poor old Nobby was out, and singer Les McKeown was in. The most famous line-up was the Longmuir brothers, Les, Eric Faulkner and Stuart Wood.
Apparently, Stuart was a little bit surprised that he was chosen. He told the BBC in 2021:
"I was gobsmacked. I'd only been playing guitar just over a year and probably knew about five or six chords."
But Tom understood a huge part of the appeal was going to be the image. So as long as he could play the basics, it didn’t really matter if the others had to carry him for a bit.
These changes proved to be a good move, because after struggling to succeed for the last few years, they started to see some success.
They also brought in song writers Phil Coulter and Bill Martin, and from there the hits started to flow.
One track, Shang-a-Lang, is credited in particular with starting Rollermania.
Fans went absolutely wild, screaming the roof down and any given gig. But there was something different about these fans compared to other bands at the time. They weren’t in their late teens and early twenties… They were mostly pre teen and early teen girls.
So the Bay City Rollers had unintentionally found a gap in the market. There were very few bands aimed at this demographic, but it was a demographic that had the potential to make a lot of money.
Sold on this image, Tam started the work trying to get them a reputation for being young and innocent. He spread the rumour that they preferred a glass of milk to alcohol, for example.
And by the end of 1974, their debut album, Rolling, was at No. 1. However, the band wasn’t happy. They wanted more creative control and felt left out of the song writing process.
They replaced their producer with Phil Wainman, which again proved to be a good move. Their previous producer, Jonathan King, turned out to be a wrongun' and was sent to jail in the 2000s for child sex abuse.
In 1975, they released Bye Bye Baby, which is possibly their best known song ever.
This song went supernova. It was everywhere. Kids decked out in tartan lined the streets, desperate to catch a glimpse of the band as they toured.
They also had their own children’s pop TV show in 1975 called Shang-A-Lang, which cemented their place as idols in this young demographic
But despite their success on the outside, things were not good for the boys in the band. The squeaky clean image that Tom was pushing out was not the reality of it at all… because of him.
He was introducing the boys to drugs. Les told the Guardian in 2005:
“Tam started us on drugs. Well, he started me on drugs. When we got a wee bit tired, he’d give us amphetamines. He’d keep us awake with speed, black bombers, and then it becomes a little culture, doesn’t it? ‘I’ve got this great stuff from a chauffeur’, mandrax, whatever, so you end up almost showing off to each other what stupid drugs you’ve taken.”
On top of that, they weren’t actually seeing much of the money that they should have been making. That was going straight into the pockets of Tom and other members of their management.
Despite the band’s massive international prominence, the millions of pounds promised and generated by their success simply disappeared under his management. The band members received only small allowances while Paton funneled the vast majority of the profits away from them.
To make matters worse for Les, in 1975 he was responsible for a collision that killed a 75 year old woman. He was convicted of dangerous driving, although he disputed it - he claimed he was driving within the speed limit, whereas witnesses at the time claimed he was way over the speed limit.
Whatever happened, this was pretty traumatising for him. But he wasn’t given time to sort himself out and face it. He was put straight back on tour. He said in the same interview:
“They didn’t see it from a helpful, human way. It wasn’t like, ‘We’re going to get through this together’, it was more like, ‘We need you on stage tomorrow, you wee c**t, so you better stop fucking crying.’ “
The touring in the UK hit a peak at one performance at London Weekend Television, which was part of the plan to break America - this show was being broadcasted to 30 million Americans.
However, things didn’t go to plan when a stage invasion led to Woody and Les being taken to hospital.
But again, there was no time to recover. They were picked right back up and were soon off to America.
When they arrived in the states, it was pure pandemonium. They were greeted in the airport by thousands of adoring fans and their song Saturday Night hit the top of the charts.
But again, things weren’t great behind the scenes. Alan, one of the founding members, quit the band in April 1976. There’s a few different accounts as to why. Some say he was pushed out by Tom, others that he couldn’t take the pressure anymore. Either way, he left to financial ruin. All that touring, all that work, and Tom had taken most of the money.
Alan was replaced by 17 year old Ian Mitchell, who left after just 7 months and was replaced by Pat McGlynn.
The band trundled along for a little while longer, but by the end of 1978, Les had left and the rest of the band fired Tom. This signified the end of anything resembling the classic line-up.
While the individual band members faced severe financial distress—with some going through repossessions, nervous breakdowns, and poverty—Paton used the wealth accumulated during his management years to build a highly lucrative, multi-million-pound real estate and property empire based in Edinburgh.
But years later, darker stories started emerging.
Pat McGlynn revealed in 2003 that Tom had attempted to rape him while on tour. This was not the first time such accusations had come to light. Tom had previously been jailed for the sexual abuse of multiple boys, back in the 80s after he was fired from managing the band.
The police decided there wasn’t enough evidence backing Pat’s claim and the case was dropped.
It was also later revealed by Les that Tom had seriously abused his power over him.
After Tom’s death in 2009, Les revealed that at one point Tom had drugged and raped him. I can’t even imagine the levels of trauma Les had to work through in the years following the band.
The financial problems also came to head in the early 2000s. 6 members of the band took their record label Arista to court, with the claim that they had stolen the royalties they should have earned from them. This was drawn out for years, and sadly only resulted in a pay-out of around £70,000 for each member. Not a huge amount when you remember how many millions of records they sold.
When Paton died, he left behind a massive fortune, while the band members he had managed at the peak of their careers were still dealing with the lifelong emotional and financial fallout of his exploitation.
Some members of the band reunited for shows over the years and original guitarist Stuart Wood has been touring with a new line-up since 2018.
But sadly, exploitation in the music industry is just far too common of a story.
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