Roll out the tartan for Scots rockers on tour

FIFTY years after the Bay City Rollers achieved superstardom with songs such as Bye, Bye, Baby, guitarist Stuart “Woody” Wood says he is delighted that the band “keep on rolling”.

“The songs are still there, they’re great songs. We’re here to keep the band name and get the tartan going,” he says.

“The band had a hit in 1971, I would’ve been about 12 or 13 and still at school and Keep On Dancing was a No 9 in the UK chart so it was pretty big.

“The singer then was a guy called Nobby Clark and there was a guitarist called John Devine and the other three guys, Derek [Longmuir], Eric [Faulkner] and Alan [Longmuir].

“I was playing in the band by March, April 1974. I’d left school as soon as I was 15.”

The band, with Les McKeown as the singer, hit the big time.

Stuart, who lives just outside Edinburgh with his wife, Denise, and their dog, says: “In the mid-Seventies, the world was basically tartan. Everywhere you went, there was hordes. I remember playing at the Budokan in Japan and it was a sea of tartan, it moved like a sea, in a way.

“Specially if we did a ballad, they didn’t have phones back then, it was lighters so the lighters would get lit, or the old flash cubes would go off.

“They would get discarded, thrown at the stage and usually hit you in the face — it was a bit manic.

“That was a sign of the times, that tartan thing was wherever we went, but it’s funny because tartan wasn’t where we started.

“We used to wear cardigans. I had a big ‘W’ on mine, a white- and red-coloured cardigan and white skinners [trousers].

“There was a film, A Clockwork Orange, and the guys in that, the way they dressed in it, the bovver boots, the skinners and the Crombies [coats], that’s kind of where my head was.

“We used to mimic them and it was dead cool to have a Crombie on. It was only the second album when the tartan started getting involved.

“We used to stitch on the tartan ourselves and just get a pocket, get a wee bit of needle and thread and we’d stitch it on. My mum made some of the stuff. I think the parents liked it, it wasn’t costing them a fortune to get their kid ready to go and see a show, they’d just stitch a bit of tartan on, that’s it, you’re in the gang.”

The current Bay City Rollers line-up is Woody on guitar, John McLaughlin on keyboards, Ian Thomson on lead guitar/vocals, Mikey Smith on bass and Jamie McGrory on drums.

“The band have never really gone away. We’ve had a few reunions in the Eighties and Nineties. The last one was 2015, when John got involved as a manager.

“Les McKeown, Alan Longmuir and myself did that reunion in 2015. Les sort of screwed it up by doing his own thing. We did T in the Park in 2016. We’d fallen out with Les, it was going to be fisticuffs. Then Les and Al unfortunately died.

“This particular band, two of the guys have been in it for eight years, the other guy three years and John nearly a couple of years now.”

Woody’s autobiography, Mania: Tartan, Turmoil and My Life as a Bay City Roller, came out in June and the band’s latest single, Rollers Forever, is out now.

There is a musical, Rollers Forever, now at the Pavilion Theatre in Glasgow, the story told from the fans’ perspective.

“At a songwriting level, John always had this idea that it would be great to get a musical. “We brought out our album, Keep on Rollin’, last year.

“Our first album was called Rollin’ and half the hits were on that and here we are, 50 years later so it seemed a nice touch.

“It’s just ticking along nicely, there’s a lovely feeling in the band, it’s kind of like the way it was when I left school. It’s like a wee gang.”

Stuart and John sang with Rod Stewart at Edinburgh Castle two years ago.

“Rod and John are really good pals and Rod had asked if we would do a guest appearance. So we did a version of the Proclaimers song Sunshine on Leith and it was brilliant.

“It was our home town and it was just so memorable.

“Some people say ‘why are you still doing it?’ It’s just a fun thing to do.

“People that maybe walk in, maybe they’re a bit old and then suddenly they burst into life and they’re 16 again, they’ve got their scarves going.”

l The Bay City Rollers play the Crooked Billet on Monday, September 15 and Tuesday, September 16. Tickets cost £50 as part of a music cover charge. For more information, call the gastropub on (01491) 681048 or visit www.thecrookedbillet.co.uk