Sex, drugs and the rocking Roller

Published on Sunday 28 September 2003 01:00

Les McKeown once bought his parents a house.

He made copies of that picture after his parents died last year. Maybe it sounds sick, he says tentatively, but he’s stuck it on items all around their old Edinburgh flat. The Cornwall dream was only temporary. The house is gone. Frank and Florence are gone. The superstar career is gone. And most of the money was gone before he even got hold of it. Never one single royalties cheque. Somebody siphoned it off, says McKeown. Was it Rollers manager Tam Paton? The other band members? "Who the f***," he demands, "got my money?"

Goodness knows what a psychologist would make of Les McKeown. Several hours and a few double whiskies into the interview, it is clear he is not a simple man. He laughs a lot, with a husk of a laugh, rough at the edges with whisky and nicotine. But underneath the laugh and the chipper Jack-the-lad exterior, there is anger, paranoia and sadness. Anger because of the missing money. Paranoia because he has imagined endless plot permutations. And sadness because he’s smart enough to know that even justifiable anger is corrosive.

One minute he talks of wanting to pour bleach down Paton’s throat, and of hating the band members. "If it was legal, I’d have shot every one of them dead. Except Alan," he adds. The next he’s admitting that on some level, deep inside him, he cares about the boys. By the end of the interview he is in tears - not about the money or the band, but deep, quiet tears about the loss of his parents. McKeown is like one of those sweets that you dismiss as a boiling and crunch into, only to discover an unexpected soft, liquid centre.

A complicated Bay City Roller. What a concept. It would be fair to say that the Bay City Rollers never seemed like the types who would be submitting a group membership for Mensa. Eric and Woody looked like a couple of tartan-clad toilet brushes with guitars. There was Derek Dim on drums, and his older brother Alan. As an ensemble, they were possibly the most vacant-looking boy band in pop history. And then there was McKeown.

He was the singer - always the most popular member of a band. According to McKeown, the others resented him. Good-looking and cocky, he had a streetwise air that belied Tam Paton’s insistence that his boys were virgin pop stars who drank only milk. Sensible girls took one look and knew McKeown was trouble. Luckily for him, there were plenty of un-sensible girls willing to find out just how much trouble.

That psychologist might just start with the "burdz", as McKeown calls them. It would be wrong to describe his sex drive as high; pathological comes closer. Women and sex are the coloured threads weaving through his conversation, to the extent that you begin to question whether this compulsion is actually about sex at all. When he stayed in posh people’s houses, he says, the maid was just "someone else to pull".

Their manager, Tam Paton, insisted that there should be no girlfriends; the 20,000 fans camped outside their hotels wouldn’t like it. Paton was terrifying, but McKeown’s lust always overcame his fear. Like the time in Canada, when he clocked a gorgeous fan in the hotel. He told the others he wasn’t feeling well and stayed in his room. "I let things calm down, got into the service elevator, went to the area where I knew she was going to be, got her up the stair, got her in the room and went mental."

The thing is, when he was 13 "something happened" to him. "One of my older brother’s girlfriends was staying. I was a wee bit drunk and she was staying in my bedroom. I had my first sexual experience with her. She was 21. I don’t regret it," he adds.

Yeah, but his brother might have. But, no, Mrs McKeown must have taught her boys to share nicely, because his brother didn’t seem to mind.

"Maybe that’s me being over-the-top interested in women. I have been like that all my life. Until I got married, of course." He winks. "And then it all stopped!"

Normally, booze, drugs and "shaggin’ burdz" talk would set my teeth on edge, but McKeown is actually very likeable in person, much more so than he often sounds in his new book on the Rollers days. There is a kind of emotional honesty about him, and underneath that bravado is something much more complex. "My mum was the most beautiful woman in the world," he says, "the only woman who ever gave me a true kiss."

He’d better not let his wife hear that. She’d understand, he says. "You can fall in and out of love with people, but your mother will love you through thick and thin. She’d put herself in jeopardy, do anything for you."

Did he eventually get bored of bedding anonymous women? He laughs at first and then replies, "It’s quite interesting, what you are saying. Me actually wanting to touch another human being, never mind that part of it, to be in a comfort thing... You can even interpret that as wanting to be in your mummy’s arms again, or something."

Nice try, Les. "It could," he insists. "Part of it must be there. Wanting some kind of love and tenderness instead of coldness. It’s not just wham, bam, thank you ma’am. I appreciate all the other things - the kissing, the cuddling, the talking."

What about that girl in Canada, for instance? "I would have loved to have gone for dinner with her, sat and got pissed," he says. Irresistible technique. "Or gone out in a boat on the lake," he continues, "or for a helicopter ride. We had the world at our fingertips, but no freedom to enjoy it in a full, rich sense." Instead, Woody suddenly barged in and lost no time in telling Paton.

The manager was the constant thorn in McKeown’s side. At the age of 18, he sat in Paton’s car and signed an agreement that handed over all rights of attorney to his manager. He was too young and gullible to ask questions. That first contract, McKeown suspects, might account for the missing cash. He used to ask Paton for any money he needed. But someone must have got the royalties cheques, unless the record company cheated them all.

Paton’s no-sex rule for the Rollers did not extend to sex with him. He regularly made passes at the band. "If he tried to touch me, I used to say, ‘My father will rip your f***ing head off. And my brother. They’ll stab you to death." Once, McKeown had to defend a later addition to the Rollers, Pat McGlynn. "I had to jump on Tam and get him round his neck and pull him off him. He’s a dirty bastard."

In the years since, Paton has been jailed for sexual offences involving under-age boys. Derek Longmuir was charged with child-pornography offences. "I’m convinced Paton made Derek the way he is," says McKeown. Is he embarrassed by the connection between the band and paedophilia? "Very," he says. He has since become involved with Kidscharities, an umbrella charity set up by the wife of 1970s megastar David Cassidy. "I have no time for people who fiddle with kids. I just don’t understand that stuff. I understand most things, but that one is beyond me."

But he knew Paton. Didn’t he also know his inclinations? "I knew he was up to things with various members of the band, but I didn’t know he was fiddling with kids." And if he had? McKeown’s answer is abstract at first. "Tam had a physical presence. He could pick you up with one arm. The first time I met him he was finishing his daily job, which was lifting hundredweight sacks of potatoes off a lorry. He had two on each shoulder. I’d find it hard to lift one."

McKeown is no faint heart. By his own admission, he sometimes has trouble with anger management - though his shouting is usually to avoid facing things. It’s his ugly side, the side he’d rather not have. But even he sounds scared of Paton. "I was scared of him. I was," he admits. So even if he had known, he’d have been too frightened to tell the police? "Well, yeah," he admits. McKeown’s father went with him once when he went to Paton’s house. But, claims McKeown, Paton made a sound and his Alsatian attacked his dad. "It bit him all round his stomach. Then Paton made another sound and it stopped. He said, ‘See, Les, nobody’s safe.’"

He receives Christmas cards from his former manager, even though he has moved around a lot. "That’s him saying, ‘I know where you live.’" How does he know it’s not just him saying happy Christmas? "Because he hates me," says McKeown. They all did. Because, with all due modesty, McKeown believes that he was the talent of the band. With the guitars and drums continually replaced on record with session musicians, McKeown was actually the only Bay City Roller on any of the first five records. "It was me and session players. Those guys were just muppets at the back."

The band was held together by fear of Paton and hatred of McKeown. "You could maybe understand it if you’d been through a horrible divorce or something - all the devious machinations, the manipulations that went on."

Near the end, McKeown resorted to putting bugging devices in their rooms. "I thought, ‘Wow, I’ll be able to hear what they’re saying about me.’ And then you hear, and it’s devastating. You don’t want to keep hearing; you want to be back where you were before you heard." After the bugging devices, he wanted out. Everybody thought only a madman would leave a successful band. "But a wee voice inside me was saying, ‘F***ing get out of this. It’s sick. It’ll screw you up.’" He was torn. "When I tried to disassociate myself from them it was really hard. I was crying and scared to go."

Technically, he was still under contract to Arista Records and therefore unable to sign a new solo deal for three years. "It wouldn’t have mattered when I left the Rollers. They would have done the same things to me: cutting off my finances, stopping me getting a record deal, trying to screw up my career as much as possible - all of which they did."

Shortly after he quit, the band split completely. McKeown’s share of the spoils was a 24,000 American Express bill he had no way of paying. "The doors closed," he recalls. "Everyone who used to be my friend was now refusing to take my calls." The only place he was able to work was Japan, where - for a while - he was hugely popular. Later, he set up his own Bay City Rollers Group, as did Eric Faulkner.

Years of court cases ensued, trying to establish rights to the band name. But recently the Rollers decided to unite to fight for their missing royalties. They even re-formed for a gig in 1999. But the arguing started again, and all their plans for court proceedings collapsed. Such is the bitterness now, McKeown can’t help speculating about whether the others found the missing money and cut him out.

There were other legacies of the Roller years. He knocked over and killed a pensioner, an event that still haunts him. "I think that might have been what put me on the rocky road to drugs," he says wearily. "I wouldn’t touch cocaine now, though." Was it hard coming off? "I have an addictive personality. I find it hard to give things up. Once the gravy train stopped, I had to buy it myself. I’d do daft things, really illegal things, like carrying and stuff. If you were caught you’d be sentenced to about 14 years."

Even now, he knows he’s killing himself with cigarettes and alcohol. So he’s glad, in a way, that he had no money then, otherwise he’d be dead. "I never actually knew when to stop. I used to challenge people to do daft things. Like I’d put out a big line of coke on the mantelpiece and say, ‘If you can do that, you can have it.’ Stupid things, like, ‘I can drink more than you.’"

There could so easily have been Michael Barrymore-type headlines. Instead, the headlines were his own kiss-and-tell tales about actress Britt Ekland. A look of absolute shame darkens McKeown’s face. "That was bad," he says quietly. "I needed drugs; I was a junkie. That’s why I did it. I would never do it again, even if I did need drugs. That woman trusted me. I destroyed something. Not my relationship with her, which was over, but perhaps her relationship with anyone else she meets."

McKeown went on to marry Peko, his Japanese wife, with whom he has a 19-year-old son. He acknowledges that he’s not the most trusted of men. "I’ve done certain things and made it up and sworn I’ll never do it again." He loves his wife. She’s his best friend. But he begins talking cryptically about emotional pain. "You know that kind of thing, when you don’t want someone to be with anyone else?" he says.

The trouble with men like you, Les, I say, is that you can’t bear it when your women behave as you do. "I suppose that’s the pain I was talking about. The revenge." Can he cope with revenge? "To tell the truth, I don’t think so." Well, yes, maybe he can. He has been. Has his wife taken revenge? "Yeah, I mean women… It’s the first thing you think of. The revenge f***." Must be a technical term.

"When it’s all put back to you, it’s devastating. It’s the worst thing you can imagine." But did it make him less likely to cheat? "We don’t call it cheating any more." He laughs. "We call it extra-marital encounters. It’s more akin to what the Californians call ‘an open marriage’, but it’s not an open marriage. You know what I mean?" I’m no longer sure even he knows what he means. "We’re all right now," he continues. "And if she’s got that kind of inclination, I don’t want to know. Because knowing about it has done my head in."

He hasn’t been a big cheater, really. He has just done some silly things. And his marriage gave him his son. "A beautiful boy," he says almost wistfully. "I don’t think I was supposed to be a dad," he says. "I don’t think I’ve been a great dad."

The trouble has been the band’s legacy. The bitterness. It stopped him being the person he might have been, the dad he might have been. "All of my son’s life," he says, "this crap has been coming in and out of my head, in and out of our lives."

MAYBE it’s the way he describes that Cornwall photo of his parents that makes McKeown’s life flash up like a series of photographs. Tartan-clad McKeown on stage. Click. McKeown sitting in Paton’s car, signing his life away. Click. McKeown smuggling a girl into his room. Laying out a line of coke on the mantelpiece. Click, click. You can tell a lot about a person’s life from a photo album. But there’s always one picture that’s your favourite, the one that captures a person best.

McKeown’s dad, Frank, was so handsome. What a physique he had. "I should have brought a picture to show you," says McKeown. His dad was a disciplinarian. McKeown got his practicality and a lot of "disabling emotional stuff" from his mum - not that he sees emotion as weakness any more. "If I said to you, ‘I love you,’ it could be considered a weakness. Now I think the opposite. I think it’s quite brave to say it and live with the consequences if you reply, ‘Well, I don’t love you.’"

Florence was soft. The nurses in the hospital all cried when she went, because she used to sing "Danny Boy" to them at night. A beautiful voice, she had. "You never know you miss them till they’re gone, eh?" says McKeown, his voice cracking. "You just think they’re going to be here forever. How can your mum and dad die? It’s impossible."

After McKeown’s father died, Florence gave him a shoe-box full of envelopes containing cash he’d given them over the years, complete with little notes he’d written - 20,000 untouched.

The hardest thing was hearing his dad being asked if he wanted to die. Frank had a tracheotomy and had difficulty breathing. "Well, I don’t want to live like this," he’d said. McKeown can hardly get the words out. "I think my dad was awful courageous, you know? Brave. F***ing hell, what a guy. And my mum… She loved him to bits. She died of a broken heart."

Tears are running down his cheeks. "I’ve been in bits, to be honest," he says. Then he smiles. "I’m not ashamed of crying, but it’s just you cannae talk." He’s lost a lot in his life, McKeown, but there’s a definite awareness of which loss is greatest. And here he is now, ex-pop superstar with a whisky glass, crying and laughing at the same time. Click.

Shang-a-Lang: Life as an International Pop Idol by Les McKeown with Lynne Elliot is published by Mainstream (15.99) on October 20. He will be launching his book in conjunction with Ottaker’s at Acanthus on Waverley Bridge, Edinburgh, on Wednesday, October 8, at 7pm. Tickets are 2 and are available from Ottaker’s on 0131 225 4495.

He will also be signing copies the following day at 1pm at WH Smith at the Gyle, Edinburgh

An exclusive 10-part serialisation of Shang-a-Lang starts this Thursday only in the Evening News