Mania: Tartan, Turmoil and My Life as a Bay City Roller: New book by Stuart 'Woody' Wood

In the late 1980s, Eric Faulkner, guitarist in the classic Bay City Rollers line-up, rescued a pensioner who was trying to drown himself. “You think you’ve got problems,” Faulkner is reported to have said to him. “I used to play guitar with The Bay City Rollers.”

The Rollers’ problems have been well documented, notably by Simon Spence in his 2016 book “When the Screaming Stops: The Dark History of the Bay City Rollers”.

Rollermania swept the globe in the seventies. The band sold millions of records and had 10 top 10 singles, four top 10 albums, two number 1 singles and two number 1 albums. “Saturday Night” sold a million copies and reached number 1 in the US. Spence traced the flip-side of the story, tracking the financial mismanagement, sexual predation and drug consumption associated with the band, with its nefarious puppet master, Tam Paton, firmly at the centre of the narrative.

"Mania: Tartan, Turmoil and My Life as a Bay City Roller"

“Mania: Tartan, Turmoil and My Life as a Bay City Roller”, by Stuart “Woody” Wood, is the latest addition to the literature on the Rollers. Wood was, of course, the other guitarist in the classic line-up; it also included Les McKeown (the lead singer), Alan Longmuir (the bassist), and Derek Longmuir (the drummer).

Wood deals with Paton immediately. “I met Tam when I was 16 years old,” he says. “He was intimidating and a bully, and all the disgusting things said about him are accurate. He was a predator. He abused me as he did others. It was a horrendous and harrowing time.” Wood says that he won’t go into Paton’s abuse in what follows. Still, like Banquo’s ghost, Paton haunts much of this version of events.

Wood’s upbringing was unremarkable. He was born in Edinburgh in 1957 and was to be the middle brother of three. He grew up in “a nice house”, and had “a fine life”. (“We’re not poor, by any stretch,” he says. “Right in the middle of the middle class, I suppose.”) His mother worked as a nurse and then in a nursing home for the elderly; his father worked for the Post Office. He was a lamentable student who spent his time daydreaming. He left school early with no qualifications and became an apprentice electrician.

At school, he played cornet with friends in a three-piece jazz band before playing guitar in a pop group—Freezin’ Heet—on Saturday mornings at the Odeon in Edinburgh between the cartoons. Freezin’ Heet eventually became Kip.

Stuart "Woody" Wood

Enter Tam Paton. Wood noticed Paton—“one of the true monsters of pop culture”—sizing up Kip from the audience. “No, scratch that,” Wood adds, chillingly, “He’s sizing me up.” Despite that impression, Wood became a roadie for Paton’s band Bilbo Baggins. Paton then asked him to join the Rollers, who were on the cusp of spectacular success, with “Remember (Sha-La-La-La)” starting to creep up the charts. Wood’s world would never be the same again.

Wood’s book is replete with memorable anecdotes and vignettes. Having been in the eye of the storm, he captures with engrossing depictions the hysteria surrounding the Rollers as they rose to become the biggest pop band on the planet. Concerts were virtual war zones as fans became “subsumed by tartan and oestrogen”.

At Mallory Park, the Rollers escaped by powerboat as hundreds of teenagers tried to swim after them. Wood slipped into unconsciousness and fought for breath, trapped under a pile of teenagers, as the band were unveiled to the US public live by satellite. In Australia, a dozen fans jumped on to the Rollers’ car, threatening to squeeze them “like we’re the last traces of toothpaste in the tube.”

Wood attests to the “sheer boundless excitement” of being a Roller. An entertaining humour bubbles under it all, however. On first reading the word “Rollermania” in a newspaper, he turned to Alan Longmuir and said, “Ach, we’re a mania now.” Longmuir barely looked up from his plate of chips, Wood confirmed; he simply responded, “‘Oh aye’, dipping a burnt chip into a watery puddle of service-station ketchup.” Then there’s the story of Alan Longmuir on his retired racehorse chasing a bunch of rowdy teenagers in Dollar, “swinging a horsewhip over his head”. “Just everyday retired pop star antics,” Wood observes.

Wood’s relationships with his bandmates seesawed. Paton wanted band members who were “pretty or malleable, or maybe a combination of the two”. McKeown, Wood says, could be “a sociopathic narcissist”; “like oil and water”, he and Wood were “never going to mix.” Faulkner was “a closed book”. Alan Longmuir, on the other hand, was “laid back, warm and gentle”—until a sad falling-out with Wood before his death. Derek Longmuir was “quieter, less demonstrative” than his brother. He and Wood were “close throughout the Rollers’ heyday”, but drifted apart.

Wood isn’t deluded: he’s aware of the opinions of “the music snobs” and of how the band has been viewed. “No one is looking to hear your innermost thoughts,” he reflects, looking back on the band’s heyday. “No one wonders if you have a solution to the Israel-Egypt conflict.”

Equally, he’s aware of the Rollers’ legacy. As he says: “All that optimism from the 1960s, the screaming girls and joy of it all, was getting swept away under a grey tide. Strikes and terrorism, rubbish piling up. The world’s a miserable place suddenly. The streets are violent, bloody places ... Suddenly there are these five fresh-faced guys, a splash of colour and ... maybe we’re bringing a bit of joy to the world”.

Fair point.

Stuart Wood continues to tour with the Bay City Rollers.