Bay City Rollers: 'Lipstick getting stuck to the windows, fans going berserk'
The Bay City Rollers in 1975. A modern version of the group plays in Cork in February.
In 1976, the Bay City Rollers toured North America for the first time. The biggest date on their promotional schedule was an appearance on the Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell television show.
Cosell, the host, introduced them with a flourish, pulling on an oversized ribbon to reveal the band hidden inside a giant tartan box: “Ladies and gentlemen, all the way from Scotland, England, it’s the Bay City Rollers!” Rollermania had just been unleashed on the United States.
The Bay City Rollers were the world’s biggest pop group in the 1970s, generating hysteria levels not seen since the Beatles a decade earlier. The group, made up of five working class lads from Edinburgh, Scotland, hit their stride in the early 1970s. They had early chart success with Keep on Dancing (1971), a cover version, and Shang-a-Lang (1974), a track penned by the famous song-writing duo Phil Coulter and Bill Martin.
In 1975, the Rollers hit the big time with back-to-back No 1s in the UK, 'Bye, Bye, Baby' and 'Give a Little Love', and a year later they climbed to the top of the US Billboard charts with their single, 'Saturday Night', ultimately selling over 300 million albums worldwide. They even had their own weekly television show on ITV, entitled Shang-a-Lang.
The boy-band formula, based on androgynous looks and sentimental pop songs, was a winner. They made young teenage girls, “too old to sit on daddy’s knee, too young to date the boy next door”, swoon in particular. The streets outside venues they performed at, or hotels they stayed in, were invariably peppered with police, St John Ambulances and girls fainting and crying.
“Fans used to mob the stage,” says Stuart 'Woody' Wood, a guitarist from the original line-up. “It was mad. We used to stop the show on average two to three times a night. Police and promoters would be up on stage, telling fans they had to sit down. There were a couple of times we couldn't go back on stage because it was too manic. A few venues in London banned us for a while. It was crazy – ‘Rollermania’.
“There were some uncontrollable situations that we had to get through. There was a lot of excitement, waving and screaming. It happened quite a few times that we got stuck in a car or a limousine when fans had swamped it. The roof would be starting to cave in. The driver would be panicking, sweating. There would be all these faces pressed up against the windows, lipstick getting stuck to the windows, fans going absolutely berserk. We’d be just waving and blowing kisses.”
Their tartan look was a distinctive feature. A fan from Liverpool sent the band a sketch of themselves dressed in bomber jackets with chequered design down the sides. The band’s guitarist Eric Faulkner hit on the idea of taking the look, but switching out the chequer for tartan. A craze was born. Fans began copying the tartan look with their home-made Roller gear. Suddenly the whole world turned tartan.
“We were the original Tartan Army, not the Scotland football crowd,” says Wood. “When we were up on stage, all we could see was a sea of tartan. I remember playing the Budokan in Tokyo, a 10,000-seater arena in Japan. There were just waves of tartan. We almost got seasick, or ‘tartansick’ from seeing all these tartan scarves. It was amazing to see.”
Wood believes timing was key to their success. The mid-1970s was a dreary, economically depressed time in the UK, beset by urban decay, electricity cuts and a three-day working week. Enter the Bay City Rollers, with their fresh faces, glam rock look and exuberance.
“We came along at the right time,” says Wood. “There were a lot of strikes going on, with people out of work. Roller music is the opposite of anything negative. It's nice songs – happy, easy-to-sing-a-long-to melodies that stick in your brain. There's no heavy messages in there. It's all about love. It’s cheerful.
“Again today, the world's in a pretty dismal place in certain countries. At our gigs, audiences get this excitement, and it’s not just Roller fans from the ’70s that have stuck with the band all the way through. We’ve got a cross-section in our audiences – they’re from their twenties up to 70. They all get into it. People need an escape from their horrible realities. Hopefully we cheer everybody up a bit. That’s our job.”
- Bay City Rollers will perform at Cork Opera House, 8pm, Sunday, February 16. See: www.corkoperahouse.ie
