Those crazy days when my sister fell in love with a Bay City Roller

The Herald Scotland

19 hours ago

As it turns out, Stuart 'Woody' Wood has proven the most resilient of the Rollers. Singer Les McKeown and Derek and Alan Longmuir are no longer with us. Eric Faulkner contracted viral encephalitis in 2015 and we nearly lost him too. So Woody is the only Roller still rolling.
Stuart Wood performing (Image: Natalia Aronowicz) And there's a lot of rolling to be done. He's playing live, there's a new musical to promote and a memoir, Mania: Tartan, Turmoil and My Life as a Bay City Roller, just published.
It's why he turned up on Boom Radio on Sunday night to pick some records and talk about his life.
Gently interrogated by Phil Riley, the musician now in his late sixties recalled that moment 50 years ago when a generation of teenage girls (my sister included) lost their heads.
'I can only liken it to if you're out in the sea swimming and suddenly you get caught in a whirlpool and it grabs you and it spins you round and then it chucks you out,' he says of Rollermania. 'And that whirlpool experience lasted about probably four or five years. It was a lot of noise, a lot of movement. Never scary, just exciting. We got crushed in cars. Even right now I can see the faces squashed up against the mirror. The mascara stuck to the windows and the lipstick … these big lip marks on the window."
Does that sound like fun? He found it so. There is so much in the Rollers' story that wasn't.
Wood didn't get on with his front man for a start. 'Les was a bit of a bully. He was always pushing me in the back, being a bit of a dick basically. I kicked him off stage one time because he was so annoying.'
He was grand with the rest of the band. The manager Tam Paton? Not so much.
Paton initially hired Wood as a roadie for the band. 'I didn't get paid … That never changed,' the latter noted. Indeed, the band were royally ripped off.
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But today the Rollers story is defined by one word. Abuse. Wood has recently admitted that he was the victim of the band's predatory manager. In the past McKeown had claimed the same.
Riley brought this up in the interview and Wood seemed to have a prepared answer which shut down the line of questioning. Riley was happy to move on.
The interaction felt a little staged, to be honest. But the more I've thought about it the more I've thought that Wood is entitled in this situation to be in control of what he will (and will not talk) about.
'I don't want to go into all that side of that,' he told Riley. 'Every time a documentary comes out, or a newspaper item, it's all people want to talk about from the media side and I wasn't going to do that.'
Is making him relive it a form of abuse in itself?
My radio listening has been rather squeezed in between visits to the Fringe this week. Listening to Harry Hill on Desert Island Discs on Sunday morning prompted the slightly melancholy realisation that it's been more than 30 years since I saw Hill performing at the Fringe.
He had some advice for any budding comedians in Edinburgh or elsewhere. 'It's not the funniest people that get on, it's the pushiest. And I was very pushy.'
One of Hill's Desert Island Disc choices was from Talking Heads, and, coincidentally, that band's front man David Byrne has been Vernon Kay's guest all week in the Tracks of My Years slot on Radio 2.
It has been something of a revelation. Because Byrne has come across as, well, quite normal; chatty, funny and surprisingly good company. Talk about not living up to his oddball reputation.
He did manage to sneak Miles Davis, Television and Brian Eno onto the daytime Radio 2 playlist, so credit for that, though my favourite moment was when he was talking about his work on the music for the film The Last Emperor alongside the late, great Ryuichi Sakamoto.
Byrne told Kay that, 'Hans Zimmer was our assistant,' and then burst out laughing at the notion that the man who is now probably the most highly regarded film composer in the world was once his gofer.
Listen Out For: Book of the Week, Radio 4, 11.45am, Monday to Friday
East Kilbride's Orwell Prize-winning author Darren McGarvey reads from his new book Trauma Industrial Complex and shares his own experience of childhood trauma. McGarvey, I imagine, would have interesting things to say about Stuart Wood's situation above.