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Post by petercheck on Apr 22, 2021 17:56:40 GMT
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Post by paul carney on Apr 22, 2021 19:17:02 GMT
I saw the Rollers at Liverpool Uni just before they broke big. They were opening for The Troggs. Les sang & also played the violin....quite badly.😎RIP
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Post by petercheck on Apr 22, 2021 19:22:23 GMT
I was never particularly a fan, but there's no denying the huge impact the BCRs had at the time. How many other pop groups have had their own UK and US TV series?!
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Post by Peter Stirling on Apr 22, 2021 22:56:29 GMT
Not my scene but they made a lot people happy at the time and that was infectious. Thought they would make matured come back but obviously no longer possible.
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Post by Jan Kosinski on Apr 23, 2021 13:13:14 GMT
He had a great voice, he was my idol, honor his memory, there was sadness among BCR fans
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SydV
Member
Posts: 203
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Post by SydV on Apr 23, 2021 17:00:24 GMT
I watched that documentary a decade or so ago in which he managed to arrange a meeting with the manager who'd apparently run off with all of the money. McKeown seemed extremely bitter and understandably so. I hope he managed to come to terms with it.
Bay City Rollers is a very strange blind spot for me. I have vivid memories of much of the 1970s including the Slade, Sweet, T.Rex period, which was obviously before BCR, I remember the likes of The Sylistics, The Osmonds, Rubettes, David Cassidy and John Denver popping up all over the place around the time BCR made it big, yet when I got my first edition of the Rice/Gambaccin/Reid book of hit singles circa 1982 I was genuinely shocked to discover just how much success BCR had enjoyed and even more surprised to learn they'd had their own TV series. How did I miss all of that? I was in school circa 1975/76 and don't remember anybody talking about them. It's very odd.
Not an ideal time to break onto the scene as a young guitar band if you had any aspirations of being taken seriously. If they'd been born a few years earlier or a few years later they'd have no doubt been a very different animal altogether, not as successful, but their story - perhaps more than any other - goes to show that success is not necessarily all it's cracked up to be.
RIP
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Post by paul carney on Apr 23, 2021 19:20:40 GMT
The Rollers were essentially an early boy band.Young girls were their main fan base.
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Post by Sal Mohammed on Apr 23, 2021 20:48:23 GMT
When I got my first edition of the Rice/Gambaccin/Reid book of hit singles circa 1982 I was genuinely shocked to discover just how much success BCR had enjoyed and even more surprised to learn they'd had their own TV series. How did I miss all of that? I was in school circa 1975/76 and don't remember anybody talking about them. It's very odd. RIP I think you have to be of a certain young age to remember the Bay City Rollers TV programme Shang-a-lang since it was broadcast for an after school audience of school kids. I was 8 in 1975 so I can remember the impact they had on very young girls and for a little while, tartan was the 'in' thing at my school. Like any fad, it didn't last long and the following year Grease was the word. They probably had the same impact as the Spice Girls twenty years later by which time marketing a pop band for school kids had become more professional, look how well their reunion tours sell.
The Rollermania documentary is a good overview of the band in their heyday www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06bbct4 no doubt it will be broadcast again soon.
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Post by Richard Marple on Apr 23, 2021 21:24:43 GMT
It's interesting that they had a hit in 1971, but then didn't have any others for almost 3 years, when they had polished their act & caught the second wave of glam rock.
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Post by Alan Turrell on Apr 23, 2021 21:48:19 GMT
I'll never forget the day I turned up at a Queen concert in Hyde Park must have been 1976 wearing a Tartan Bay City Rollers Jumper I still laugh when I think of it now I actually like some of their songs though at the time it was teenage girls who mostly went mad over them.
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