I Ran With the Gang

It’s sometimes overlooked just how massive The Bay City Rollers were in the 1970s. Hailing from Edinburgh, Scotland, the group’s destiny was set after a dart aimed at a map of the US landed on Bay City, Michigan. No longer The Saxons, these soon-to-be ‘Tartan Teen Sensations’ were on their way.

Like many a time before and ever after, the duality of fate and fame collided, a fatal brew. In February 1974 the Rollers were due to go on 1970s primetime kids show ‘Crackerjack’ only for a technicians strike to curtail their opportunity. Or so it seemed. Fortune intervened in the shape of a vacancy at the UK’s then premier music programme ‘Top of the Pops’.

At their peak the Rollers and the attendant ‘Rollermania’ rivalled earlier fanatical devotion aimed at The Beatles.
Combining elements of bubblegum-pop, glam-boogie and ol’ time rock and roll, the five-piece (brothers Alan and Derek Longmuir on bass and drums; vocalist Les McKeown; and guitarists Eric Faulkner and Ian ‘Woody’ Wood) really hit the big time in 1975. A ‘frenzy of teenage hormones’ and canny marketing ploys by nefarious manager Tam Paton helped propel the boys to the very top. As Alan Longmuir dryly quipped, “it was similar to what One Direction underwent … only they got paid.”

Television series in both the UK and USA quickly followed, with worldwide success achieved it was inevitable that pressures would take their toll. Alan left in 1976 as a result of these pressures and a reluctance to be a teen idol (or ‘Yesterday’s Hero’) in his late twenties. However, he returned in 1978 as the band’s popularity began to decline and continued performing until his passing 2018.

Writer-director Liam Rudden’s ‘I Ran with the Gang’ is based upon Longmuir’s autobiography. It is through Alan’s eyes that this story - with trials and tribulations aplenty, yet laced with self-effacing humility and humour - is told. Co-biographer Martin Knight emotionally read the closing paragraphs from Alan’s book which wonderfully set the scene.

Michael Karl-Lewis plays Alan, innocently wide-eyed in the face of the rapid elevation from being an apprentice plumber to adoration, adorning walls across the world and returning to plumbing and (arguably more mortifying) being mistaken for Andrew Lloyd-Webber. Lewis embodies Longmuir’s perpetual down-to-earth outlook and self-deprecation when others have fallen foul of the industry’s pitfalls and spiritual dead-ends.

Lee Fanning is The Narrator. Clad in red tartan and a crucifix, Fanning wonderfully alternates from the devilish to angelic, fluctuating from conscience to temptation, inhabiting a succession of characters with relish.

Ross Jamieson is The Roller. Whether a bewigged Rollermaniac or inhabiting the inimitable body of Les McKeown, Jamieson demands and commands the adulation especially in the closing part of the performance. The three players ‘roll’ out a procession of the hits to the delight of the diehard fans down the front, brilliantly embodying Susan Sontag’s famous definition of camp, that of “a sensibility that revels in artifice, stylisation, theatricalisation, irony, playfulness and exaggeration.”

Performed in London for the first time, this quasi-jukebox musical was a smash in both Toronto and the Edinburgh Fringe between 2014 and 2018 and despite the intimacy of the Stage Door Theatre adding to the overall affection and fanaticism the Rollers still command, you could easily see this heart-warming production being staged in larger venues.

Even now with many devotees in attendance there is a palpable innocence about these times, and despite some dark chapters in the Rollers story particularly concerning Paton’s dark influence (there are also shades of the 1974 film ‘Slade in Flame’) it’s a joyous affair redolent of the band’s heyday.

Pop as rites of passage and lifetime community. This is a tale for the ages. Times may change, but, fame’s fickleness and life’s growing pains never will.

Irvine Welsh was in the audience, it’s tempting to wonder how his ‘version’ would manifest itself.

If McEwans is Scotland’s greatest export. The Rollers aren’t far behind.

‘I Ran with the Gang’ is on at The Stage Door Theatre until 17th August 2024.


Pic Credit: Líam Rudden Media