Tartan barmy

They had bad teeth and even worse hair and their parents were their best friends. Now here's the really bad news: they're back, writes Michele Hewitson.


Try selling this one to the bean-counters at the record company as the next big thing: Five lads from Scotland in short pants with tartan cuffs and a squeaky-clean image who are managed by an ex-potato farmer.

You may well scoff.

But in 1975 a boy band called the Bay City Rollers were top of the pops and the leading cause of laryngitis in little girls everywhere.

Eric, Derek, Woody, Alan and Les were, as a TV3 special this week puts it, "the Titans of tartan."

They were nice boys with it. They drank only milk. They never had girlfriends - and we were too young to jump to any conclusions about such a boast. They said their best friends were their parents; their favourite food was their mums' home-cooking.

We believed it all. We were even prepared to believe that sacrificing perfectly good pairs of jeans on the altar of the Bay City Rollers' look was cool. We cut them short and got mum to sew tartan ribbon around the cuffs. We pashed the posters and dreamed of "going round" with Les. We must have been mad.

Viv Hardie, a Christchurch property manager, cheerfully owns to having been in the grip of BCR madness. "I was definitely one of the obsessive fans - we were totally mindless, like sheep."

She claims she never really believed they were the good boys the fanzines made them out to be. Eric was the one with "his hedgehog hair."

Cruel family members continued sending Hardie tacky tartan souvenirs long after she was too old to be termed a teenybopper. Although the memorabilia is long gone, she has "a horrible feeling the tartan scarf is lying somewhere in the bottom of the wardrobe."

Oddly, it's mostly the boys who seem to remember the words to the songs. And it is a sad sight indeed to witness a grown man grooving away behind a desk to the not very catchy Shang A Lang.

It must be a gender thing. While we girls were busy drowning out the lyrics with our screaming, they were committing to memory the songs that it might have been kinder for time to forget. Although Hardie, at 36, admits to putting on a collection she discovered on CD when she's alone. "It's Hoovering music."

It was a girl thing, really. But Charles, now in his 30s and working in the fashion industry, had his mum whip him up a Bay City Rollers' outfit when he was 11. The gear was impossible to buy in the Auckland of the day. He resorted to buying the obligatory striped socks from T & T Childrenswear.

He was one of two male members of around 30 disciples who hung out at the Auckland BCR fan club, which met on Saturday afternoons in Fort St under the eye of Granny Fan - an older woman who wore a tartan skirt almost completely covered in badges. What did they do there? He can't quite remember. "Sat around and ranted on about them, I suppose."

His favourite Roller was Les, "this is getting a bit personal." But "Eric had good hair." It's interesting, he says, to look back at what constituted a pretty boys' band way back then. "Our perception of pretty is now quite different. What would make a boy star today?"

Not Les with his bad teeth or Derek with his lank locks in those pre-hair fudge days.

"They weren't," says Carol, who fell off her sneakers for Woody at the age of 11, "what you would call good-looking. Woody had buck teeth."

Back in her Waikato intermediate school days (circa 1974) such talk would have been tantamount to treason.

There was competition in the form of girls who got around in denim skirts with denim tops and, when they could get away with it, baby blue eye-shadow. They were the Abba girls, and very common they were, too.

We BCR fans were a rarer breed with a louder roar: "B A Y, B A Y, B A Y C I T Y with an R O DOUBLE-L E R S , BAY CITY ROLLERS ARE THE BEST!"

In Britain, where Hardie grew up, Abba were regarded as for "the deeply middle-aged." In New Zealand, though, the Abba fans, says Carol with the benefit of retrospective clarity, were the cool girls. She secretly liked Abba but she put on the tartan because a girl she wanted to befriend was a big Roller fan.

"I didn't make friends easily and it was all part of wanting to belong to a group. And at that age it was a way of taking the first step towards independence - of getting away from your parents."

Who, like Hardie's relatives, are scoffing still.

And more than 30 years on, based on the evidence of Behind the Music, it's hard to go on being a BCR fan. The lads fell out and Les showed himself to be less than lovable.

He admits that he "escaped into marijuana and Jack Daniels" and caused a punchup between the boys on stage in Japan. Eric overdosed on amphetamines and manager Tam Paton called the tabloids and an ambulance. Possibly in that order. There was no money. Paton - "still just a simple potato farmer" - had given it to the accountants to mismanage.

In 1982 Paton went to prison for a year after pleading guilty to 10 counts of indecency involving underage boys. This year Derek, who has retrained as a nurse, was charged with what the Sun newspaper described as "gay sex allegations."

To stalwart fans like Hardie, none of this takes anything away from the memories. "I will always love them."

She's not alone. They're out there. The hundreds of fans who live on the World Wide Web. The ones the documentary describes as "seemingly normal responsible women" who sign off their e-mails with KOR. Keep on Rollin'.

With fans like that, what else could five poor boys do? This year the BCRs - hold onto your tartan hats, girls - made up and headed back to the recording studio. KOR, indeed.

Who: The Bay City Rollers What: VH1 Behind the Music When and where: TV3, 7.30 Wednesday