Review:

on 2011-02-21 CharlesMartel Said:

Jeez I had almost forgotten about this, but a call yesterday from my sister (who was a big fan when these guys were around) and the subject came up. Yes, my little sister as an teenage kid was besotted with this band in the early seventies. If anybody thinks boy bands are a recent phenomenon, go and check this lot out. And if anybody thinks that fronting any group with a pretty boy is nothing more than a marketing ruse intended to rob schoolgirls of their pocket money, then look no further than the Rollers' frontman Les McKeown for confirmation.

In the early seventies in the UK a dichotomy had already opened up between "chart music" and "album music". In simple terms, the former was the UK singles charts which were dominated by commercial releases, often by acts who barely had enough talent to scratch their own balls, but looked cute enough to attract the girls into parting with their newspaper-round money. The latter was for anything which would not get played on the radio, which in the UK meant everything from prog, folk, rock, psychedelic, jazz or whatever. And with the propensity for musical tribalism in the UK, which seemed as much a part of the national teen psyche then as getting pissed out of your head and kicking to death the first unfortunate father of three young kids who happens to come out of his house and tell you to move along, is today, the split was permanent, irrevocable and mutually hostile.

The record companies had increased their stranglehold on "pop" radio which was at the time all publicly funded - basically you listened to Radio One or you might as well be deaf. For some reason the BBC (which ran the station) never challenged the industry and continued to accept industry-constructed playlists for its own content. What this meant was that the record industry basically told Radio One what it could and could not play. And what it could play were the latest singles by the outfits, usually ones invented by the record companies, designed to screw the most money out of gullible adolescents in the shortest possible time. I always thought the BBC was not supposed to accept advertising, but this was not only advertising, but the BBC had to pay for the "privilege" of airing them. Utterly preposterous! And yet the same cancer still persists to this very day.

And what this corrupt and pernicious system resulted in was trash like the Bay City Rollers. Only one of them could actually play his instrument (the bassist I believe) and Les McKeown could just about hold a key with his voice, provided he was not expected to take on anything too challenging. But that wasn't the point. It was all about the image. This was aimed squarely at adolescent girls (like my sis). These guys were clean cut, always smiling inanely like gibbons on dope, dressed in this ridiculous pastiche of fashion (tartan flares for chrissakes). And all they sang about were kissing girls, missing girls and shang-a-bloody-lang! Catchy hooks, sing-along call and response refrains and staring into the camera with puppy dog eyes each girl KNEW were just for her and you had a winner! And the little girls fell for it, just as the record companies had intended. This was what Joe Strummer would later describe in "London Calling" as "phony Beatlemania".

To maximise the revenue, the record companies made the band put out a slew of singles in quick succession and, for those who had missed out first time round, then combined the singles periodically onto albums, like this, and released them. Consequently, the Rollers were, during their heyday, never out of the singles charts. I hated it then and have little tolerance for it now. Call me a rockist snob if you will, but mass produced, slickly-marketed shallow, throwaway pap is what this and only what this is. When I raised the subject of the Rollers, my sister couldn't remember a single song they did, let alone recall a tune. I do not find that in any way surprising.

History has been kinder to the Bay City Rollers than I have been. Some people look back through rose tinted spectacles because it reminds them of a kind of golden age, a time of which they had fond memories and the Bay City Rollers were part of that. Some people actually like cheesy bubblegum pop. Fine on both counts. Each to his or her own. But for me this represented the epitome of what was wrong with music in the UK in the seventies, and what continues to be wrong with it today. You can trace a direct line, through a succession of record executives and A&R men, from X-Factor right the way back to the Rollers. Success was (and is) measured in money; talent (if it exists) is relevant for only as long as it a success; a genre was a bandwagon others jumped on in search of success. Given that many of these acts could barely perform and most of the records were done by session musicians this, in my view, was tantamount to a criminal offence of obtaining money by deception. And when it was over, and the record companies started to peddle something else, well it was just embarrassingly forgotten. The records were stashed in the loft, the posters were taken down from the bedroom walls, the tartan flares turned into dishrags and the five lads who fronted it picked up their UB40's and went back to signing on fortnightly, drinking themselves into oblivion and, in the case of Les McKeown, shooting curious one-time fans out of his bedroom window with a shotgun.

Pop music.
Rating: 1/10