When the Bay City Rollers were at the top of their popularity, singer Les McKeown would sit around in hotel rooms composing new music and recording it on a cassette recorder.
Many of those songs never saw the light of day as the Rollers parted with McKeown in 1978 as they were going through personnel upheaval within the ranks of the band. Those cassettes found their way into a briefcase that was stored in the antic of Les’ home.
According to McKeown, “I kept the tapes in a suitcase in my attic and never thought they’d see the light of day. I’m ecstatic that they have now been turned into this great record and proud to finally be able to perform them for my fans.”
Les teamed up with award winning producer John McLaughlin for the new album who was excited by the songs when McKeown played them for him at the beginning of the creation process.
Last year, the three original members of the band, McKeown, Alan Longmuir and Stuart “Woody” Wood announced they were going to do a reunion show in Glasgow. It went so well that they booked the T In the Park festival in London but, shortly before that show, Wood announced that T would be his final performance.
Les is moving forward, using the name Les McKeown’s Bay City Rollers with a 47 date tour of the U.K. from September through November promoting the album and the band’s greatest hits.
The Bay City Rollers were a fairly short lived phenomenon in the U.S. They had already had eight hits in Britain before making it big in the U.S. with the number 1 single Saturday Night (ironically, the song wasn’t a hit in the U.K.). They went on to have just two more top ten hits, Money Honey and You Made Me Believe in Magic before disappearing from the U.S. scene but, in England, they managed ten top ten hits including two number 1’s (Bye, Bye Baby and Give a Little Love).
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