I mentioned before that my sister was a huge Bay City Rollers fan* (Alan Longmuir was her favourite) but she switched her affections to another Scottish boy band called Slik after their #1 hit “Forever And Ever” and going to see them live. I’ll never forget her coming home from that concert and excitedly telling my mum “They were so much better than The Rollers!!!” which doesn’t sound like high praise to me but you never know.
But it’s a fickle life for the teenybop idol, “Forever and Ever” topped the charts in early 1976 right before punk came along and brought the whole 1970s teenybop era of Bell Records/Supersonic/Disco 45 crashing down. If only Slik had made it a couple of years earlier they could have been as big as, well, The Bay City Rollers I guess. But their follow-up singles flopped and before long the pretty teenage girl who breathlessly declared them to be the best thing ever had forgotten all about them and was letting their only album gather dust on the shelf behind a new one by some blokes called The Clash.
The most interesting thing about Slik was that their lead singer was a little chap by the name of Midge Ure who of course went on to form The Rich Kids with Glen Matlock, then become lead singer of Ultravox and make a fortune wearing a trench coat and looking moody in black and white videos. The other interesting thing was that they had short hair and wore straight trousers. It might not seem like much now but back when hair was long and feather-cut, and trousers and collars wider than the wingspan of a Jumbo jet they looked very different. Maybe their management had their ears tuned to the zeitgeist, pretty soon punk was going to make flares and long hair look ridiculous (I have to admit I was the last of my friends to switch from flares to straights — I actually thought flares looked better! — and it wasn’t until 1978 that I joined the modern fashion world.) When Malcolm McLaren saw Ure on the streets of Glasgow in 1975 he was so taken with how he looked he asked him to be lead singer of this band he was putting together called Sex Pistols. Midge turned him down because he thought the bloke was too obsessed with his image and never talked about the actual music much. Good for all of us that he did, the mind boggles at the thought of The Pistols with Midge Ure on vocals.
“Forever and Ever” was written Bill Martin and Phil Coulter who wrote most of the Rollers big hits and sounds pretty much like one of their records with a singalong, scarf-waving chorus but it also has these weird Gothic chanting bits complete with church bells and organ that make it sound quite unusual and, dare I say it, not unlike parts of “Vienna” by Ultravox. “The Kid’s A Punk” was the second single after their big hit and the title is probably an attempt to cash-in on the punk bandwagon that was coming (“Anarchy In The UK” had hit the charts by then) but it failed and never made the charts. I think this sounds great though, one of the last gasps of 1970s teenybop glam.
Download: Forever And Ever – Slik (mp3)
Download: The Kid’s A Punk- Slik (mp3)
*Funny story: My sister was going to a Bay City Rollers concert and got all dressed up in her Rollermaniac uniform of shin-high baggy jeans with tartan trim, denim jacket, long stripy socks, platform shoes and a tartan scarf tied around her wrist. While she was waiting for her mates to pick her up my mum asked her to pop up the shop and get a loaf of bread. Before she went out she got changed back into her “normal” clothes and when mum asked her what she did that for she replied “I’m not walking up the road dressed like that!“
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