My sister endured merciless piss-taking from my mates and me over her Rollers fandom, calling their TV show “Shag-A-Slag” and other dazzling bon mots. She mostly just ignored it, treating our opinions with the special disdain reserved for younger brothers and their oik-ish, spotty mates. Not that our tastes were that sophisticated either as we thought Slade and ELO were the pinnacles of Western civilization at the time. But in a very mature moment my friend Graham admitted to her he thought that the track “Eagles Fly” was, you know, actually pretty good. She still wouldn’t go out with him though.

So don’t hate me until you’ve heard this record, it’s not bad at all with a laid-back, 70s East Coast acoustic rock vibe. They wrote it themselves too, so they weren’t just pretty faces. Actually, I thought they were a a plain-looking bunch, and bass guitarist Stuart “Woody” Wood was downright ugly. No wonder on the sleeve above it looks like Les McKeown is trying to hold him down and keep him out of the photo.

Download: Eagles Fly – Bay City Rollers (mp3)
Buy (or not): “Wouldn’t You Like It?” (album)

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!“

Between 1975 and 1977 my sister went from worshipping the Bay City Rollers and the ground they walked on to thinking The Clash were the greatest thing since sliced bread. That’s quite a big leap from “Shang-a-Lang” (or “Shag-a-Slag” as we called it – what wits we were!) to “White Riot” but she didn’t make it in one bound. In between the two she had a fling with The Steve Miller Band and their “Fly Like An Eagle” album which she bought because she liked the “Take The Money and Run” single from it. There’s no logical connection between Scottish teenyboppers, American soft rockers, and guttersnipe London punks but we probably all have these “stepping stone” records as we mature and go looking in all directions for new experiences as restless teenagers are wont to do. My sister’s fellow Rollermaniac friend Sue had a dalliance with Nils Lofgren before diving headlong into punk, orange hair and bondage trousers, and I got from ELO to The Jam via Bruce Springsteen.

“Fly Like An Eagle” is actually a pretty good album, a mix of catchy, Fleetwood Mac-esque soft rock and trippy electronics – what Miller called “space blues” – held together by a lazy, hazy vibe which suggests everyone got very high making the record. My favourite track “Wild Mountain Honey” is a very pretty ballad that floats along sprinkling fairy dust as it goes. Listening to it is like sinking into a warm bubble bath. The title track is fairly well known but this is the longer album version with the dreamy “Space Intro” beginning which is all electronic bleeps and wooshes that wouldn’t sound too out of place on a Tangerine Dream album. Its spacey groove makes it sound very modern today, though back then they probably used steam-powered synthesizers.

Download: Wild Mountain Honey – Steve Miller Band (mp3)
Download: Space Intro/Fly Like An Eagle – Steve Miller Band (mp3)
Buy: “Fly Like An Eagle” (album)

I could never understand why teenybopper girls like my sister screamed their knickers off over The Bay City Rollers, far as I could see they looked like a right bunch of twerps and made dreadful records. But David Essex I could understand because not only was he a very handsome chap – and I say that completely secure in my heterosexuality – but he also made some terrific music that even 12-year-old me thought was rather good. His records were far better than they needed to be, he could have made a mint and a whole career out of “Gonna Make You A Star” clones but his producer Jeff Wayne was far more ambitious than that. Along with Mickie Most’s production work for Hot Chocolate, Wayne made some of the weirdest-sounding, most inventive pop of the decade using all sorts of strange arrangements and studio effects (like playing percussion under water).

His 1975 album “All The Fun of The Fair” was the only one his my sister owned but I think she picked a winner. Like most of his oeuvre it’s a schizophrenic affair, divided between sweet ear-candy like “Hold Me Close” and “If I Could” (that one really made the girls melt) and darker matter like the subterranean “Circles” and the grand title track. This wouldn’t sound out of place among the lurid theatricality of “Aladdin Sane” with Essex playing a cracked actor fairground barker, rolling his tongue with relish around lines like “rrrrrroll on up, see the main attrrrract-shunnn” and leaning heavily on his Cockney like Bowie at his most Anthony Newley-ish. It gets increasingly deranged over its 6:40-minute length, Chris Spedding’s guitar fractures like broken glass and the track crashes in an ear-splitting pile before fading out into some maniacal horror-movie laughter that must have made all the Mums who bought the album for “Hold Me Close” drop their copies of Woman’s Realm in shock.

Julie Burchill once said that the musical tastes of teenage girls have never been taken seriously by rock critics and I wonder what Essex’s cred was at the time, whether he was given his due by the grand poobahs at the NME and Melody Maker or simply ignored as teen fodder with pretty blue eyes. What would you rather have? An ugly face and critical adulation or good looks and hordes of moist young girls throwing their knickers at you? Decisions, decisions…

Download: All The Fun Of The Fair – David Essex (mp3)
Buy: “All The Fun of The Fair” (album)