#the rollers

its fall yall so this photo fits my new theme of orange

A Dead Man's Roll: The Rollers

Bay City Roller Alan Longmuir was born at Simpson Memorial Maternity Pavilion Hospital Edinburgh on June 20th 1948.

Alan Longmuir was born in Edinburgh, one of four children of Duncan and Georgina Longmuir, who encouraged their interest in music. His father was an undertaker who allowed Alan to wear his top hat and long frock coat when performing for guests at the family home.

Alan and his younger brother, Derek – the Rollers’ future drummer – went to Tynecastle high school, which Alan left at 15. After a year of office work he was apprenticed as a plumber, but the job was secondary to his yearning to be a musician, he eventually hit the big time as the bassist and founding member of the Bay City Rollers, the band that hit the heights of pop fame in the 1970s, of his fame he said he was  “Just a plumber from Edinburgh who got lucky” .

The group he started in 1964 dominated mid-70s pop both in Britain and internationally, selling around 100m records – the precise total, and royalties owed the band, have never been established, spawning a long-running dispute with their former record label and their late manager Tam Paton.

In their peak year, 1975, they had two UK No 1 singles, including the signature hit Bye Bye Baby; the end of that year saw them top the American chart with the stomping Saturday Night – a foundational influence on the Ramones. When they played live, fans showed their appreciation by breaking seats; consequently, many venues refused to book them. They were the biggest pop sensation since the Beatles, and of the pop idols who have followed, only One Direction have inspired quite the same frenzy.

Like the rest of the Rollers, Longmuir, the band’s bassist, felt trapped by fame and the concomitant erosion of their privacy. Unlike the others, he refused to observe their manager’s edict against drinking alcohol and having girlfriends. In 1976, he was sacked because he was “too old and too hard to control”, according to Simon Spence’s 2016 biography The Dark History of the Bay City Rollers. Longmuir himself said: “I had a fallout with [manager Tam Paton] because I wanted to get a life.”

The public were told that he had chosen to go; in his first photo session as an ex-Roller, he wore a three-piece business suit – tantamount to sticking two fingers up at the band, who were forced to wear matching tartan outfits during all public sightings.

After his departure from the group in 1976, he released a solo single, I’m Confessing, but spent much of his time fishing and looking after his horses on his farm in Dollar, Clackmannanshire.

He viewed the 70s with wry humour, saying in 2008: “I remember sitting at the bar of the Beverly Hills hotel – there was Patrick Magee, Barbra Streisand, David Soul – and Alan Longmuir, the plumber from Edinburgh.”

In 1978, Paton asked him to rejoin, thinking that Longmuir, then nearly 30, would exert a stabilising influence. He left again in 1983, and repeated the process several times,  he returned to working as a plumber and from 2000 until retirement was a bylaws inspector. His fringe show debuted in 2014 and came back to the festival every year since .

The band again reunited for a successful 2016 reunion tour.

Alan Longmuir passed away two years later on July 2nd 2018,  in Mexico where he was on holiday with his wife Eileen.