The Herald (Glasgow)
March 19, 1997

Two on a roll down memory lane

BYLINE: By Alan Hunter

THE euphoria of seventies music returned to Edinburgh yesterday, with a visit by two musicians from one of its home-grown bands. Bay City who? The Rollers, as they were also known, were as big then as Boyzone and the Spice Girls are today. Two musicians from the original group, Alan Longmuir, its bass player, and guitarist Stewart "Woodie" Wood visited the Music 100 exhibition at the City Art Centre. Older, and, in their own words, wiser, they played down suggestions that the Bay City Rollers would be getting back together again. Despite the revival of interest in sixties and seventies music, with a Brit award won by the Bee Gees and a comeback tour by sixties band The Monkees, they said future appearances of their group was only a possibility. Longmuir is recovering from a stroke, at the age of 48, which has left him with leg movement problems and was only released from Stirling Royal Infirmary two weeks ago. Colleague Wood, now 40, was upbeat about his friend's forecast that he will make a full recovery. Wood married his artist girlfriend a week ago, and the two musicians have been writing and rehearsing, having completed two major tours of Japan and the USA last year. Acrimony involving their previous manager, and other members of the group saw them fall from grace. Their most famous hit songs, Bye Bye Baby, and Give a Little Love, were number one hit singles for several weeks in the pop charts, closely followed by songs like Shang-A-Lang and Money Honey, not entirely forgotten, as they explained yesterday. Said Stewart: "Last year we played in Tokyo to an audience whose ages ranged from 20 to 50, and in New York, we had a audience of 12,000 at Westchester, near New York." Asked about the possibility of a get-together, he said: "We are not back together yet, but it is not an impossibility. Anything is possible. "We have many legal matters to thrash out, but we are chatting to the other original members of the band, and that's good. "Who knows what may come from it?"
The musicians toured the exhibition which celebrates 100 years of recorded sound at the centre, naturally taking in their own seventies era, watching a video of Abba, Gary Glitter and Boney M - which includes a performance of their own.