Bay City Rollers: You Made Me Believe In Magic
[purchase]
The Bay City Rollers have undergone a partial rehabilitation over the past few years, with their music now unironically regarded as better than we (that is, people who grew up in the 1970s) were used to acknowledge, and their silly tartan outfits seen as a marker of their taste-challenged times rather than as the fashion disasters that they were, and the girls who screamed for them now our wives (whisper it, though, that I was a young male fan before the first public follicles fought their way to the surface).
Truth is, the music mostly was not really good, a few stand-out tracks aside. Oh, but how good these few tracks are. Saturday Night is an almost perfect pop song, but even better is the song only Americans, Germans and Japanese seemed to like. Recorded by an act with greater credibility, You Made Me Believe In Magic might have become a pop classic. Appearing on BCR’s final album with Leslie McKeown on lead vocals, 1977’s It’s A Game, it stalled at #34 in the UK charts. With David Bowie’s producer Harry Maslin at the console (which explains the bizarre cover of Rebel Rebel on the LP), BCR came up with a catchy, muscular pop song that, despite disco strings, has aged very well. A good cover version by the right act could become a huge hit.
Soon McKeown would leave the band, to be replaced by Duncan Faure, singer of the iconic South African band Rabbit (which also produced Yes’ Trevor Rabin). I’ve been told that the BCR albums with Faure were pretty good, but the band sank like a stone. Apparently there are at least two rival reincarnations of BCR touring; one of them led by McKeown.
Post by Any Major Dude. Being that he's the newest SMMer around these parts, he missed Magic week (and nearly every other week too), but we hope he's game to never miss another. Thanks again, Dude!