Les McKeown Life's Ups & Downs || RIP (1955 - 2021) LES MCKnown Bay City Rollers Singer
Channel: ListTenz
Date: 2021-04-22

Les McKeown, the Bay City Rollers' lead singer during their most prolific era, died at the age of 65. Les McKeown Life's Ups & Downs.

He "died unexpectedly at home," according to his relatives, who requested privacy due to "the shock of our profound loss." The cause of death has not been revealed.

McKeown, who grew up in a tenement in Edinburgh, sang the Scottish group's UK No. 1 Bye Bye Baby, as well as Top 10 hits like Shang-a-Lang and Summer love Sensation, and helped them achieve US success in the mid-70s.

The Bay City Rollers began performing covers of American pop and R&B songs in 1964, with singer Gordon Clark at the helm. Keep on Dancing gave them their breakthrough in 1971, but their success waned, and Clark left in 1973, to be replaced by McKeown.

With Remember (Sha-La-La-La), the first in a string of hit singles that cemented the group as one of the UK's most successful – and screamed overacts, the handsome singer quickly accumulated a teenage following and returned the band to the Top 10 in 1974. They sold over 120 million albums in total.

They had more hits with cover versions like Bye Bye Baby, as well as original material like Give a Little Love, which reached No. 1 in the UK in 1975. McKeown and the band wore tartan clothing to proudly show their Scottish roots, which quickly became a sort of uniform for fans. McKeown said in 2013: “We were young, working-class guys who wanted to be popular, who wanted to play all over the world and make our music, Scotland, and tartan famous, and that was our main goal.”

Clive Davis, who formed Arista Records in 1974 and later nurtured Whitney Houston and Bruce Springsteen, successfully launched the group in North America in 1975, when they reached No. 1 in the US with the single Saturday Night and had two additional Top 10 hits.

The band's success waned as fashions shifted in the latter half of the decade. McKeown left the group in 1978, at the age of 22, when the group shifted to a more modern new-wave style but returned for several reunion tours, the most recent of which was in 2015.

His debut solo album, All Washed Up, was a hit in Japan in 1979, and he went on to release eight more solo albums. The Lost Tracks, released in 2016, featured songs he wrote while touring with the Bay City Rollers in the 1970s.

McKeown was found guilty of reckless driving in 1975, just as his fame was growing after he hit and killed an elderly neighbor, Euphemia Clunie. He was fined £100 and banned from driving for a year. In another instance, he was found to have been driving while inebriated, more than double the legal limit, and leaving the scene of an accident in 2005. He was given an 18-month suspension and a £1,000 fine.

Beginning in the late 1970s, McKeown suffered from drug and alcohol abuse. He later admitted that the deaths of his parents within a month of each other "flipped him over to the dark side," and that he developed an alcohol addiction in the early 2000s, drinking "one, two, maybe three bottles of whisky a day." After a four-month stay in a California recovery facility in 2008, he became sober.

The band had been involved in a long-running legal battle with ex-manager Tam Paton and their label Sony over royalties they said they were owed. McKeown also said Paton, who died in 2009, gave him drugs when he was with the band: “When we got a little tired, he'd give us amphetamines.” He'd hold us up with his speed,” he told the Guardian in 2005, calling him a "thug, a predator" elsewhere.

He is survived by his wife Peko Keiko and their son Jubei, whom he met in 1978.

#Les_McKeown autobiography Bay City Rollersin laulaja Les McKeown, 65, kuoli äkillisesti.






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