Skip to main content
Work with the NEU
A look back without anger
PETER MASON is enthralled by the highly refreshing music business memoir devoid of bitterness or recrimination

I Ran with the Gang: My Life in and Out of the Bay City Rollers
by Alan Longmuir
(Luath Press, £14.99)

AS founder and longest serving member of the Bay City Rollers from 1965 until he first left in 1976, the guitarist Alan Longmuir was party to many of the ins and outs of one of pop music’s most unusual band careers, from the early days of slogging around Scottish working men’s clubs to the mad later years when the response to their music was so frenzied it even put Beatlemania in the shade.

The job of getting down Longmuir’s recollections had just been completed when he died unexpectedly, aged 70, in the summer of 2018, and therefore his words, co-written with Martin Knight, have had to be brought out posthumously.

The 95th Anniversary Appeal
Support the Morning Star
You have reached the free limit.
Subscribe to continue reading.
Similar stories
covers
Music / 3 January 2026
3 January 2026

New releases by Porridge Radio, The Cribs, and Bjorn Meyer

shobsy
Gig Review / 31 October 2025
31 October 2025

WILL STONE in entertained, and some, by the Irishman Shobsy and the Dutch/Kiwi combo My Baby

genocide
Books / 4 July 2025
4 July 2025

JOHN HAWKINS welcomes the passion, grief, precision and elegance of an eloquent witness of genocide

flam
Dance / 30 May 2025
30 May 2025

PETER MASON is wowed (and a little baffled) by the undeniably ballet-like grace of flamenco