Bay City Roller frontman Les McKeown loved being a superstar, but he's still very better that the band gained so little financially, he tells Viv Hardwick.

SING a few bars of Shang-A-Lang and you have the instant nostalgia of the heady days of 1974 when a bunch of snake-hipped Scotsmen with tartan-trimmed half-mast trousers and stacked shoes dominated the charts.

Nearly 30 years on, the Bay City Rollers remain the band that the girls loved and the guys hated, but the clean-cut tartan image has been torn to tatters by legal wrangles, a tragic road death, alleged attacks on fans and a series of sex scandals.

Now the best known of the band members, frontman Les McKeown has produced his biography, Shang-a-Lang, in which the 47-year-old reruns Rollermania from his own point of view.

It makes uncomfortable reading. The boy from Edinburgh's school of hard knocks makes few apologies for his antics and re-opens the allegations surrounding the disgraced DJ Jonathan King and the Rollers' manager Tam Paton.

McKeown, now a DJ himself and happy to commute between homes in London and Munich, says: "I look back at our Shang-A-Lang days with affection, but there are lots of things that I might have changed. One thing for sure is that I would have got rid of that monster manager of ours. When he decided he was going to arbitrarily fire Alan (Longmuir) from the group they should have all stood side-by side with me, which they never, and told him to **** right off. That was a turning point in the Bay City Rollers' career. After that, I was finished with them."

McKeown dedicates his book to his parents Florence and Francis, an Irish couple who came over to Britain to work for an Edinburgh tailor. They both died last year.

"The established view of the BCR and the established view of me... was made up by people who wrote for Jackie magazine. Nobody actually interviewed us," says McKeown. "It was a myth that was created about the crazy things that happened. So when I say 'this is Les from the Bay City Rollers' people automatically have this complete data file on me... or think they have. So I'm trying to tell it the way I saw it happen, what really happened."

He gives his version of a road accident which killed a pedestrian and the shooting of a female Rollers' fan with an air rifle pellet.

There is certainly no dispute over the level of hysteria surrounding the band, although McKeown admits "fan invasions" were frequently allowed to get out of control by the band's management.

"We were young kids who were happy to be in a situation we dreamed about for the first two years. At the same time, when the veneer wore off, we realised we'd been cheated by horrible, nasty people that I didn't know existed in this world. I was the voice of 300 million records, that's what they say, and I didn't get a bean for any one of them."

McKeown's bitterness about his missing millions has not dulled with time and he still talks of taking legal action against Arista Records.

On the price of fame, he reflects: "I often browse around bookshops to look at the history of pop and rock and we barely get a mention while some other bands who sold two-and-a-half records in Europe get around five pages. It's like they want to forget us and pretend it never happened, but we were the biggest things after the Beatles and we're still the biggest-selling British artists in Japan. And I'm still not getting anything."

* Shang-a-Lang: Life as an International Pop Idol by Les McKeown with Lyne Elliott (Mainstream Publishing, £15.99)

* Do you remember Rollermania? Write to Hear All Sides, The Northern Echo, Priestgate, Darlington DL1 1NF.