Rollermania When pop sensations sparked waves of teenage hysteria

The Bay City Rollers were the teen idol sensation of the mid-70s Britain, a homegrown boy band which inspired almost religious devotion among their fans. So when their much-anticipated Bristol appearance was cancelled 50 years ago, the girls were left disconsolate. Eugene Byrne invites female readers of a certain age to indulge in some nostalgic Rollermania.

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GENERATIONS of teenage girls have gone mad for some of the big pop stars of their day, screaming their devotion in packed auditoriums before returning home to bedrooms which they've turned into shrines to their idols, every last penny of the pocket money or the Saturday job wages spent on posters, records and a load of associated merchandise.

It's a time-honoured rite of passage into adulthood, isn't it? It might, perhaps, be passing now with the increasing fragmentation of culture and media, but it wouldn't be clever to bet on it.

While the teenybopper phenomenon arguably all began in the 1960s with the Beatles, it came of age in the 1970s.

Fifty years ago, girls might project their early romantic fantasies onto chart-topping non-threatening boys like David Cassidy, Donny Osmond and his brothers, or maybe the Jackson 5.

Their mothers might smile indulgently, while the girls' obsessions would be viewed with lordly condescension by older brothers and withering contempt by sixth formers and college kids who hung out in the "Heavy and Progressive" section of the record shop.

Dads would shake their heads in disbelief and complain about the noise from bedroom record-players, and on Thursday nights might look out from behind the newspaper to opine that a spell in the Army would sort out those ridiculous popinjays prancing around on Top of the Pops.

The headline pop story of 1975 was what you might call Britain's first real "boy band" - the Bay City Rollers.

The Rollers, a bunch of working class lads from Scotland, generated waves of hysteria among teens and tweens, and when they were due to appear at the Colston Hall on May 30 of that year, Bristol expected the biggest scream-fest the city had seen since the early days of the Beatles.