IT was more rejection than the young keyboard player could handle. The Crusaders had just crashed to a humiliating tenth place out of 12 acts at a showpiece London talent contest in front of celebrity judges Ringo Starr and Cilla Black.
Tam Paton knew his band's performance deserved better. He stormed up to another of the judges, the Beatles manager Brian Epstein, and demanded an explanation.
The reply which he got as he stood in the Prince of Wales Theatre, dressed in his sober
suit, never left him.
"You were a good band, nothing wrong with you," Epstein said, as Paton later recalled the moment, "but the band just didn't have any image. You were just like a show band which played very well and people could dance to it, but afterwards they would just walk away unaffected.'"
It was a lesson which the young musician would take to heart, and eventually put into practice more effectively than anyone had ever done before.
Forget the flares and tartan, the band's boyish good looks and, yes, of course, forget the music, when it comes down to what turned the Bay City Rollers into the world's biggest band nothing was more crucial than that moment.
There was little before that to mark Tam Paton out as the man who would become pop's first great image-maker, accumulating a fortune running into many millions along the way.
He ended his days at Little Kellerstain, his gated mansion in the Capital's Gogar area where he was found dead in his bath earlier this month. His beginnings, though, were far humbler.
Born Thomas Dugald Paton, the son of a potato merchant, also Tam, in Prestonpans in 1938, he was one of four children – he has two sisters and a brother, David.
He grew up in the East Lothian town's Prestongrange Road and the end-of-the-row house would be his home – its garage was where the Bay City Rollers would practise in their early days – until the mid-1970s.
It was only then, with the Rollers at the height of their fame, that he moved into a house of his own – the Gogar mansion which friends say cost him a mere £29,000.
As a teenager, Tam helped out with the family's business, Thomas Paton Potato Merchants, and was frequently seen driving his father's van, earning him the nickname "Tam Tatty".
Although in later years he talked publicly about his homosexuality, friends who knew him in his late teens had no idea he was gay. Former Bay City Roller Alan Longmuir says the same, insisting that in the early days of the band the boys were totally unaware.
In one interview, Paton said he knew he was gay by the age of 12, but that it was hard to admit when growing up in a small town in the 1950s.
"I used to bash my head against the wall," he said. "I just couldn't figure out what was wrong with me because nobody ever spoke about someone being homosexual. When everybody else was looking at girls, I was looking at guys."
On leaving school, Paton was called up for national service and spent two years with the Household Cavalry in St John's Wood in London.
It was when he was back on home turf that he made the decision that music would be his future. Waiting at a bus stop in Musselburgh, Paton found his foot tapping along to the sounds of a gig being played at the nearby Town Hall. The band was called Golden Acres, a well-known local group of the early 1960s, and he was hooked.
Soon he was the keyboard player and leader of another local band, The Crusaders, but his real talents were becoming clear even then.
"Although Tam had originally played the accordion, and later went on to keyboards, his real talent was getting us gigs," explains Frank Connor, 66, the band's lead guitarist. "He used to go home after a day's work, get a shave and come to the gigs. Nine out of ten times we would be late, but he always talked his way out of it."
Aged about 24, Paton was one of the older members of The Crusaders, first meeting Frank when he was about 17.
The band played music halls across the Capital in the early 1960s – including The Place, on Victoria Street, and The Gonk, on Riego Street – and later going on to support artists as big as Dusty Springfield and Billy Fury.
"Tam was certainly the old guy in the band, but he never played the big man," recalls Frank, who remained friends with Paton all his life. "Those early days were nothing but good times and a lot of hard work. It was all about trying to be a great band."
This didn't just include the music, as Paton found out that fateful night at the Prince Of Wales Theatre.
"Up to that point, I thought it was all about sound," he later told biographer Wayne Coy. "I realised then how important image was. I switched immediately from boring suits to brown mohair, big bow ties and topped it all off with a Tony Curtis hairdo.
"Our singer, Pat Fernie, put Dusty Springfield to shame with her voice and make-up. Image became everything."
After a few more years, The Crusaders called it a day, leaving Paton to become band leader at the Palais de Danse at Fountainbridge.
There he began organising local bands to play every Thursday – a night popular with teenagers from across the city – leading to him becoming one of the most sought after Edinburgh managers of the day.
He said in an interview in 2000: "And that was my first sight of the Bay City Rollers – that's when the Bay City Rollers and I met.
"They also used to come along and watch the big band and they had always wanted to speak to me – Alan and Derek Longmuir had wanted to speak to me for ages.
"I got them some work in the Palais de Danse and they were popular. The popularity was due to how they looked and how tight they wore their trousers, if that's not putting it too crudely. That was basically the start of the band."
Although Paton had initially refused to manage the Rollers – due to his own commitments at the club – he changed his mind after the venue closed and he was forced to help out with his family's potato business, as well as working as a DJ in clubs such as the Casablanca.
Lugging 56lb bags of potatoes around Edinburgh didn't hold much appeal for Paton, so when the Rollers came to him again, he was more open to their plea.
He later said: "I thought my life in the music business had come to an end. But then the Rollers approached me again while I was working in the family business and I did decide to take the band on."
The Bay City Rollers – who had formed in the Capital in 1967 – were later signed by Bell Records, following a chance encounter with an executive in Edinburgh.
Paton believed the group could go all the way with the right image, and began to orchestrate their now famous "boy band" look.
"By this time, I was working on cruise ships as a musician," explains Frank Connor, who now lives in his Kent with his wife and children. "But when I came back to Edinburgh, I would go to see Tam at his parents' house in Prestonpans. He used to tell me the music scene had all changed and what was important now was what the girls were screaming about."
By 1971, the Bay City Rollers burst into the UK charts, trimmed with tartan. Their first single, Keep on Dancing entered the charts at number nine.
On the back of that, the boys headed to London for their first appearance on Top of the Pops – the seal of success for bands in those days. They were on the road to global stardom and Rollermania would soon be in full swing.
SEX PISTOLS FIRED UP BY ROLLERSSEX PISTOLS manager Malcolm McLaren was among those who followed Tam Paton and credited him with paving the way for their own exploits.
The punk impressario says that he learned many of the "tricks of the trade" from the way the Bay City Rollers manager worked.
Paton was innovative in the lengths he would go to promote his band, constantly tipping off journalists about the bands' activities.
Legend has it that when one of the Rollers collapsed from a drug overdose it was the papers he called first while the ambulance came second. A version of events he later denied.
While Paton would provide jugs of milk for the Rollers to be pictured with to emphasise their wholesome image, McLaren used his media savvy on stunts such as debuting the Sex Pistols' God Save the Queen on a Thames cruise boat outside the Houses of Parliament.
The full article contains 1516 words and appears in Edinburgh Evening News newspaper.
