What does it feel like to have been so well-known you were unable to go out for fear of being mobbed by hysterical teenage girls?

What does it feel like to have sold an estimated 300 million records?

And, particularly, what does it feel like not to have this anymore, especially not the money?

It’s hard to tell because, in an email interview conducted specifically for the occasion, Les McKeown doesn’t really go into all that.

He wants to talk about his: “Fabulous, upbeat look at the Bay City Rollers’ worldwide career in pop music, told through music and verse.”

How will his show work? “There will be a start, a break, then a second half, then the end,” he states, adding a smiley, presumably to denote humour.

OK then, scarves? “Tartan scarves are always present at my Bay City Rollers Show,” he says.

At this point readers of this article may form two camps. The first will wonder what on earth McKeown is on about.

And the second will be immediately transported back to the mid-1970s when five Edinburgh lads wearing unfeasibly wide, too-short, tartan-edged flares, platform boots with socks bearing images of their own faces up the side, tartan-bedecked tops and tartan scarves were belting out songs with titles like Remember (Sha La La La), Shang-a-Lang and Bye-Bye Baby (employed to moving effect at the funeral in the movie Love, Actually).

They will remember the hysteria that accompanied every Rollers’ appearance, including the one at Bournemouth’s Winter Gardens in 1974, the way their faces were emblazoned over Jackie and Blue Jeans magazine and the fact that they were the only band since the Beatles to have had the word ‘mania’ appended to their name, in an effort to convey the pandemonium that existed around them.

McKeown remembers it all.

How did he react to the band’s level of success?

“With humility and reckless abandonment of anything considered ‘normal’,” he says.

His best memory of the time was: “Being young and full of beans.”

He doesn’t mention his worst memories, something he has referred to as the ‘dark matter’, which has come to light since the original band’s demise.

And who can blame him? Amid what has been described as bickering and acrimony, McKeown left the band in 1978 after they fell out of pop favour.

Then followed a period where drugs and alcohol played too big a part in his life and there was a spell in rehabilitation.

(He later alleged the band had been given drugs to cope with their punishing recording and performing schedule.)

Then there was the money or, rather, the apparent lack of it.

At any one point various former Rollers appear to be embroiled in legal wrangles to get a fair share of what they claim are millions which they say they never received during their heyday.

And then there is the really dark stuff.

The Bay City Rollers’ late manager, ‘Big’ Tam Paton, was not only accused of ripping them off he also, alleged former member, Pat McGlynn, attempted to force himself on him, a claim McKeown has also made in an interview about Paton.

Certainly the manager served time in 1982 for indecent acts with males (not Rollers) under the age of consent and was convicted of drug dealing.

But McKeown is nothing if not a survivor.

He’s still happily married to his Japanese wife, Peko, and still in love with rock and roll.

It was always his ambition to be in a rock and roll band, he says, and he is “Always doing something that relates to music creation.”

His fans will be relieved about that.

But if they are hoping his show, which arrives on stage at the Lighthouse Theatre on September 13 will shed any light on the deepest mystery at the heart of the Rollers, they can probably think again.

Because McKeown simply will not reveal what Shang-a-Lang really means.

“The true meaning of Shang-A-Lang can only be felt in a deeply spiritual way, you either have Shang-A-Lang in balance or you don’t,” he says.

“You can have too much Shang and not enough Lang – in itself not a big problem as long as you rebalance the Shang and the Lang at regular intervals, usually by playing BCR music until you feel you have achieved what we call Shang-A-Langness.”

So now you know!