81 - The Bay City Rollers with Stuart 'Woody' Wood (Edinburgh)

81 - The Bay City Rollers with Stuart 'Woody' Wood (Edinburgh)

Author: Rock n Roll Book Club September 13, 2025 Duration: 47:33

This week we travel north of the border to talk about the history of the Bay City Rollers, one of a handful of British bands to have a number 1 single in the UK & the US. 


Stuart ‘Woody’ Wood is our guest & he tells us about going the band after working as a roadie for them first. Once officially a member Woody joins the band, who are without a hit for a few years at this point touring the working men’s clubs & Mecca ballrooms of Scotland & the north of England. 


The band explode in popularity in 1974 & we find out about how the tartan clothing came to be so closely associated with the band, various injuries sustained, how Woody’s family dealt with the fans gathered at the family home & even starring in their own TV show. 


The Bay City Rollers success is replicated in the US, Australia, Japan & around the world. 


Famously the bands financial situation becomes messy & takes over 40 years to find a resolution meanwhile there are various revivals of the Rollers from the late 1980s onwards including a homecoming gig at T in the Park in Scotland in 2016 & today the band is thriving with a new lineup. Woody still plays with the band & has taken over as the custodian of the Bay City Rollers legacy. 



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Hosted, Produced & Edited by Simon Cardwell

Music by Andy Maxwell


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The Music Maps Podcast from the Rock n Roll Book Club isn't your typical music show. It's an audio expedition where geography is the guide. Every episode starts with a specific location-a city, a venue, a forgotten roadside attraction-and uses that place as a launchpad to explore the sounds, stories, and scenes connected to it. You might find yourself deep in the blues clubs of Chicago one week and tracing the underground punk threads of a small European town the next. The conversations are wide-ranging, connecting the dots between iconic artists and obscure movements, all anchored to a point on the map. Listening to this podcast feels like adding a new, richly detailed pin to a global atlas of musical influence. It’s about the context behind the chords and the cultural soil from which genres grow. The result is a continuously evolving, deeply human portrait of how music and place are inextricably linked, one fascinating destination at a time.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 100

Music Maps Podcast
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