LAST Friday, the day after the death of the Bay City Rollers singer, Les McKeown, at the age of 65, the tennis coach Judy Murray tweeted a photo of her embracing him after a Rollers concert in 2016. Her caption read simply, “Bye bye baby”.

Judy was one of a huge army of Bay City Rollers fans in the mid-1970s. They bought all the singles – the band had nine top 10 hits between 1974 and 1976, including the 1975 chart-toppers Bye Bye Baby and Give A Little Love – as well as the albums, two of which went to number one.

But being a fan, Judy wrote last Friday, “also meant dressing the way the band did: sawn-off trousers with tartan trim, short-sleeved shirts with front pockets (and tartan flaps), plus a tartan scarf tied around your wrist. Yes, I wore the lot”.

For those too young to remember Rollermania, or have perhaps hastened to forget it, the photograph gives a good idea of Roller fans’ taste for tartan. Several people responded to Murray’s tweeted picture of her with McKeown. Wrote one: “Walked to school with a tartan scarf tied to my bag every day, and every night kissed a poster of Les goodnight”.

Another wrote: “Back in 70s, before video recorders became a big thing, I was always upset that Shang-a-Lang [ITV’s pop music show featuring the band] was on TV each week at the same time as my swimming lesson. I’m sure that’s why I’ve never really been a big fan of swimming.”

In 1993 the Evening Times said a Glasgow woman who, as a teen, had won McKeown’s trademark tartan suit in a competition in 1977, had contacted Christie’s to see if they might be interested in including it in their next auction of pop memorabilia. She got the idea after seeing footage of women touching a suit once owned by Roller Stuart “Woody” Wood.

She said: ‘’When I was 15 my friends wanted me to wear [McKeown’s suit] everywhere. Les must have been quite slim because the jacket fitted me and even the trousers, which they wore sort of at half-mast, weren’t too long.’’