I'll always bow to your superior knowledge and experience on this one JK but how does Arista manage to hold on to everything ?

Regardless of anything Les is a talentless and arrogant fool yet on his Myspace he praises the death of Paton in ridiculously extreme language - missing out the former and assuming that he is famous because of his own talents. Paton's main crime was possibly thrusting a talentless berk in to the limelight by allowing him to front a rubbish but successful band. Personally if I were a gay man I'd hate to go anywhere near Les or any of the other no talent twerps who were part of the band over the years.

That's the puzzle Mike; how come Arista can get away without paying royalties clearly due on a signed contract? Especially as Clive Davis is a good friend of mine and only broke the Rollers after a breakfast with me.

But lawyers say "no chance".

Just as they say it was quite legal for Michael White to transfer the rights for The Rocky Horror Show into a new company, bankrupt the old one - with which I had a deal for 20% of all profits - and pay me nothing.

That the Bay City Rollers were once so big is a testement to the svengali skills Tam Paton once possessed - what is not in his favour is how they fell so hard and so quickly from grace and quickly became a byword for both lack of substance/talent and 'car crash' behaviour (literally in the case of Les McKeown) and subsequent bitterness - it can only point to extreme mismanagement. It's a miracle that all the key members are still alive 35 years later given what went on, but of all the major pop acts of the 20th Century the BCR back catalogue is almost embarrassingly thin. It's hardly suprising Les McKeown has had demons to wrestle with, he was thrust into the limelight having just turned 18 (and unlike the rest of the band paid no dues as such), was arguably the nations no.1 heart-throb for 18 months and a has-been by the time he was 21... and let us not forget that '74-'76 era was not only 'old' it was (quite rightly in some respects) viewed as an abberation for a good 15 years thereafter. A clip on youtube of Les as a guest on The Last Resort with Jonathan Ross shows a still-young and good-looking McKeown 10 years after his last hit, why he has never managed to 'move on' in 30-odd years is astounding.
Another thing about the Rollers is that, whilst they did originally start out as 'proper band' they became Paton's project almost entirely which of course would have only stirred up resentment between band members, and this is why even all these years they have zero musical credilbility