Flag paying tribute to Bay City Roller Ian lands in Downpatrick

Flag paying tribute to Bay City Roller Ian lands in Downpatrick

25 May 2022

A FLAG honouring former Bay City Rollers star Ian Mitchell has found its way to his home town of Ireland.

The flag was sent to Ian’s family just a few weeks after it took pride of place at a parade in New York.

Ian, who died in September 2020 at the age of 62, was honoured by Bay City Rollers fans last month during the 24th annual Tartan Day Parade. 

The flag has since made the 3,200 mile journey to the home of Ian’s sister, Rita Mitchell, in Downpatrick. She plans to hang the flag in her bedroom.

“The Bay City Rollers Fan Events group fund this stuff themselves and it’s great to keep his memory alive,” she told the Recorder. “It means a lot that they went to all this trouble.”

Rita took the opportunity to share her memories of Ian’s time in the band and the role Downpatrick played in his early career, recalling that she gave him his first guitar.

“My dad had bought me a guitar for my 15th birthday but I had no time for it so I gave it to Ian. It was coming up to Christmas and he sat on the hearth and tortured us with his playing. 

“He’d taught himself, and he could only play two songs, Jingle Bells and Good King Wenceslas.”

What started as a hobby soon became a potential career. 

In his teens Ian was a member of the Young City Stars with brothers Damien, Terry and Colin McKee. 

“Their band was the support act for the Rollers in Belfast. That was when the Rollers clocked Ian,” Rita recalled.

“It was said at that time Bay City Rollers founder, Alan Longmuir, was thinking about leaving the band and it was that night that Ian was invited over to Scotland.”

“Ian became a Bay City Roller when he was 17 and we knew nothing about it until we saw the newspaper. The Sun arrived and there he was on the front page. My mum was in the hairdresser’s and I ran with the paper to show it to her. We thought it was a joke because it was the 1st April,” she recounted.

Rita had first hand experience with the impact of ‘Rollermania’.

“I used to go to my mum’s all the time and there would be young girls coming to the door. Some of them cut bits of grass out of the garden and one time they even broke into the house,” she revealed.

“But all they took were knives and forks because they thought Ian had eaten with them. It was all very funny.

“One time, the Rollers were playing in Bangor and Ian had come home to see the family for a few days. His mate, Damien McKee (former member of Young City Stars and subsequent bandmate of Ian in Rosetta Stone) was taking him to Bangor. 

“The place was choc-a-bloc with Bay City Rollers fans and Ian ended up being put in the boot of a car so the fans wouldn’t see him. They didn’t want him to be recognised because he would have been mobbed.

“The whole family went to see him play, even my parents, and we got to watch from the balcony. You could feel the balcony move underneath us. Every time the roadies were on stage, putting their guitars up or when anybody moved there was screaming. I remember St John’s Ambulance people carrying out girls who had fainted.”

Rita recalls how her eldest daughter, Joanne had “all the Roller gear” during Ian’s time in the band. She added that though Ian became an American citizen in later life, his love of Northern Ireland, and particularly Downpatrick, never wained. 

Ian told the Recorder in 2014: “I became an American, a proud one at that, and am still an Irishman at heart, and a very lucky Irishman, indeed. And my life, well, all of it, started in a small place called Downpatrick.”