Les McKeown’s Bay City Rollers: The Last Tour
Crowdfunding
Publishing
Celebrity
Project Management
Sales
Marketing
PR
Social Media
In April 2021, Les Mckeown the much loved lead singer of 70s pop idols, The Bay City Rollers, suddenly passed away. I had worked with Leslie for many years, taking him on numerous highly successful tours of Japan. I decided to self fund, curate and produce an A4 sized, full colour, hardback, coffee-table style photobook in his memory. To produce book I used some of the last professionally taken photographs of Les, as well a live photography which were taken on his last full tour with my company, Alive.
I crowdfunded the book and devised a online-offline marketing campaign to raise the funds to cover publishing costs. I ran a PR campaign to push the crowdfunder and secured features in major newspapers such as The Scotsman, The Edinburgh Evening News and the Daily Record.
Producing the book was an exercise in curation given that the photos we had were intended to be used for promotional purposes rather than to tell the story of Leslie's life. As such I had to study the photos and profile each one, creating a mood board to ultimately organise the photos in a manner that let them tell their own story, before writing accompanying text.
The project was mine from start to finish, from conception through to execution and delivery of a final luxury product. I oversaw the printing, graphic design work, shipping and sales process for the entire first edition, which was warmly received by Leslie's fans.