At the height of the Bay City Rollers’ fame, when crowds surged like tides and every street seemed lined with screaming teenagers, one band member carried a private fear so disorienting he rarely spoke of it. Years later, he finally admitted, “I avoided mirrors. I couldn’t recognize the child I used to be.”
It was not a dramatic confession. It was quiet — almost whispered — as if the memory still unsettled him.
He described walking into dressing rooms filled with bright, unforgiving bulbs and doing everything he could to keep his eyes away from the mirror above the counter. He would fix his hair by touch, check his outfit by looking down rather than forward, and leave the room as quickly as possible. When forced to look, even briefly, the reflection seemed unfamiliar. The boy he once knew — the one with ordinary dreams, limited expectations, and a simple rhythm to his life — had vanished behind an image shaped by the world rather than by himself.
“The face was mine,” he said, “but the expression wasn’t.”
Fame did not steal his identity all at once. It chipped at it. Piece by piece. Each photo shoot that insisted on a specific angle, each performance where he had to carry energy he didn’t feel, each headline that described him in terms louder and more dramatic than he recognized. Slowly, the reflection in the mirror became less a person and more a product — something polished, pre-packaged, and increasingly distant from the boy he once had been.
He said the worst moments came late at night after concerts. The adrenaline would fade, the hotel room would go quiet, and he’d catch himself in the bathroom mirror under a single harsh light. The face staring back looked older, even though he was still young. Tired, even though the world insisted he should be thrilled. He once turned away so quickly he bumped into the wall — a physical reaction to an emotional truth he didn’t want to face.
“I didn’t know how to be myself when everyone else had already decided who I was.”
The pressure behind the fame was invisible to the crowds. Fans saw excitement, success, youth, and glamour. What they didn’t see was the loneliness — the sense of being watched constantly, shaped constantly, misunderstood constantly. He said there were days when he felt like he was living in a costume he couldn’t take off.
The turning point came not through crisis but through exhaustion. One morning, after months of touring, he finally forced himself to look in the mirror for longer than a passing second. He saw the confusion, the strain, the boy hiding behind the man. And instead of turning away, he let himself feel the grief of losing that earlier self.
“That was the beginning of finding him again,” he said.
Recovery was slow. He learned to look in mirrors without judgment, to reclaim pieces of himself that fame had buried — the quiet interests, the ordinary joys, the small moments that didn’t require applause to feel meaningful. He rediscovered humor. Friendships. Silence.
And eventually, one morning, he looked in the mirror and didn’t flinch.
The child he used to be wasn’t entirely gone.
He was waiting — patiently — for the man to come back to him.