Les McKeown's final
Bay City Rollers album saw the band continuing to push away from the teenybop sound that made its name, but with mixed results; a bizarre contractual agreement forced the band to include no less than 50 percent cover versions on the album (all of them drawn from elsewhere within the Arista label stable), which thoroughly derailed
the Rollers' attempts to build up their own internal songwriting machinery. Full marks for their ultimate decisions, but it scarcely allowed the band to prove its true worth, and
Strangers in the Wind wound up a considerably lighter-weight collection than it ought to have been. A few bright spots peek through the AOR stew. The single "All the World Is Falling in Love" is a bouncy little bopper, while the album opens and closes with two solid efforts, "Another Rainy Day in New York City" and "When I Say I Love You." Elsewhere, however,
Strangers in the Wind wanders morosely between the sad and the saccharin, and it was clear that something had to give. That something, of course, would be
Les McKeown. He quit and the band would be reborn in his absence.