From Stag-Do Drag to Fenway Park: How a 1970s Disco Hit Became Scotland's Alternative National Anthem

It is, on the face of it, a deeply unlikely global hit: a disco-flavoured number by a band best known for tartan trouser suits and a string of early-1970s chart smashes. Yet on 16 June 2026, a 1978 track originally recorded as a b-side by the Bay City Rollers is being belted out in football stadiums from Hampden to Fenway Park, the de facto second anthem of the Scotland national team and, increasingly, a singalong fixture wherever the Tartan Army congregates.

The song in question is I Only Want to Be with You — not the Dusty Springfield original, but a covers version by the Bay City Rollers — and the dance that accompanies it has become a phenomenon that no promoter, broadcaster, or music industry executive engineered. It simply spread.

A b-side that refused to die

The Bay City Rollers built their fame in the early 1970s on a run of hits including Bye Bye Baby, Saturday Night, and Shang-a-Lang, wrapped in a tartan-trousered image that made them one of the era's biggest pop exports. The Scottish vocal group, formed in Edinburgh in 1966 and fronted by Les McKeown, had by the late 1970s moved on to softer material. The cover of I Only Want to Be with You was a Glasgow recording, tied to that late-period catalogue. It was not, by any reasonable measure, a flagship release.

What happened next is a study in how cultural artefacts travel. The track resurfaced in stag-party culture, where the simple, repetitive hook proved ideal for drunken, large-group karaoke. The accompanying dance — arms outstretched in an aeroplane pose, then a choreographed back-and-forth — evolved organically, passed between groups of friends, and migrated with stag parties from Glasgow and Edinburgh into the matchday terraces.

The football terrace as transmission belt

The Tartan Army, Scotland's famously good-natured travelling support, took the routine into international football. From there it metastasised. It now appears in pubs and stadiums in cities that have no particular claim to the song's origins, performed by fans who often cannot name any other Bay City Rollers track. The pattern is a familiar one in fan culture: a tune attaches itself to a moment, and the moment keeps reasserting the tune.

The song has reached venues that would have seemed absurd targets for a 1970s pop act — including Fenway Park in Boston during a Scotland friendly, where the singing visibly caught the players and the wider crowd off guard. It has followed the team to the World Cup. BBC Sport reported on 16 June 2026 that the routine has now spread so widely that Scottish supporters arriving at major tournaments find locals already performing it before the travelling fans have finished queueing.

This is fan culture operating in a way that the official music industry cannot replicate: no marketing budget, no sync licensing deal, no playlist placement. The song travels because it is fun, it is short, and it is contagious.

The counter-narrative: a song looking for a place to belong

There is a less flattering version of the story, and it deserves airtime. The Bay City Rollers' legacy is mixed: the band's chart run was punctuated by internal disputes, well-publicised legal fights between members, and the kind of press coverage in the 1970s tabloids that turned teenage pop fandom into a spectacle. Some of the people who made the original records have made clear, in interviews over the years, that the tartan-era material is not what they consider the band's best work.

It is also worth being honest about the limits of the phenomenon. The Tartan Army's version of the song is, in effect, a cover of a cover. Springfield's 1963 original is the song with the deeper place in popular music; the Rollers' version is the one that caught the stag-do virus. Treating the Rollers' track as a quasi-folk anthem of Scottish identity is, strictly speaking, a small historical accident compounded by football tribalism.

But that is precisely the point. National identity in football is rarely assembled from the most defensible historical materials. It is assembled from whatever catches.

Why it works — and what it tells us about football culture

The song travels because it solves a problem. International football fans need a singalong that is: easy to pick up, impossible to mess up, and short enough to finish inside a stadium break. I Only Want to Be with You checks all three boxes. The dance is the same — repetitive, communal, and slightly silly, which is the only register that survives in a 30,000-crowd away end.

There is also a structural reading. Football supporter culture has spent two decades losing the old terrace anthems to streaming, stadium regulation, and the slow death of the in-house matchday programme. The places where chants used to be minted — the corner flag, the local boozer, the away-day minibus — still exist, but the transmission belt that used to carry a new song from one ground to the next is weaker. The Rollers routine is interesting precisely because it did cross that weakened transmission belt, going from Glasgow stag parties to international football in a few seasons without any of the formal infrastructure that used to do that work.

It is, in a small way, a case study in how fan culture can outperform the formal music industry at producing shared communal material. The music industry has the catalogues. Football has the crowd. The stag-do was the missing middle.

Stakes, and what remains uncertain

The honest answer to "why this song" is that the question is a little bit wrong. The song is, in a meaningful sense, the crowd's — not the Bay City Rollers', and not Dusty Springfield's. Its continued use depends entirely on whether the Tartan Army, and the wider international fan base that has borrowed it, decide to keep singing it. There is no licensing reason it has to last, and no commercial reason for it to fade.

What is also worth flagging: the BBC Sport piece that surfaces the story is, by its own framing, an account of a cultural moment, not an industry analysis. The reporting does not specify how the routine was first introduced into matchday contexts, which of the original band members still hold the recording rights, or whether there has been any formal attempt to monetise the phenomenon. Those are real questions; the sources do not answer them. This publication finds the story interesting precisely because it sits in that gap — a song that escaped its authors, found a new public, and is now doing cultural work that no one planned for.

If the Tartan Army's next World Cup campaign goes the way fans hope, the routine will harden into tradition. If the team struggles, the song will keep going regardless. It has, by this point, stopped needing the football to survive.

— Desk note: Monexus framed this as a story about how fan culture manufactures shared material faster than the formal music industry, and resisted the temptation to treat the Bay City Rollers' late-1970s cover as a primary cultural artefact in its own right. The phenomenon is the crowd, not the catalogue.