High Flyers

Seventies hitmakers PILOT were the missing link between pop and prog. Paul Lester meets the (oh-oh-oh... it’s) magic band.

It could quite reasonably be argued that The Bay City Rollers and The Alan Parsons Project have very little in common, but they did share one musician, albeit at different points in their respective histories: David Paton, who had a brief stint with the tartan-touting teenyboppers in the late 60s and spent several years as a session player with the progressive rock band from the late 70s to mid-80s.

In the interim, Paton was in Pilot, a four-piece pop-rock group featuring himself on bass and vocals, another ex-Roller, Billy Lyall, on keyboards, Ian Bairnson on guitar and Stuart Tosh on drums. They had four UK chart entries during 1974-75, including one No 1 UK hit (January) and a Top 20 single, Magic, that also reached the Top Five in the US.

Pilot only troubled the Top 40 on two further occasions, with Call Me Round and Just A Smile, while only one of their four studio albums grazed the Top 50 (Second Flight, in May 1975), and yet the abiding impression of them is that they were far more successful, perhaps because their irresistible and infectious pop songs have achieved such cultural ubiquity, regularly cropping up on the radio, on TV or on film soundtracks to this day.

January, of course, routinely gets dusted down and aired on radio after every Christmas, on the likes of Classic Gold. Magic has …

by Paul Lester
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