Picutred above, as stated by their shoes, are the Bay City Rollers. The band was a trendy teen idol band in the 1970s, and you're almost certainly familiar with their 1976 song "Saturday Night," which opens with them clapping, spelling the word "Saturday" and then yelling the word "night!" a few times before going into the rest of the lyrics. (If not, click here to give it a listen.) You may not be able to quickly think of another one of their songs but they're hardly a one-hit wonder; at their peak, the Scottish boy band was all over the airwaves in the UK and, really, the world.

And for one English songwriter, that seemed like an opportunity to get out of his music contract. 

But it didn't quite work out the way he had hoped.

Nick Lowe is a British singer-songwriter whose work you may not be familiar with. His most memorable song is "Cruel to Be Kind," released in 1979. (You can listen to that one here.) He's well-known in the music industry, though; he's collaborated on many songs and albums and is generally seen as a very talented and creative songwriter. He got his professional start in the late 1960s with an English pub rock band named Brinsley Schwarz, which you've probably never heard of and isn't really important for our story today, except for the fact that Brinsley Schwarz was successful enough to land a deal with United Artists (or "UA"), a record label.

In 1975, Brinsley Schwarz split up, and it wasn't clear what Lowe's next steps were. As Songfacts explains, "Lowe was established as an inventive songwriter and producer" and, therefore, sought after by the music industry." Lowe didn't want to just write and produce music for others, though; he wanted to continue creating his own works. Unfortunately, per Songfacts, "United Artists were keen on keeping him under contract, but Lowe desperately wanted to leave so he could pursue his own projects." He needed a way to get UA to fire him.

The easiest way to do that? Turn in awful work. In the book "Punk Diary: The Ultimate Trainspotter's Guide to Underground Rock, 1970-1982," Lowe explained his idea:

Lowe recalled “I couldn’t be obvious about it by turning in Country & Western songs with sitars [not a bad idea!] … so I decided to make one of those fan type records like in the ‘60s …. at the time there was no escaping the Bay City Rollers they were everywhere! So I wrote this stupid little song. … I recorded it and it was actually the very first thing I’d done all by myself.

It actually was a hit in Japan. [ . . . ] It was a hit simply because the Rollers were so huge in Japan. The Japanese kids who were all Rollers fans, they had no idea I was taking a rather sort of jaundiced view of their heroes, you know. They just heard ‘Rollers’ in the title and heard the kind of guff that it was and all thought it was very worthwhile [laughs]. Yeah, it was a sizeable pop hit. For a couple of weeks, I think [laughs].