Led A STRAY

They didn’t get the breaks, but STRAY were one of the best bands of the 70s, says Barry Winton

To today’s audience, Stray may not be up there in the pantheon of late 60s/early 70s heavy rock gods like Zep and The Sabs. Yet they recorded some of the era’s finest albums, all brimming with a very British mix of imagination, depth, feeling and above all - from such young men- outstanding musicianship.

Last year Sanctuary began an ongoing reissue programme of their eight studio albums, with bonus tracks, and belatedly this fine band are currently attracting a resurgence of new listeners.

They were arguably Britain’s hardest working live band, clocking up over 300 gigs a year, rewarding them with a celebrity fan base which included Julian Cope, XTC’s Colin Moulding, The Damned’s Captain Sensible, Neil Peart from Rush and in particular rock gods Iron Maiden, whose mainstay bassist Steve Harris once famously told a reporter: “Had it not been for those guys, who knows where I’d be now, I owe them a massive debt”. Indeed, Maiden covered Stray’s anthem All In Your Mind in 1990 as the B side of Holy Smoke.

It was that very same epic that first alerted me to the major talents of these masterful riff kings, once stupidly labelled by the day’s critics as the ‘Poor Man’s Status Quo’. As a mere 12 year old, I vividly remember going to the Harlequin record store in …

by Barry Winton
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