But for a few weeks things were so tough the Cats were forced to sleep on the floor of a music publicist’s in Soho while he got them some gigs. Having honed their chops and grown their audience in New York, they’d taken the step of crossing the Atlantic because they felt their songs would be more appreciated than in the US, where the name of Gene Vincent was almost forgotten. Their back story was a marketing man’s dream. When you peered beyond the poses and the obligatory rock’n’roll lifestyle excesses, you could see this band took their music seriously. Quizzed on his influences, Setzer would reel off a string of names going all the way back to Charlie Christian. Both he and Lee, whose parents were acclaimed classical musicians, had played together in a band before hooking up with Brian, two years their senior. Slim Jim had learnt to play drums from Mousey Alexander, who’d worked with jazz greats like Benny Goodman, Bud Freeman and Sy Oliver. They’d cut their teeth on the club scene of Long Island, New York, before graduating to the trendier bars of Manhattan. That band was to be Stray Cats – a trio made up of Brian Setzer on vocals and guitar, Slim Jim Phantom on drums, and Lee Rocker on bass fiddle. All that was needed, nearly everyone agreed, was some energetic new band who could really seize the imagination of the nation’s youth. So rockabilly was already bubbling over into the British mainstream. Shakin’ Stevens had also registered in the Top 30 with Hot Dog and Marie Marie, and Crazy Cavan And The Rhythm Rockers were churning out a stream of fine albums for Charly Records. Not only were there many good groups playing to enthusiastic, well-informed audiences on the club and pub circuit, but Matchbox had already had a steady run of UK pop chart success with singles like Rockabilly Rebel, Buzz Buzz A Diddle It, and Midnight Dynamos. Can you imagine an equivalent company putting their weight behind such an album today?Īccounts of the 1980 rockabilly revival usually head off with admiring references to Stray Cats, but a little rewind is in order to pay credits due to the rock’n’roll scene that already existed in Britain when the band arrived in London in the summer of that year. Even more remarkably, they were signed to major record label Arista at the time. In its own way, that LP was as raw, naïve and uncalculating as the work of the first-generation rockers in whose footsteps, without overdoing the awe, they so ably trod. And you can carve in stone the word ‘classic’ next to their debut album Stray Cats, released in 1981. Old school Teds might disagree, but Top 10 hits like Runaway Boys and Rock This Town have now entered the canon of rockabilly greats. A new album, their first in 25 years, follows on 24 May. Hoskyns pointed out that it was almost exactly 23 years since one of the Cats’ heroes, Eddie Cochran, had met his untimely end while on a tour of England, and he wondered whether, in decades to come, the country would still be cherishing memories of the boys from New York with similar warmth.įast-forward 37 years, and the answer’s surely a resounding “Yes!” The band celebrate their 40th anniversary this year, and just a few months ago released a brand new single, Cat Fight (Over a Dog Like Me). The band was riding the crest of the wave in the US, but record sales in Britain, where they had enjoyed their first major success, had levelled off. I n 1983 Barney Hoskyns wrote an article on the Stray Cats for the NME. Vintage Rock pays tribute to the punky trio who caused a rock’n’roll explosion. In 1980 the British rockabilly revival was primed, ready and waiting for somebody to light the touchpaper.
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