….Stagg adds a touching guitar solo before, in typical 70’s fashion, there’s a bombastic climax with multiple reiterations of the chorus with the band almost drowned out by orchestral strings. Over the top, yes, but Suicide is a marvellous song and worth the price of this 4 CD set on its own.
These days, the word strap in British slang is understood to mean a gun. Older readers though might well remember getting ‘the strap’ at school. This was the feared retribution of the teachers: the very painful slap of a strip of leather across the hand, administered as corporal punishment for misdemeanours. As a teenager in the ‘70s myself, I know how painful it was, although I don’t think I was aware of its other sexual connotations at the time. Judging from the image and lyrics of the group Strapps, they certainly had this latter interpretation in mind, and it may well have been one of the critical factors that undermined their attempt at stardom. But I’m getting ahead of myself here, so let’s first see who exactly Strapps were.
Strapps were one of the many minor bands that were part of the Deep Purple family tree. Drummer Mick Underwood had been in Purple-linked units in the 1960s, both as a member of Episode 6, overlapping briefly with John Glover and Ian Gillan, and in The Outlaws with Ritchie Blackmore. Underwood met Australian guitarist and singer Ross Stagg in 1975, and that triggered the formation of Strapps. The line-up of the four-piece was completed by Joe Read on bass and Noel Scott on keyboards, and their eponymously titled debut album was released in 1976.
That debut album was recorded in Ian Gillan’s Kingsway studio and produced by Roger Glover, so Underwood’s relationship with the Deep Purple circle had remained strong. So, did they sound like Deep Purple? Well, they were certainly a hard rock band that liked those terse riffs that Blackmore churned out and they did have a funky edge that recalls the Hughes-inspired Deep Purple material, but they were no Purple-clones. There are also more theatrical Queen and Roxy Music influences to be heard in their music, especially in Stagg’s vocal style, and occasionally you catch a touch of Uriah Heep. While clearly absorbing influences from the time, Strapps did manage to forge their own identity.
The self-assured debut album is bookmarked by two superb tracks. School Girl Funk is, as the name suggests, a funky number, highlighting immediately the quality of Joe Read’s bass playing. Stagg’s simple but effective guitar hook sticks in the mind too, as does his near-rapping vocal style which seems to foreshadow the Rolling Stones’ Miss You. Closing the album in unexpected fashion is the seven-minute mini-epic, Suicide. The beginning is tentative – uncertain acoustic guitar and quiet but anguished vocals – before the emergence of the gentler warmer chords of the chorus as Stagg sings ‘You were here just one week ago’ as he painfully views suicide from the guilt of a person who might have done more to prevent a friend from taking their life. Stagg adds a touching guitar solo before, in typical 70’s fashion, there’s a bombastic climax with multiple reiterations of the chorus with the band almost drowned out by orchestral strings. Over the top, yes, but Suicide is a marvellous song and worth the price of this 4 CD set on its own.
While the above two tracks represent the best of the debut album, the six remaining tracks are strong too and surprisingly varied. Dreaming is another fine funky number, this time with a Zeppelinesque syncopated bass line. There are a couple of slower piano-based numbers which show some Queen influences while the excellent In Your Ear boogies along like early Roxy Music. With such a strong debut album, success was surely guaranteed, but the band didn’t help matters with some questionable lyrics. Take, for example, the chorus of School Girl Funk which goes: ‘Sweatin’ little virgins, urgin’, urgin’ Let me be your surgeon, urgin’, urgin’ on!’. Err…no imagination needed about the subject matter, is there? Add to that a marketing campaign for their tour featured a topless lady, and the feminists were up in arms, guaranteeing a certain amount of notoriety for the band which, while generating visibility, probably hindered them from being taken seriously as musicians.
The band learnt their lesson, and for 1977’s Secret Damage they toned down the image and lyrics, and produced what is, to these ears, their best album. There was a clunkiness about certain parts of the debut album (for example, Rock Critic, which sounds like three separate decent ideas badly cobbled together into one song), but here the songwriting is stronger and sleeker. The powerful rock’n’roll opener, Down To You, is a good example, driven along by a brilliant keyboard-led theme and a Moog solo that Wakeman would be proud of. These progressive leanings on Secret Damage are a welcome surprise.
Secret Damage has just seven tracks, with the eight-minute Violent Love / Secret Damage attempting to reproduce the same sort of epic climax as Suicide without being quite as impactful. However, it has its moments, including an inspired touch of blues guitar work in Violent Love and then the Zeppelin-inspired riff that underpins the Secret Damage part of the track. I suspect Stagg had been listening to Physical Graffiti because that Secret Damage riff sounds distinctly like In My Time Of Dying, and the enjoyable guitar/keyboard stomp of Soft Touch has strong echoes of Trampled Under Foot.
The heavy blues of The Pain Of Love is another highlight, while more straight forward numbers include the energetic boogies, I Wanna Know and In Your Ear, both of which have a bit of a Uriah Heep about them. The Gospel-tinged Child Of The City is a little strange but again shows the band experimenting in interesting ways. There really isn’t a throwaway track on Secret Damage, and it is quite astonishing that it suffered from such poor sales, triggering their label Harvest to drop them. The career of the band was hanging by a thread at that point, and the only glimmer of hope was the offer of a deal for an album for release in the Japanese market where Strapps had built up a strong following. Hence, 1978 saw Prisoner Of Your Love seeing the light of day, but only in the land of the rising sun.
Prisoner Of Your Love starts strongly with Bound For Glory, with its punkish riff showing signs of the influence of the New Wave. It could be mistaken for Hawkwind from around the same period if it weren’t for Scott’s prominent organ work. Sadly, it’s very thin pickings elsewhere. Attempts at heavy blues – Let The Music Play and It’s Your Dreams – tend to ramble along without any real heft. The production may be part of the reason for this because there’s an alarming thinness to the sound. Even worse, there seems to be an overt attempt to write more commercial pop-oriented material, and several tracks sound like Chris Rea on a bad day. Longer songs are absent, and five of the ten songs don’t even make four minutes in length (compared to a total of only three songs across the first two albums) – surely an indictment of the lack of good malleable material to mould into more substantial pieces. There’s no hiding from the fact that Prisoner Of Your Love is a poor album. Worth hearing once, but not one that you’ll be eager to hear again.
By now the wheels were falling off – quite literally with keyboardist Noel Scott leaving. He was replaced by Ray McRiner on rhythm guitar which meant that the fourth and final Strapps studio album, Ball Of Fire, would be their first without keyboards. There seems to have been an attempt on Ball Of Fire to return to the hard-rocking roots of the band, and opener Bring On The Thunder has a nice gritty riff to it that promises well. The following Silent Slaughter is also a solid enough track that gallops along with a NWOBHM lilt. The highlight is the catchy hard rock number, Evil, which could have sat comfortably on Blue Öyster Cult’s Agents Of Fortune or Spectres. The stomping blues of Angry is also a strong track but the rest is easily forgettable. It’s an improvement on Prisoner Of Your Love for sure but towards the end of its forty minutes you end up yearning for Scott’s keys to add a bit of tonal variety and some light and shade to proceedings. After Ball Of Fire, Underwood then received an offer to join Ian Gillan’s band and after those two underwhelming albums you can hardly blame him for accepting with alacrity.
Nicely rounding up this box set is a live performance at the Rainbow in London which took place on May 14th 1977. The live set is almost 50 minutes long which is a generous slot considering that Strapps were just the support act for Ian Gillan. Secret Damage had been released earlier that year so not surprisingly it took the lion’s share of the set with six tracks showcased (just In Your Ear was missing). There’s the curiosity of the as yet unreleased Understand It – a good funky number that only saw the light of day as a B-side to the all Thru The Night single, and the set closed with the only track from the debut album, School Girl Funk, introduced by the statement that this was their favourite number from that album. Now I’ll admit that Suicide is not a track to galvanise a live audience into headbanging, but its omission from the set was a bit baffling.
There’s no doubt that if you wanted to capture Strapps live then 1977 was the best possible year, and yet there’s something a little disappointing about this live set. The songs are strong but are played through perfunctorily with little or no variation from the studio versions. The great live albums of the ‘70s are marked by instrumental improvisations and memorable audience interactions but there’s none of that here. The rhythm section and keys are solid without being spectacular, but you realise that Stagg is a rather ordinary guitarist who had a voice that struggled at times too. They were still an entertaining live act – I can vouch for that myself since I saw them myself in 1976 – but this live recording inadvertently reveals the gulf between Strapps and those bands that were capable of genuinely electrifying an audience.
History has relegated Strapps to a minor branch on the Depp Purple family tree. That’s fair enough, but those first two studio albums were certainly full of promise and they make this compete set of recordings well worth the investment for fans of 1970s hard rock.
No comments! Be the first commenter?