Cat Power

Forty years down the line, the Stray Cats are playing with as much attitude as ever. Silvia Bluejay slips into her polka dot dress for a chat with the great Lee Rocker

- Silvia Bluejay

This year marks the fortieth anniversary of the Stray Cats, who are celebrating in style, with a new album— aptly titled 40—and a world tour on which frontman Brian Setzer, bassist Lee Rocker, and drummer Slim Jim Phantom have been reminding audiences of the huge power of their amped-up rockabilly brand. We caught up with Rocker at a recent London show for a chat about those early days four decades ago, when the Cats first left New York in 1980 for pastures new in the UK. What did they bring with them?

“We sold pretty much every bit of equipment except my one upright bass, which I brought with me” Rocker reminisces. “Brian brought his 1959 6120 Gretsch guitar, and Jim brought a snare drum in his suitcase. We bought four airline tickets, and one of them was for the bass; you could put it upside down in the seat in a soft case. We got to London without a plan, and pretty quickly realized that we hadn’t really thought it through well! We had to sleep in Hyde Park, and although we made friends, we had no contacts.”

Did they know what awaited them in London, we ask? “What we knew, we pretty much knew from the NME and Melody Maker, the rock weeklies of the day,” he recalls. “We knew the names of the venues, so we knocked on their doors. We looked different enough, and carried around this gear, and although we only had this crappy cassette tape, the band always sounded good. We had a lot of confidence, so people took mercy on us and gave us some gigs. We ran into all sorts of people; Ronnie Lane from the Small Faces took us home, and let us sleep in his house, introduced us to others, and word spread quickly. We weren’t homeless for long.”