Earlier this month, the best rock band to have come out of America in decades played London’s Roundhouse in front of 3,000 very excited British fans, all of whom sang along to every song the Alabamans played. It was the best gig I’ve been to in years, mainly because the Red Clay Strays are musically so damned good and that smart British audience got everything they were offering. It had that rowdy, joyful atmosphere that Faces gigs did in the early 1970s.
Stay with me, Spectator readers. While our collective, more sophisticated, tastes may lean towards Wagner, Chopin and Mozart and, at a push, Miles and Monk, there will always be the sound of rock music in the background of our lives, as it was in the 1960s with the Beatles and the Stones, in the 1970s with the Sex Pistols and the Clash, the 1980s with Springsteen’s E Street Band, and on and on. Now, pencil in the Red Clay Strays for the 2020s, or whatever this decade is called.
They are a six-piece from Mobile, Alabama, who follow in the southern rock footsteps of the Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Drive-By Truckers and all those Americana musicians – part country, part gospel, part rock, part soul – who circled around FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals in the 1960s and 1970s. (Sir Paul McCartney has told me that the sounds and the songs that were coming out of FAME Studios in the early 1960s had had a profound effect on the Beatles… and the entire British Invasion class. Indeed, one of their early hits, ‘Anna’, was a FAME Studios original.)
Those Southern roots make Red Clay Strays’ identity, as is their softly spoken Christian faith. As the band’s frontman Brandon Coleman tells his audience every night, they are not preaching the Christian gospel, but quite clearly and unapologetically it plays a significant role in their musical identity. Song titles such as ‘Will the Lord’, ‘God Does’ and ‘Devil in My Ear’ pretty much sum up their musical reference points. White Christian soul music.
I first heard the Strays at a music-industry friend’s home in Nashville earlier this year. He played their second album ‘Made in These Moments’. He said everyone in Nashville was talking about them. For me everything stood still. The sound was completely fresh (produced by the studio genius that is Dave Cobb), the musicianship on another level, the songs brilliantly original and the singer… well, more on him to come. It reminded me of when I first heard the Beatles, sitting on a beach in Cape Town in early 1963 and ‘Please Please Me’ leapt out of the transistor radio. Before many Spectator readers were born. Previous. Previous.
As with most overnight sensations it turns out the Red Clay Strays have been performing together for more than ten years, starting out as a covers band, playing Southern dance halls and local shindigs before evolving into the powerful creative force they are today. These Southerners come out of a cauldron that forges a level of musicianship one doesn’t find that easily north of the Mason-Dixon line. Every kid on a street corner seems to have music in his or her bloodstream. As John Sebastian wrote in ‘Nashville Cats’, ‘there are 1,352 guitar pickers in Nashville and anyone that unpacks his guitar could play better than I will’.
The Red Clay Strays are musically so damned good and that smart British audience got everything they were offering
As a live band the Red Clay Strays surely have few peers, as we saw and heard at the Roundhouse this weekend – a dynamic, liquid mix of rock, gospel and soul fused with that overpowering message of faith and hope. The bassist is as languid and melodic as Paul McCartney, the two guitarists as fluent and fast as Eric Clapton, and the drummer, a mix of Ginger Baker and Animal from the Muppets, drives the band with passion and ferocity. This is Southern Baptist boogie at its finest.
God and sin and heartache and existential angst are the subtexts on most of the songs, and they draw you in inexorably. Their biggest single, ‘Wondering Why’, has become a viral hit, racking up more than 100 million streams on Spotify. Here, Brandon Coleman laments: ‘she is from silver spoon, private school, never missed Sunday church, and I come from blue collar, low dollar, out there where concrete meets old red dirt’. Teenage class divide, Mississippi style.
The band is led by Coleman’s extraordinarily soulful vocals; he has a kind of James Dean look about him and moves like a young Presley, twitching his hips and curling his lips. At 6ft 6in with a perfect quiff, he is the impeccable frontman. This guy has it all – a soulful voice, thin as a rake, and southern gospel soul running through his veins, a magazine-cover star in the making.
Next summer the Strays are playing Madison Square Garden, and stadium concerts beckon. It may be that this Roundhouse gig was the last time the band’s followers will see them at an intimate, accessible venue. And what surprised me most was the absence of rock writers from our national press. Notably missing were the two star critics from the Telegraph and the Times who my colleague Michael Henderson put to the sword in The Spectator this summer. As the Strays’ most famous song asks: ‘Wondering why?’
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