Hey! Mr Music Man

You may never of heard of him but that does not matter. For the last forty years Liverpool’s Billy Stratton, aged 63, has made a living from the notoriously fickle music industry and after all these years in the business, is now willing to impart the benefit of his knowledge to the future generation of the cities talent. Following the recent success of the Billy Stratton Workshop, which took place in the aptly titled Sessions pub, he is now looking to develop these workshops further.

This brief introduction does not give justice to the journey; some would say an odyssey that has been Billy’s Life. Its been a story of ups and downs, near misses and ultimately of bad health, which saw Billy being given only two years to live back in 1987 – just as he was on the verge of making it in Hollywood. After all that Billy has been through it would be easy to have a jaundiced view of life but that is not Billy’s way at all and, despite everything he has been through he still has dreams and ambitions, with which he wants to fulfil.

I met up with Billy in the basement cellar of his Kirkdale home, which he has converted into a studio and which sees the operation of his Moonrock Publishing Company, which he runs with his wife Linda.

Like any journey the best place to start is obviously at the beginning. Billy recalled his first gig way back in 1959, at the Old Swan British Legion Club, as an 18-year-old guitarist sitting down at the back of the stage as the band belted out skiffle numbers by Lonnie Donegan.

Billy remembered that first night vividly,

“ We did a couple of country numbers and an instrumental. Me and the Drummer did ‘Steppin Out With My Baby’ – it went down really well. In the meantime the singer’s in the back and he looks like Marty Wilde.

He had a pair of old Dockers gloves that we painted white and he put a trilby on and his collar up and when he finished that I started the Into to Mack the Knife. That was my first taste of what was to come.”

The Liverpool Music scene has obviously changed down the years and in some cases not for the best. It is also a possible reason why he is trying to develop and nurture the talent of today. How did he find playing in Liverpool in 1959?

“That’s why I feel sorry for the kids, because when I played in the early Sixties, the Echo used to have two pages of gigs – 500 on a page- it was easy to play, I played every night. Though it affected my marriage the only time I saw her was when I was running after the ambulance for the maternity ward!”

It has certainly been an enjoyable experience for Billy and he echoes the famous quote ‘that if you can remember the sixties you weren’t there’, when asked to recollect his experiences of the period,

“The first thing people say is How old are you and what was the sixties like? I just say one thing. I played a gig on New Years Eve 1959 – I got pissed and I woke up in 1968. What happened in between I haven’t got a clue.”

Like many Liverpool musicians at the time Billy was able to go to Germany to ply his trade. Billy’s career has also seen him travel the length and breadth of the British Isles, as well as places farer a field such as Belgium. Holland and a even few gigs in America. The American gigs also fulfilled Billy’s childhood ambition to travel at sea,

“When I was younger I stowed away on a ship called the Slovania and I played the Jack Dempsey’s bars I can’t remember how old I was. All my friends where seafarers and that’s what I wanted to do, but I got married at 17.”

It was like a marriage for Billy, with regards to his love of Music, but with out his music his life could have been a little different for Billy. His ambitions of being a seafarer now curtailed, a different avenue could have been taken by Billy. By his own admission he was a little bit of A rebel at school but the reason for this was Billy’s inability to read or write as Billy says the teachers at his school they gave up on him.

So with out much direction in his life Billy had one of those chance encounters that more often than not become life altering, he explains,

“I remember one night at the top of Sandhills and what we used to do as kids was to jump on the wagons going to the docks and throw the gear off. This particular day we were getting chased by the police – I ran into the doorway of a pub. It was a place called City Whites, at the bottom of Regent Street.

When everything died down a bit, I stood there and I heard this music. There was a fella playing called Billy Witty. He was playing Jimmy Rogers songs that was about 1956, 1957 – I was sold then.”

So with the notion that Billy was going to be a musician, Billy trudged off to the local pawnshop at the top of his road to purchase his first guitar for five pounds – the problem was that Billy could not play it.

In another quirk of fate, that owes much to that fateful night at City Whites, Billy went to a party where a chance meeting with a girl, revealed that she happened to know Billy Witty’s wife. So out of chance meeting, Billy got a foothold into the music business and Billy Witty gave Billy a chance, as well as five guitar lessons to the fledgling musician.



Billy believes that this meeting not only gave him the chance to forge a career in something interesting, but it saved him from an alternative that could have been a reality,

“Soon as I started to play the guitar. Out of 8 mates I was the only one that never went to jail I put it down to the guitar. I just practised and practised.”

In the 1970’s, he was fronting his own band the Eugene Stratton’s Rock and Blues band. The band consisted of seven members. This band took Billy back to Germany where he toured Germany’s NATO bases. Sadly this band soon broke up due to the usual distractions that effect rock bands.

Music has remained a constant in Billy’s life, though he did put his guitar down, for a time during the Seventies where he took up alternative careers as a window cleaner, after buying someone’s window cleaning round. He also had business-renovating furniture and he had a job as a demolition man. But after all this Billy came back to what he knew best…music.

After his last tour at the end of the 1970’s, he came back to a different Liverpool. The early 1980’s were a time of the Toxteth Riots and this event inspired Billy to write a song called ‘The Crowd Outside’. These events inspired Billy to branch out into a different avenue. As Billy explains,

“I got in with some fellas I knew from a few years earlier – ‘Boys from the Blackstuff’ came around. In one of the episodes there is a character called Shake hands. He came round to our house one day to ask me to write a song. I put one of my other songs on the b-side and I had ‘nine months of Beatlemania. I had an agent and everything. Everywhere I went it was the Shake hands character, everyone loved him.”

Things where seemingly heading in the right direction for Billy. A chance meeting with an associate from the Sixties called Jimmy Wide saw him and Billy set up their own company enabling them to produce plays that they had written. Everything appeared to going okay even a move to Los Angles transpired, as the newly formed company tried to sell their plays to the American moguls. Again just a things where going right. Billy had a breakdown.

“I was in the house and I just blacked out and they told me I was a diabetic. It was so bad that the doctor told me that I only had two years to live that was in 1987. He told me you couldn’t drink or smoke anymore.”

Sadly this was not the end of Billy’s health problems

“ I had that and I thought that I’d got over everything. Then In 1990 I had a stroke. I had a series of little ones. Thank god, it wasn’t a massive one, but the last one I had was when I was living in London. I was waiting on the platform of a tube station and I nearly went under a tube. That’s when they told me that the last one had left me with brain damage. To this day my left hand side is numb.”
Prior to the first attack in America Billy, was in fairly good health so his health problems came as a bit of a shock to him. During his time in LA, even though he was doing well with the play at the time, Billy likened the experience to a year’s extended holiday and by his own admission it was a time that he spent most of his time drunk.

The 1990’s saw a further period of ill health for Billy. He was in and out of hospital all the time. In 1994, he than developed trouble with his kidneys and the likelihood was that Billy might loose a kidney. After a series of operations, it was found to be a kidney stone. This required him to have surgery. Whilst in the hospital recovering Billy set his mind to other things

“I was in the recovery room and they had a jazz station on and I heard them saying that no one was writing jazz anymore. So I went home and wrote twenty songs.”

Billy’s efforts at trying to publish his album of jazz songs, led him to the setting up of his own publishing company after a chance meeting with a friend who told him that with all his knowledge he should put it to use. He did and Moonrock productions, was formed. And with it saw the release of the album ‘Melodies of Billy Stratton’.

With setting up his new company this looked like aiding Billy back to full health but a visit to the hospital told him otherwise,

“I learnt to play the piano. I started to write more songs and people than started to send us tapes. Then I went to hospital and they said to me your body is not accepting the insulin. So they put me on pills. Then two years ago – I didn’t know that my blood pressure was 200 over 100.

As a result, I had a further stroke and I lost my memory I was crying for two weeks. I would see a guitar but I couldn’t work out what it was for, Gradually as my wife Linda started put on my old records and I went to the library to re-learn stuff my memory gradually returned.”

This latest attack shook Billy up so much so that he realised that everything that he had learnt through out the years would be lost. This is partly the reason that he set up his music workshop at the Sessions pub, just down the road from his home in Kirkdale. The workshops where funded by Liverpool City Council’s Millennium awards scheme. The scheme funded projects that specialised in skill sharing.

Billy believed that the workshop worked as a two way process. Firstly, he was able to help budding talent from the city but also it acted as a sort of therapy for him after all his recent health scares. Billy was really pleased with the outcome of the course as he explains,

“We got the right crowd everyone of them was good. We put out a CD of seven singles and for a period of 10 weeks – 4 hours a week – It’ brought me right back.”

So what of the future for Billy? Still ambitious as he has ever been is seeking further funding for possible future courses. Sadly the Millennium awards, has now come to an end, so Billy is seeking funding for other projects. One of the immediate projects is working with one of the performers from the music workshop.

“I’m working with one of the guys now called Paul Hoult on an album – It’s inspired me because I’m writing his style of music now. For someone who has been playing for forty years I’m happy, It’s the best cure it’s the best relaxation.”

Typically for Billy not everything has been running smooth as he would like it be. He has started sending out demo copies of Paul’ s work to the contacts that he has amassed over the numerous years, he has spent in the business but so far without much luck,

“I’ve been sending it out, but all the guys I new years ago are either dead, divorced or skint so its back to square one. I’ve sent an ep out to a few contacts and no one has sent it back without any positive comments.”

From speaking to Billy and witnessing his work at close hand, you get the impression that Billy is deriving as much satisfaction and pleasure from what he is doing today than anything he has done in the previous forty years. I do not believe that Billy has wasted a single day on this planet but with what has happened to him in the last fifteen years everyday is a bonus for Billy and he is helping people who are grateful to him for sharing his wisdom and experience.