TOTO HUNTED DOWN THE STRANGER IN TOWN WITH SCOTLAND YARD

This is as 80`s sounding as you'll get, but as far as AOR is concerned, the TOTO song STRANGER IN TOWN was a rare and refreshing deviation away from the tiresome melodramatic love ballad format which most AOR bands were completely obsessed with throughout the entire decade. STRANGER IN TOWN comes off the 1984 album ISOLATION, it reached number 7 on the US billboard chart and even made the australian Top 40 chart, despite it recieving virtually no airplay on radio here. The song has a very tense and uneasy feeling about it, picture perfect precision melody as you'd expect from TOTO, but lyrically it borders on being sinister. The stranger in town referred to in the song is a killer who's on the loose in a small town somewhere in america, SCOTLAND YARD is chasing him, singer DAVID PAICH looks outside his window one night, and sees the stranger outside and running down an alley way, he's been seen in town talking to children, old people in town know who he is and his evil past, and yet he remains a free man. The ever so brief lyrical reference to children begs the question did TOTO write this song as a real life representation of a known paedophile, or is the song just a make believe story about a fictitious killer, like you'd find in a million horror movies or the lyrics of one hundred thrash metal bands. Whether STRANGER IN TOWN is based on reality or fiction, it is one the best pieces of AOR recorded in the 80`s, with a good helping of state of the art progressive rock musicianship that would have made a member of JOURNEY turn purple in envy. Besides featuring whiz guitarist STEVE LUKATHER and keyboard extraordinaire DAVID PAICH, the song and album was one of the rarer occasions in the history of TOTO where the three Porcaro brothers, Steve, Mike and Jeff, all played together without one of them being missing in the recording studio.