PRAYING MANTIS Trivia — 16 Entries
16 sourced facts about PRAYING MANTIS.
Trivia
What put this band back in front of an audience, after they had stopped in the middle of the 1980s, was a concert in Japan. In April 1990 a show marking ten years of the new wave of British heavy metal was staged at Nakano Sun Plaza in Tokyo, and the Troy brothers played it with Paul Di'Anno, Iron Maiden's first singer, and Dennis Stratton, who had also been in Iron Maiden. The record of that night is Live at Last, and six of its fourteen songs — "Wrathchild", "Murders in the Rue Morgue", "Remember Tomorrow", "Phantom of the Opera", "Iron Maiden" and "Running Free" — are Iron Maiden's. The band's own site names that Japanese festival as the place they reformed.
From Predator in Disguise in 1991 to The Journey Goes On in 2003, this band's new albums came out in Japan first. Pony Canyon, through its Canyon International imprint, issued them as PCCY-00207, PCCY-00422, PCCY-00794, PCCY-01257, PCCY-01462 and PCCY-01636. The band's own profile page says of those years that they released many successful albums with Pony Canyon in Japan and that Japan became one of their major territories. A good deal of the reason a band who went nearly a decade without a record at home has been able to keep making them for thirty years since is contained in that one sentence.
The June 2024 Japanese shows were announced by the band themselves as their last performances in the country. Shibuya Club Quattro on the 5th and Umeda Club Quattro in Osaka on the 6th, billed as the Praying Mantis 50th Anniversary Farewell Japan Tour 2024. The listing embedded on the band's own site says the shows celebrate their fiftieth anniversary, that they will play across their career including new songs from Defiance, their thirteenth studio album, and that "these shows in Tokyo and Osaka will be their last performances in Japan before they retire from touring". Tokyo Onkyo promoted them; admission was standing only at ¥9,500 including tax, with a ¥600 drink charge on top.
The band started out called Junction, and the change of name happened entirely by accident. Chris Troy tells the story in the Troy Story section of the band's own site: they were overdubbing four-part backing vocals behind their singer Stan, bouncing sound between two cassette recorders, with a broom handle for a mic stand and a claw hammer taped to the end of it for ballast. Watching them gesture with their hands as they sang, Stan burst out laughing and said they looked like a load of praying mantises. Junction ended there.
What put the band in front of people was a single demo tape: "Captured City", "Lovers to the Grave", "Johnny Cool" and "The Ripper", cut at First Light, an eight-track studio in Beckenham. They handed it to Neal Kay, who ran the Heavy Metal Soundhouse in Kingsbury in north London, and Kay started playing it to the room — the same room where Iron Maiden's and Samson's tapes were being played. The band's own site calls the Soundhouse north London's premier hard rock disco and says the movement took shape out of it.
On the 1980 tour supporting Iron Maiden, Chris Troy had been crossing seven or eight times a night between his bass amp and a small temporary platform that jutted out from the front of a stage some eight feet high. On the last note of the last song, "Captured City", he pulled the strap off to raise the bass above his head, took a step backwards, and found nothing under his foot. He landed on the wooden floor beside the scaffolding poles that held the platform up. The rest of the band had left by the other side and nobody noticed; Tino Troy counted the encore in, stopped the band and told the room, "Apologies, we seem to have lost our bassist." Nothing was broken. Troy ends the story with the line of the night — asked whether Mantis went down well, the answer was that the bassist went down really well.
The debut's actual UK chart performance was modest. The Official Charts Company's database has Time Tells No Lies entering on the chart dated 11 April 1981, peaking at 60 and staying two weeks, and the single "Cheated" entering on 31 January 1981, peaking at 69, also for two weeks. The band's own profile page states that "Cheated" went top 40 in the UK charts in 1980; the Official Charts Company's record differs on both the year and the position. Either way the numbers are not the point — this is a record that has been named in every account of the new wave of British heavy metal written in the forty-five years since.
"Captured City" has closed this band's sets since the First Light demo of 1979. For thirty-two years, though, there was no proper studio recording of it to buy: it is not on the 1981 debut and not on any of the albums that followed the 1990s restart. The first official studio version appeared in 2011, on Metalmorphosis, made for the band's thirtieth anniversary. The same is true of "Praying Mantis", the 1980 single named after the band itself. That Japan-only album is not simply a set of re-recordings; two of its songs exist nowhere else.
Metalmorphosis was only ever released in Japan. King Records issued it on 21 December 2011 as KICP-1598 with eleven tracks, and the band's own page explains that it takes the five-song Metalmorphosis: 30th Anniversary EP, put out in Germany that March, and adds six more. The project began in Europe, then, and only the finished version — the Japanese one — exists. Benjy Reid and Gary MacKenzie split the drumming between them song by song, and Wes Maebe mixed and mastered it at Pinewood and Snap Studios in London. There is no streaming edition; finding the CD is still the only way to hear it.
The first proper rehearsal room was a converted coal store at Nathaniel Heckford School on Cable Street in London E1, where a member's father was the schoolkeeper. They hung black curtains around the thick brick walls and had somewhere they could play as loud as they liked without bothering anybody. They built their own lighting rig out of catering-sized tins, built their own PA, and bought a second-hand Bedford ambulance that kept breaking down. Chris Troy adds that the school stands in the middle of Jack the Ripper territory, and that an early Junction song called "The Ripper" was written about exactly that.
On the same Iron Maiden tour, the coach broke down in midwinter Scotland. There were about twenty-five people aboard between the Mantis party and Iron Maiden's crew, in a fifty-seat coach Chris Troy reckons was about as old as its seat count. This was long before mobile phones, so the driver set off on foot to find a phone box. Out on the moors with the heat draining away, everyone came to depend on the short bursts of warmth the driver let them have by turning the engine over, which he rationed because the fuel was low; the roadies gave up on dignity and huddled together. When the replacement coach finally appeared after hours of it, Troy writes that few things other than beer and sex have ever been so welcome. The landlady at that night's bed and breakfast prescribed a hot bath, coffee with a dram of whisky in it, and the electric blanket.
After the 1990 restart, players out of Iron Maiden kept arriving in this band. The band's own profile names three — Dennis Stratton, Paul Di'Anno and Clive Burr — and Stratton then stayed until 2007, holding one half of the twin lead for seventeen years. Gary Barden, who had sung with MSG, took the vocals on Predator in Disguise in 1991. The same page records that Iron Maiden and Praying Mantis had been paired in many settings since the Metal for Muthas days of 1980 and built a strong musical relationship; the traffic in personnel runs straight out of that.
The fifth song on Sanctuary (2009) has two titles. The track listing the band publish on their own archive site prints it as "Turn the tide / Lonely Way Home"; the international edition uses the second name and the Japanese edition the first, and the video Frontiers posted on their channel is titled "Turn The Tide". The same listing marks the ninth song, "Broken Chains", as "(Japanese release Only)", which is also where the reason the Japanese CD runs to eleven tracks is written down.
The Troy brothers are half-Greek. Announcing their Athens show of 10 October 2025, the band wrote that they were back in Athens after six years, that they always have a great time in Greece, and then — "the Troy brothers are half-Greek you know!" It is a piece of family history the band let slip in a gig announcement; it appears nowhere in their profile page or their biography.
The band's own material gives two different founding years. Their profile page says they were formed in London in 1973 by the brothers Chris and Tino Troy, and the same page describes them as having a forty-six-year history at the time it was written. But the 2024 Japanese tour and the album Defiance, from the same year, were both announced as a fiftieth anniversary, which counts from 1974 — and MusicBrainz gives 1974 as the start date too. This site follows the latter. The band's archive site, for its part, declines to pick, saying only that they formed in the mid-1970s.
The German and Italian dates of November and December 2026 are being sold by the venues as the "45th Anniversary - Time Tells No Lies Tour 2026". It looks like a contradiction — the 2024 Japanese shows were a fiftieth anniversary, and two years later the number has gone down — but the two counts measure different things. Fifty runs from the founding of the band; forty-five runs from Time Tells No Lies, the debut album of April 1981. The ticket page Paunchy Cats run for the Lichtenfels show on 21 November gives a 20:00 start, standing only, at 25.83 euros including tax and fees.