stratford place stud putting on concerts at clubs and, after briefly contemplating a job offer for an international import export company, he started his own record label. The early successes of Chrysalis included Procul Harem and Jethro Tull and the label continued to work with top bands throughout the 1970s and 1980s, names including Blondie, Billy Idol, Ultravox and Spandau Ballet amongst many others. In Wright’s recent autobiography, One Way Or Another, there is photograph of Wright among a dazed-looking group waiting on the side of the road next to Janis Joplin’s tour bus somewhere in the US in 1968. “I flew to the States in June 1968,” he recalls. “I had more or less short hair, a suit and a briefcase. When I came back I had long hair, a beard, a leather jacket and a hippy shoulder bag! “It was an amazing time in the music business; in the 1960s and 1970s music was everything for the young generation and it was an all-consuming time to live.”
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wo decisions marked Chrysalis’s progress. First, the company paid an almost unheard of sum of $1.2 million to buy Blondie’s record contract. “It was my partner who had seen them as a band in New York and told me they were really good, so I told him to go ahead and buy the contract whatever it cost.” Not every decision looks so good in retrospect and it was the same partner who turned down signing David Bowie. “We had signed Bowie as a songwriter and it was my ex-partner who listened to the record ‘Hunky Dory’ and turned it down,” Wright explains. “I was away at the time and I had heard the record, and liked it, but it was too late to go back on his decision.” At about the same time as Crime Of Passion was racing, Wright had bought a house in the country at Coln Rogers in Gloucester, still his base today. “Three or four years later the farm surrounding the house came on the market and I bought that too. “I set about turning some disused cattle sheds into stables, not necessarily with the idea of having expensive thoroughbreds there, and I hired John Wall as my stud groom. “It was John who convinced me that we could bring the mares home as at the time Crime Of Passion was boarding elsewhere. “I had to find a name for the stud company
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Although Wright would like to keep all of his stock, Stratford Place is run on a commercial basis
...in the 1960s and 1970s music was everything for the young generation and it was an all-consuming time to live and I chose Stratford Place Stud – at the time my London office was in Stratford Place,” he remembers. Wall stayed at Stratford Place until his recent retirement when Wright appointed Chris Lock to take over his position. Crime Of Passion’s family is still well represented in the stud and her descendants include the Rathasker Stud stallion Bungleinthejungle and this year’s Group 1 Dubai Golden Shahen winner Muarrab. Muarrab was sold for 280,000gns at the 2010 October sale and is now the winner of
13 races and more than £1.1 million in prize-money. “They all do what is says on the tin,” Wright says. “They are fast and precocious and it was a great thrill to breed a Group 1 winner on Dubai World Cup day. “It is a pity that Crime Of Passion’s daughter Crime Of The Century died young as she was producing really well, but we still have Licence To Thrill, the dam of Bungleinthejungle and Muarrab as well as some of her daughters.” The stud has had some great days at the sales – it sold a Galileo colt for 750,000gns in 2007, and on the racecourse it has produced Muarrab, the Hong Kong Group 1 winner Zaidan, and others including Souvenir Delondres, a juvenile Group winner who ran in Wright’s colours in 2014. “We have always been a commercial stud,” Wright explains. “I would like to keep them all, but you have to have a commercial view and we always offer yearlings. “You keep learning about selling. You have to have the right page, which is never easy
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