Education
He was educated at Mount Waverley Secondary College and before his entertainment career was a professional carpenter.
He was educated at Mount Waverley Secondary College and before his entertainment career was a professional carpenter.
He is best known as the lead singer of the 1970"s rock group Skyhooks. Strachan pursued a solo singing career during his time with Skyhooks and released a number of records, the most successful of which was his cover of Editor Cobb"s, Every Little Bit Hurts in 1976. He left Skyhooks in 1978 and then worked as a radio and television presenter.
He became known to a new generation as the host of children"s television series Shirl"s Neighbourhood in the early 1980s.
In the 1990s he was a regular presenter on home makeover program Our House where he resurrected skills from his pre-Skyhooks carpentry trade. He was also instrumental in several Skyhook reformations during the 1980s and 1990s.
Strachan presented a breakfast radio show with Gary Belcher and Dean Miller on the Brisbane radio station 4MMM in the 1990s. Strachan left Triple Master in 1999 following a pay dispute.
Strachan was killed in a helicopter accident on 29 August 2001.
He had been a fixed wing pilot for many years and had been undergoing training for a helicopter pilots licence, with a view to buying a helicopter and taking friends and family on surfing safaris. On a solo flight near Mount Archer in clear weather and inexplicably off the course planned by his instructor, Strachan encountered mountain turbulence which caused the rotor of his Bell 47G to sever the tailboom, crashing the helicopter onto a mountain slope. Radio 4MMM, Strachan"s former employer, held a day-long on-air tribute to him on the day after his death.
Old archived audio was played on air.
The episode of the American Broadcasting Company documentary Long Way To The Top featuring Skyhooks was scheduled to be broadcast on the day of his death. The episode was dedicated to his memory.
Channel Nine ran a tribute episode of Our House featuring footage filmed in the weeks before his death, along with archive footage.
