THE STRANGLERS UNRULY ESCAPADES

THE
STRANGLERS
UNRULY
ESCAPADES
©2009 PERSONS UNKNOWN ;-)
Old, Ugly, Nasty, The Stranglers
were punk’s cartoon outcasts. Yet
their thuggish image hid a deep
friendship that would ultimately
tear them apart.
Hans Warmling was fed up of life in the ice cream van.
He’d come to England from his homeland of Sweden to play
guitar and write songs in a band with his friend Hugh.
However, ever since moving into the flat above the
Courage Off Licence in Guildford, Hans had become
disenchanted. Gigs were difficult to come by, not least
because of the band’s name. On learning that they were
being invited to book The Stranglers, the average agent’s
response was to hang up the phone. When gigs did occur it
was invariably the result of subterfuge. Once the venue
manager realised he was not looking at a clean-cut
country & western band but a surly-looking group of
hippies and a crop-headed bassist – proficient in
anything from R&B to ballads – there was no way he was
going to invite them back.
Chugging around the country in drummer Jet Black’s ice
cream van, lurching from one unprepossessing engagement
to the next, a record deal seemed a remote prospect. The
only interest had come from small London independent
label Safari, with whom The Stranglers signed a short
term contract in March 1975. But the company was far from
financially sound and the single they recorded was never
released.
Squashed in the back of the ice cream van, heading to a
gig at a bar mitzvah in London, Hans Warmling brooded
over the injustice of the band having to play cheesy
cover versions in order to placate their audiences. The
songs he was writing with Hugh Cornwell and bassist JeanJacques Burnel were more than adequate. Theirs was a
versatile covers repertoire: I Saw Her Standing There,
Fun Fun Fun, Walk On By and, as of spring 1975, If, a
recent Number 1 for bald-headed TV tec Telly Savalas –
sung by Jet Black. The Stranglers drummer certainly knew
his MOR showstoppers. It had been his idea for the band
to cover Tony Orlando & Dawn’s 1973 hit Tie A Yellow
Ribbon.
“That’s why poor old Hans left, Tie A Yellow Ribbon was
the straw that broke his back”, says Hugh Cornwell, “Cos
there’s a lot of chords in it, about 40 or 50. Major
7ths, diminished 9ths... He just couldn’t be bothered to
learn them all. (Adopts Swedish Accent) ‘We have better
songs than this Hugh, why are we playing this?’ He was
absolutely right.”
So Hans quit. Seven years later, established as one of
the most successful and notorious British bands of the
era, The Stranglers took Strange Little Girl, a song Hans
had written with Hugh above the off licence, to Number 7
in the singles chart. Warmling had indeed been correct
about the group's potential.
To replace him, The Stranglers decided on a full-time
keyboard player, and placed an advertisement in Melody
Maker: "Keyboard/vocal man for soft rock band. Mostly
original material. Good gear essential. Accommodation
available." Dave Greenfield, a 25-year-old moustachioed
prog-loving veteran of 18 failed bands — including the
tantalisingly named Rusty Butler — was told about the ad
by his aunt, then acting as the prodigiously able
organist's agent. Soft rock? he pondered, en route to the
audition. No problem.
July 5th, 1976. It’s backslapping time at Dingwalls in
north London. The prime movers in London's blossoming
punk scene have come out in force for the first UK
appearance by The Ramones, headlining with The Flamin'
Groovies as part of a two-night American Bicentennial
celebration at the nearby Roundhouse. At Dingwall's bar
after the show Paul Cook and Steve Jones of the Sex
Pistols talk to Paul Simonon of the just-formed Clash.
Other faces in the milling crowd include members of The
Damned, Johnny Rotten and Chrissie Hynde. Joe Strummer,
meanwhile, is at a table chatting to the singer-guitarist
from the band who'd played first on the bill that night:
the same soft rock band Dave Greenfield had joined 12
months previously.
A few things had changed in the world of The Stranglers.
For one thing, the hair was shorter; apart, that is, from
Dave Greenfield's shoulder-length tresses, and JeanJacques Burnel's do, always unfashionably short for a
musician in the mid '70s. Visually, they're down-at-heel
and austere. Their set, largely purged of covers (Walk On
By survived), featured new songs like Ugly and Goodbye
Toulouse which simmered with baleful aggression.
Some of the older material had been speeded up and other
songs - Strange Little Girl, for instance — dropped altogether. Plus, after a year of almost constant UK gigging
The Stranglers had also built themselves a unique sound,
prominently featuring Burnel's infernal bass and
Greenfield's arpeggiated organ runs. They'd always looked
pretty mean, but now they played the part; plenty mean
enough for a News Of The World shock-horror expose that
April which identified The Stranglers as key members of
the nefarious 'punk rock' youth cult threatening to wreak
moral turpitude upon the nation. The band were also
building a reputation: for trouble.
"I remember that night distinctly," says Burnel. "I never
used to drink. And [legendary punk scenester] Dagenham
Dave had given me a bottle of wine, I'd sucked about a
quarter of it, and I was pissed. We were walking Indian
file through the crowd, leaving the venue. Steve and Paul
from the Pistols were with Paul Simonon. They all had
pints.
In those days Paul had this nervous tick where he used to
spit, y'know, Hey don't I look cool — spit. He did it as
I walked past and I thought he was spitting at me, so I
thumped him. He fell into Steve and Paul, pints flying,
next thing we knew we were in the courtyard. And it's me
and Paul going, Give in! 'Apologise!' No! 'Well, I
won't!'... In each other's faces, bit of prodding. Not a
fight. I remember being told afterwards that Joe Strummer
and Hugh said, 'I see it's your bass player against my
bass player.' 'Let's leave them to it, shall we?' Dave
Greenfield had Lydon up against the Transit. First time
I'd ever seen him violent —and the last. It just petered
out."
The scene in the Dingwalls courtyard was redolent of a
Wild West bar-room brawl. As Burnel and Simonon postured,
their respective supporters sized each other up.
Alongside Burnel were Jet Black and Dave Greenfield, plus
a knot of Stranglers fans. Among those lining up with the
Clash bassist were the Sex Pistols, Chrissie Hynde and a
rather bewildered Ramone or two. Hugh Cornwell sat in the
ice cream van. Remembering the incident 21 years later,
he said: "What should have happened was that everyone
should have had a drink together and enjoyed the
evening."
That everyone didn't, speaks volumes for punk's gradually
coalescing value system and The Stranglers' status within
it. They were outsiders: philosophically and musically.
For a start, they were significantly older than their
punk peers — in 1976, Hugh Cornwell was 27, compared to
Joe Strummer's 24 and the 20-year-old Johnny Rotten. Born
Brian Duffy on August 26, 193 8, Jet Black was
significantly older still. In their different ways, each
member was imbued with varying degrees of cynicism about
the hand that life had dealt them. Cornwell was a
biochemist who had dropped his postgraduate studies in
order to play music. A drummer for various jazz groups in
the '50s, Black had exchanged music for the more tangible
prospects of running his own business — he'd variously
turned his hand to manufacturing home brew kits, running
an off licence and selling ice cream — but the collapse
of his marriage prompted something of a mid-life crisis
and he decided to take up drumming again. Burnel, the
English-born son of French parents who ran a restaurant
in Godalming, was a loner at school where he flirted with
far right politics, and after completing his economics
degree became a Hell's Angel. Greenfield, meanwhile, had
left school early to play music, but after 10 years was
still stuck near the bottom of the ladder. The
Stranglers' mundane base in suburban Guildford possessed
none of the Bohemian chic of Ladbroke Grove or the King's
Road, nor could their solidly lower-middle-class backgrounds (Jet aside) earn much kudos in a scene where
proletarian credentials — authentic or otherwise — were
to be flaunted. Moreover, Stranglers songs contained
little of punk's adversarial Year Zero ardour, but
instead cast a morally ambivalent gaze on the grubby
small print of everyday existence. In 1976, a song like
Sometimes, inspired by an incident where a cuckolded
Cornwell hit his girlfriend, could only have been written
by The Stranglers: dour, malevolent, heartless, arguably
misogynist... and, in terms of pop songcraft, quite
brilliant. The first song on their debut album, it
contained all the seeds for their initial commercial
success — it was wrong, but demonstrably right, too.
"The punk bands were very distrustful," says Cornwell.
"They couldn't work us out. They didn't know whether to
be scared by us, we just weren't of their group. Too
philosophical, too much intelligence, keyboards... Ooh,
that's dodgy, can't trust them, they've got a keyboard
player with long hair and a moustache. It was all silly
stuff like this. Privately, I had a quite a good
relationship with Joe Strummer. Paul and Steve from the
Sex Pistols would come to the gigs, talk to Jet about
drumming and stuff.
So there was private contact, but not public. But it
didn't bother me, because I understood. Punk had all
these rules you weren't allowed to transgress, and if you
did you were banished. And that's one of the reasons why
we thought it was all a bit of a sham. But one can
understand why it had to be so strict, because it was
peddling its own hype. It had to have these strict edges
in order for it to be seen, to be in focus. It had to be
defined like that."
Burnel: "Early on there wasn't so much tribalism, they
just knew that we were more cool than lot of other bands
'cos we had shorter hair and we had an aggressive name
and we weren't trying to be country rock, we had a dark
side. Joe [Strummer] was coming to see us. He wanted a
band like us, a band which was more like a gang. But when
the press got hold of it and the managers started getting
involved, saying you shouldn't mix with these people,
then suddenly we were marginalised, because some people
considered us hippies. Because we admitted smoking dope,
and the others, of course, weren't touching the stuff.
There was a lot of bullshit, as there is with every new
movement or scene, and Malcolm McLaren and Bernie Rhodes
and that clique definitely had the ear of certain
influential writers at that time."
"I remember doing a Pistols photo shoot on Denmark Street
when JJ Burnel sped by," says Glen Matlock. "'Wotcha!' he
called out. I said something cordial in reply, and Johnny
Rotten turned to me and said: 'You don't talk to people
like that, do you?'"
Much of The Stranglers' tilt towards punk could be
attributed to the work of their managers, Derek Savage
and Dai Davies of the Albion Agency, plus the scheming of
booking agent Ian Grant and publicist Alan Edwards.
As managers of pub rock bands Brinsley Schwarz and Ducks
Deluxe, Davies and Savage had helped create the
infrastructure for punk by persuading breweries that live
bands were the way to bring in punters and sell beer.
Albion booked the bands for such legendary punk venues as
the Red Cow in Hammersmith, the Hope & Anchor in
Islington and the Nashville Rooms in West Kensington, and
by 1976 their roster featured virtually everyone who
would be anyone in the punk and post-punk era: The
Damned, the Sex Pistols, The Jam, Elvis Costello, The
101ers. Grant, meanwhile, took it upon himself to fix up
The Stranglers with gigs. "Places that you would never
have heard of and that I haven't since," he says. "Like
Nethertown in the Lake District. I just rang places up
and blagged it. I spent the year until the record deal
was signed booking them. They played the Red Cow more
than any other band, they played the Nashville more than
any band. A lot of trouble, a lot of Hell's Angels activity. And very often they wouldn't be asked back."
"There was violence every night," agrees Burnel. "Whereas
the Sex Pistols and all the other bands pretended to be
tough and streetwise, I don't think they had experienced
the same levels of violence we did. We weren't playing in
lofts in front of journalists at special parties, we were
playing... Rhyl. Grimsby. Places where people had only
read about this thing happening in London and they
weren't going to have any of this horrible music, let's
show these Londoners who's tough. And we gave as good as
we got. For some reason. And that became a huge part of
our persona, unfortunately, because the press picked up
on the violence. What do you do when someone's bottling
you? If you're not going to run away you fight back."
Alan Edwards was a young punk fan working with legendary
PR Keith Altham, and rather less than enthralled at
plugging the likes of John 'Music' Miles. He jumped at
the offer from his old school chum Ian Grant to represent
The Stranglers, and seized upon their potential for
trouble as a selling point. It was Edwards, these days
responsible for ministering to the PR needs of David
Bowie and the Spice Girls, who had pointed the News Of
The World towards The Stranglers for the paper's April
'76 punk splash.
“Their relationship with punk was a bit forced," says
Edwards, ere more psychedelic warriors with a punk
attitude. We r pushed them that way, starting the fanzine
Strangled and positioning them alongside The Clash in the
media."
The extent of Edwards' aptitude for the hustle was
revealed on December 6th 1976, the day The Stranglers
signed a record deal with United Artists. '£40,000
contract for another punk group' screamed the front page
of the London Evening Standard. Time was racing forward.
Only eight months earlier, the men in the ice cream van
mired in penury that they had been reduced to playing a
Young Conservatives ball in Purley.
For purely pragmatic reasons, The Stranglers had embraced
punk. After two years fruitless slog, they identified it
as a chance — maybe their last — to get noticed. And
though the embrace was barely reciprocated, they were
less than bothered. Because by the end of 1977, The
Stranglers could boast two Top 10 albums in their debut,
Rattus Norvegicus, and No More Heroes, and three
consecutive Top 10 singles: Peaches, Something Better
Change and No More Heroes. They had sold more records
than all the other punk bands put together. "We were
pretty amazed," admits Jet Black.
Cornwell: "Because we missed that pub rock thing — we
were too young and not good enough to be a part of it—the
pub rock musicians sneered at us. And then when the punk
thing. And then when the punk thing happened we were too
good and too old. So we were this misanthropic group
between the two. And that stayed with us. We were a class
of one. But it didn't stop our success."
As punk came and went, The Stranglers thrived. They made
two thrilling albums, Black And White and The Raven,
which redefined the post-punk landscape and prefaced the
visceral neo-psychedelia of groups like Joy Division. But
an unabated appetite for destruction continued to obscure
their musical achievements. For the next three years,
fuelled by fame, ego and the increasingly vehement
consumption of hard drugs, they wreaked havoc around the
globe. No tour seemed complete without a confrontation
with the local authorities and a visit to the cells.
Journalists were a favourite target, and had been ever
since November 1977, when JJ Burnel sought retribution
for Jon Savage's negative review of No More Heroes in
Sounds. Confronting Savage at a Soft Boys gig at the Red
Cow, JJ threw a drink in his face then smacked him about.
Burnel: "And he's had it in for me ever since." (Hugh
Cornwell: "Understandably!")
As their press officer, Alan Edwards had the invidious
task of getting favourable write-ups for a band whose
relationship with the media was caustic at best. But he
evidently relished the situation, and in accordance with
the maxim All Publicity Is Good Publicity did a
tremendous job. For the press launch of The Raven he
organised a cricket match between a Stranglers XI and a
team of journalists. The Stranglers wore black, while
their team featured Captain Sensible and a friend of
their drug dealer who had once played for Hampshire (the
match was tied). Even Edwards, though, had his limits
tested by Burnel's ever more volatile, obnoxious
behaviour.
"The only occasion I really thought they were too much
hassle was with JJ on his Euroman Cometh solo jaunt [in
1979]," says Edwards. "He was doing interviews at our
borrowed office in the Edgware Road and he pulled his
normal party trick of smashing a hole in the door. I
didn't really have much money and the landlord didn't see
the funny side. Nor did I, to be honest."
Burnel was the one member of the band who truly regarded
himself a punk. The fact that his band were denied the
respect of his peers sat like a huge chip on his
shoulder. Considering he was a karate black belt, this
was no small detail. "I was hurt by everyone ganging up
on us. I didn't think we were that bad, actually. We
never got decent reviews, and it became a concerted
thing." Thus in 1979, Record Mirror journalist Ronnie
Gurr was kidnapped, NME's Deanne Pearson was left
stranded in the Portuguese desert after a video shoot,
and - most notoriously of all — French journalist
Philippe Manoeuvre was gaffa-taped to girders 300 feet up
the Eiffel Tower.
The Black And White album saw them broaden their musical
palette beyond the brutish strokes of its two
predecessors while still maintaining a chart profile with
hit singles Nice 'N' Sleazy and Walk On By. The
Stranglers' fourth album The Raven would see them utterly
transcend popular perception. Arriving at EMI's Pathe
Marconi Studios in Paris on June 14, they were tickled to
find that their neighbours in the next-door studio were
none other than The Rolling Stones, working on Emotional
Rescue. Tickled, because Mick Jagger had waxed none-toolyrically about The Stranglers shortly after the release
of No More Heroes ("Don't you think The Stranglers are
the worst thing you've ever fuckin' heard?" he asked NME.
"Fuckin' nauseatin' they are").
Both groups strenuously avoided bumping into each other.
Not that The Stranglers were there for terribly long. In
two weeks they recorded 12 tracks, producing themselves
for the first time after Martin Rushent, producer of the
first three albums, decided he no longer had any musical
affinity with the band. The final straw for Rushent had
occurred late the previous year when The Stranglers
recorded two tracks at Eden Studios in London as a
prelude to the next album. The first was an upbeat song
called Two Sunspots, which Rushent liked but the band
considered throwaway. One day, while waiting for the
producer to arrive, they decided to turn Two Sunspots
into another song by playing the tape at half-speed,
thereby creating one of the most distinctive and
significant songs in The Stranglers' canon: Meninblack, a
paranoid electronic creepy crawl, featuring Burnel's
vocals distorted through a harmoniser.
"We thought this could be a song in itself, possibly with
a sci-fi western feel," Cornwell writes in his excellent
Stranglers book Song By Song, "so I got my guitar and
started playing a cowboy riff. The word 'sci-fi'
triggered something in John. [He] said, 'I could do the
Meninblack lyric on this.' Martin Rushent got to the
studio late and when he arrived we were already recording
Meninblack. He said, 'If you want to work on this, I'm
going home.' So we said, OK, goodbye, and that was the
last we saw of him."
With long-term engineer Alan Winstanley co-producing, The
Raven represents The Stranglers' creative peak, drawing a
line beneath everything which had come before and
brimming with intricately arranged pop songs. "We wanted
The Raven to be more beautiful than Black And White,"
says Burnel. "And not to be as stark. Pick a bit of the
styles you're familiar with and forge a new one. I think
we got the balance quite right."
The title track's opening couplet, sung by a breathy,
wide-eyed JJ, served as a statement of intent: "Fly
straight with perfection/Find me a new direction." They
were sufficiently confident to relinquish some of their
hitherto most distinctive musical traits — Greenfield's
Hammond acrobatics, in particular, were superseded by a
vivid array of synthesized textures while the prosaic
lyrical concerns of the first two albums had vanished
completely. Now seasoned travellers and information
junkies, The Stranglers' global adventuring inspired
subject matter as abstruse and varied as the dubious
political machinations of Queensland's right-wing
governor Jon Bejelke Petersen (Nuclear Device),
Nostradamus prophesising the Iranian Islamic revolution
(Shah Shah A Go Go), Japanese ritual suicide (Ice)... and
heroin (Don't Bring Harry). Although ... Harry was a
cautionary tale, the period from the making of The Raven
onwards sees The Stranglers' drug use intensify, through
cocaine and onto smack. Their world was to change
dramatically.
Burnel: "We discovered heroin, thought it was a great
means of descent down another path. Which it was.
(Laughs) A very dark tunnel, a very, very dark path."
Early in the morning of June 21st 1980, Ian Grant — by now
managing the band on his own — was woken by a phone call
from the tour manager, telling him he had to get down to
the French Riviera and bail his charges out of Nice
prison. The previous evening's gig had ended in a riot.
Students at Nice University had wrecked the concert venue
after The Stranglers had given up wrestling with its
inadequate power supplies. All four members had been
arrested for inciting the riot. Grant's initial reaction?
'Not again!'
"I could name you 14 other incidents involving police or
jail. They were very difficult to manage because they
ended up believing their own publicity. Then add heroin.
There's where it went wrong. I couldn't have meetings
with them. They didn't understand what I was talking
about. I just thought, I'm bored of this."
On his arrival in Nice, apart from the unflappable Jet,
Grant found the band in low spirits. Burnel was strung
out and suicidal, while Cornwell, who had only just been
released from a month's incarceration in Pentonville for
possession of heroin, was contrite and humble. The rest
of that year was dogged by further misfortune, notably an
ill-starred US tour during which all their equipment was
stolen, a disaster compounded by the later discovery that
it hadn't been insured. Yet ultimately, The Stranglers'
bunker mentality pulled them through. By this point
utterly obsessed with making an album centred upon the
concept of the Meninblack — chief components: UFOs,
religion, smack — they persevered, and celebrated 1981 by
escaping from the Nice debacle with a suspended sentence
and yet another remarkable record. The Gospel According
To The Meninblack did, however, signal the apogee of The
Stranglers' dark fetish.
Burnel: "I'm convinced that when you do things like
smack, you enter a different world. People who are down
on themselves or who think the world is black tend to be
unlucky people. We were in this terrible situation,
although we didn't see it as terrible at the time.
Unlucky, bad, negative things would happen to us. And
then we all stopped - well, sort of. You don't just stop
doing heroin. But I was lucky, Dave helped me. So we put
that behind us, Hugh discovered jogging and cycling, I
rediscovered karate, started building up my body, getting
stronger. The sound of the Meninblack album was definitely a product of our drugged state of mind. We were
bankrupt by the end of the album."
And so, The Stranglers, ever the pragmatists, returned to
their soft rock roots. Golden Brown, a single from their
November 1981 album La Folie that their by now completely
disinterested record company were initially loathe to
release, reached Number 2 in the UK, went Top 5 in a
further five countries and has since become their
universally recognised signature. That it didn't really
fit in with anything else in their oeuvre is very apt:
for the story of The Stranglers is defined by their
unwillingness, or inability, to fit in. It's their
singular disregard for the accepted notions of how to
conduct a career, as well as a vigorously attuned
collective pop brain, which accounts for their enduring
myth. How else to explain the fact that to this day, 12
years after Hugh Cornwell quit the band he formed in
1974, none of the principals seem disposed to let it lie?
"I wasn't angry at all," says Jet Black, 63, and as JJ
points out, now bearing an uncanny resemblance to Orson
Welles. "From a couple of years before it was clear
[Hugh] wasn't enjoying it any more. He was mixing with
the in-crowd and becoming a different person. It was a
strange moment. But we realised we were still a band so
we went out and played pubs. In retrospect, Hugh leaving
did us a favour."
Despite a slow but palpable decline in the vitality of
their work from 1983's Feline onwards, The Stranglers had
continued until August 1990. Cornwell, though, was
chafing at the preconceptions inherent in membership of a
band called The Stranglers. He felt uncomfortable at the
disparities between the group's by now unambiguously
mainstream music and the others' — especially Burnel's —
reluctance to relinquish the black edge of yore. But
while for Hugh the punk ethos had been merely a bit of
lark, it was evidently different for JJ. In April 1985
Burnel beat up Cornwell backstage after a gig in Rome,
following a petty argument over jumping at the correct
point during Hanging Around. Cornwell was thrown through
the dressing room's temporary papier-mache wall by the
force of the attack, leaving behind an impressive Hughshaped hole. Burnel apologised profusely and Cornwell
resolved to stay — "I had certain loyalties, we were
still promoting an album" — but from that moment onwards
The Stranglers were living on borrowed time. His decision
to quit was sealed by watching England's fast bowler
Devon Malcolm hit a six in a test match against India.
Cornwell played his last gig as a Strangler at Alexandra
Palace, then left the gig without a word to the three
people he'd worked with for the past 15 years. He
telephoned each of them the following day.
"I ceased to have a good time when I had a couple of big
fall-outs with JJ," he says, "and I started feeling I
couldn't actually discuss anything with him, because I
didn't know how he was going to react. It was very
difficult when I first left. Partly because they had
decided to carry on, obviously. So that led to confusion.
And partly because it was such an important part of my
life and my creative output that it was difficult to
redefine my creative side. But I've finally got my
confidence back. I'm a good fucking writer, and I don't
mind admitting that now."
These days, the solo Cornwell records and gigs with
increasing success, and now feels sufficiently
comfortable to reincorporate Stranglers material into his
live sets. His Stranglers book proved a cathartic experience and he now wants to write his autobiography. He
plays MOJO a new ballad, Hola Cadiz, which he says is up
for inclusion in the next James Bond film. He seems
content with his lot, if curious about what his erstwhile
compadres have to say about him. "Lots of nice things,
I'm sure!" The three remaining original Stranglers
continue to record and gig with vocalist Paul Roberts,
who chuckles at every mention of being 'new' after 12
years, plus latest guitarist Baz Warne. They too profess
satisfaction with their lot. But when Roberts, a decent
man who has endured much abuse from black-clad refuseniks
over the years, admits, "It would be easier to replace
Mick Jagger than Hugh Cornwell", he almost sounds like an
old Stranglers fan, secretly wishing for an opportunity
to see the real thing once again. It would obviously be
wrong, but somehow right, too.
"Hugh did consider rejoining," says Ian Grant. "He said,
'How can I rejoin a band that still exists? Get them to
break up and I might do it.' And if JJ had any sense he
would do that. The energy between them and the adrenalin
and the edge would be something. I just don't think you
can replace Hugh. And I don't think you can replace JJ.
They would clean up. But it's pride. They did hurt each
other."
"He doesn't want to have a drink with me," says JJ
Burnel, sadly. "But I'd love to go for a drink with him,
thank him for... lots of things. He's become selfobessive, bitter and cynical. He was a lovely bloke. He
was..."
SLEAZY LISTENING
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO THE STRANGLERS
AN ALBUM BY ALBUM GUIDE
RATTUS NORVEGICUS (UNITED ARTISTS – 1977)
They may have rejected the record company's idea for it
to be a live album, but The Stranglers' apprenticeship on
the pub circuit strongly influenced their debut
nonetheless. Recorded in just six days, Rattus Norvegicus
faithfully reproduced the key components of the group's
burgeoning notoriety -aggression, misanthropy, an
unprecedented way with the bass guitar. Nasty and
brutish, always compelling.
NO MORE HEROES (UNITED ARTISTS – 1977)
Released a mere six months later and partly comprised of
songs recorded for its predecessor, No More Heroes strove
to maintain pace with the spirit of the times. Hence the
preposterously offensive Bring On The Nubiles and the yob
philosophising of Something Better Change. Commercially a
huge success, the album's hasty conception is reflected
in such unpleasant filler as the oily English Towns.
BLACK AND WHITE (UNITED ARTISTS – 1978)
The first album written to order, as opposed to drawing
from the live set, Block And White saw a broadening of
musical and lyrical horizons beyond punk's nitty gritty
concerns.
Not all the experimentation worked, but the expansive
powerage of Tank and Toiler On The Sea was hugely
effective, while the likes of Threatened and Outside
Tokyo anticipated the paranoid excursions to come.
THE RAVEN (UNITED ARTISTS – 1979)
A quantum leap forward, The Raven vouchsafed that
whatever else The Stranglers might be, a punk band they
were not. The elaborate musical sweeps chimed vividly
with some acutely personal and obtusely political themes,
while the startling Meninblack confirmed The Stranglers'
world as an increasingly strange place.
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO THE MENINBLACK (LIBERTY 1981)
Recorded over eight months in the most expensive studios
in Europe, ...The Meninblack saw experimental urges - and
Class A consumption - running rampant. Musically both
playful and oppressive, this bible-reading, UFO-spotting
conspiracy theorist's wet dream heralded a sharp dip in
commercial status.
LA FOLIE (LIBERTY 1981)
This mostly diverting, occasionally inspired collection
of patented Stranglers pop salvaged the band's career,
thanks mainly to the huge success of Golden Brown. Mixed
by Tony Visconti, Lo Folie was the last Stranglers album
to credibly bridge the gap between their perceived image
and some increasingly prevalent mainstream musical
instincts.
Hereafter, A LAW of diminishing returns pertains until
Hugh Cornwell's departure. Feline (Epic, 1983) witnessed
an unfortunate attempt to blend acoustic guitars with
electronic drums and keyboards. Aural Sculpture (Epic,
1984) was a huge improvement - Skin Deep would be the
band's last self-penned Top 20 hit - but the reliance on
synthetic textures, far from sounding 'modern', felt
merely awkward. Ditto Dreamtime (Epic, 1986). The
gestation of 10 (Epic, 1990) was painful: originally coproduced by the band and then-unknown engineer Owen
Morris, it was rejected by CBS's Muff Winwood, who then
hired Roy Thomas Baker on the premise that a man who'd
produced Queen knew what it took to break America. A set
of decent songs might have helped too, but The
Stranglers' creative chemistry was virtually spent. The
post-Cornwell version of the band have made four albums
to date, all competent exercises in a more contemporary ie, heavier - sound, but mostly devoid of that vital
songwriting spark.
©2009 PERSONS UNKNOWN ;-)
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