Last Updated on 25/09/2022
“What’s this rubbish?” Sound familiar? These are the words that await each parent and guardian’s lips when one of us juvenile youths plays something post-2000 in their presence. This got me thinking. Our mums and dads were once young themselves. They too had heroes and idols that their own folks didn’t quite click with. *Queue our new feature series* PARENTS’ PIN-UPs. We want to hear from all you parents out there. Which artist/band laid the soundtrack for your, wait for it, life before kids. For this week’s parent, it was the Stranglers …
In those days, street kids were typically into all sorts of music, because for most of them, it really was all about what it sounded like, rather than the haircut and ‘way of life’ to go with it. During those long hot months of ’76, I remember listening to all kinds of stuff, ranging from the Bay City Rollers (a lot of us donned tartan jackets – mine was predominantly white, and the richer kids who paid for their school dinners had the keks to match), to funk, disco and northern soul. We were into the louder sounding bands as well, you know, those which threw TV sets out of hotel windows and drove cars into swimming pools. The Who was the group where there was the most common ground between us, partly because it was the pick of a couple of school bullies, so knowing all the tracks on The Story of the Who was a good career move and kept you in touch with the power base during playtimes. No one could afford to actually buy it as an album in double vinyl form, but you’d pass a C90 of it around until it snapped or got lost down the back of a settee. In my circles, Buddy was preferred to Elvis and it was safe to dig the Beatles; but later stuff mind, when they were out of their suits. Even some of the jokey, pervy-rhyming stuff from the war years like George Formby went down well and we became dab hands at air-banjolele. Of course, we drew a line at Donny and the cheesy, smiley Osmond clones. They were far too wet, along with the two Davids, Soul and Cassidy. Don’t give up on us baby. Puke. Stick to Starsky mate.
Things changed the following year though. Bands that were turning heads included, on the one hand, the Buzzcocks with their feelgood singalongs (mostly about chasing girls, w***ing and getting dumped) and on the other, the perennially overrated Pistols with their songs about…who cares? Talk about one album wonders. Half of Never Mind the Bollocks is drivel, mostly written by a bass-playing Abba nerd who they replaced with an absolute car crash of a puppet that, on the plus-side, fast-forwarded their demise. It’s mental that they always come top of those ‘best ever punk band’ charts (along with those other also-rans, the Clash). Still, Rotten and co. were good enough for middle-class posers from London’s suburbia, so very desperate to spend a fortune down the King’s Road, cultivating a look based on strategically placed rips and zips that was deeply at odds with the three-chord, DIY culture they were supposed to be propagating. Weren’t they?
But anyway. The group that shone high and bright over the rest, at least for a bunch of us from the land of wall-to-wall council estates in Bulwell, just inside the city limits of Nottingham, was the Stranglers. Four miserable looking blokes dressed in tatty threads who always gave the impression, whether they were playing, being interviewed or photographed, that they’d sooner be somewhere else, doing something else, with somebody else. Lined up they looked like a punk, a tramp, a prog-rocker and a pub landlord and to be fair, that’s pretty close to what they were in real life, at least in their early days. I knew the singles from their first album Rattus Norvegicus, namely, the plodding debut (Get a) Grip (On Yourself) and reggae-inspired Peaches, from listening to the Top Twenty through a pillow slapped on top of an old Bush radio, powered by a massive Ever Ready PP1 six-volt battery; but they didn’t really grab me. Still don’t really, if I had to be honest. Little did I know then that Rattus contained epic tracks like Sometimes and Goodbye Toulouse, and the colossus that is Down in the Sewer.
So, it wasn’t until the end of the dull, cloudy summer of ’77 when I heard their second album’s title track, No More Heroes, through a posh mate’s sister’s headphones, complete with the swirling arpeggios of Dave Greenfield (RIP) and JJ Burnel’s ripsnorting bass, that I was well and truly hooked. By Christmas I’d somehow managed to get my hands on the entire Stranglers catalogue, including the novelty stuff under the Celia and the Mutations moniker and the Choosey Susie freebie. I can’t remember parting with much cash for them either, if you get my drift. Mind you, they have cost me more than a few bob since, not just in records and CDs but that spent on a couple of hundred gigs, dozens of t-shirts and, as you get older, all the hotels, booked home and abroad, that keep you from kipping in train stations, bus shelters, park benches and the occasional photo booth. You know you’ve gone full circle following the Stranglers when you go from waiting for hours in vain outside the stagedoor for an autograph as a doting teenager, to staying in the same hotel as them on tour, thirty odd years later, as an overweight fifty-something with dodgy knees who just about musters a sideways-glance in their direction at breakfast.
And what about these days? Is there still life in the old dog of a band after seventeen studio albums? The thing about getting properly into the Stranglers in the 70s, and fast learning it was the best band in the world, is that it’s the same as the football club you support for your entire life: nothing ever comes close to it. Just like a club that once played on the greatest stages, for the greatest honours who you then follow through thin and thinner, suffering relegations, local derby humiliation and pitiful cup runs, those golden early albums by the Meninblack make us forgive them for all the post-Hugh Cornwell trash they’ve subjected us to over the last quarter of a century. Bit like Forest’s glory years under Clough and the torture us Trickies have endured over a similar period of time. A lot of us feel we’re being smothered by a curse that banishes us to the lower leagues for a generation or more, put on us by the footballing gods as payback for a modestly sized club daring to be Kings of Europe for a couple of years. And it feels like that being a Stranglers fan having been spoilt by the magnificence of the first six albums they squeezed in before they were dragged, if only ankle-deep, into that musical genre known to record dealers as ‘Eighties Shite’ that spawned dross such as Kajagoogoo and Haircut 100. There were still a few pearls during those dark Thatcher years though, the stand-outs being Let Me Down Easy, Souls and Mayan Skies.
It does help, obviously, that their live sets now contain very few songs from the Mk 2, 3 and 4 line-ups. What doesn’t help, though, is Baz Warne’s one-dimensional wye aye ‘fuck this and that’ Geordie-hybrid banter and this idea he has that because he’s got quicker fingers than Hugh, he must be a better musician. I know it’s not your style JJ, but must you make him the spokesman for the band on stage? Every time he takes a bow after the guitar solo in Golden Brown to mock Hugh, who always found it hard to keep up with the rest of the band on that bit, it does make you want to ask him the following question: After twenty years in the band, four more than your hallowed predecessor, doesn’t it bother you how few of your own songs JJ lets you play, compared to those written by the band’s founder? But to be fair to him, he penned Relentless, as he likes to remind us and that deserves second division status, not quite reaching the premier league alongside Toiler on the Sea, Baroque Bordello and, of course, Sewer. So, don’t get ahead of yourself, Baz. And much, much worse, what was Paul Roberts all about? How can an uncomfortable dream last sixteen years? Paul’s a very nice bloke by all accounts but come on, he was never a Strangler and the band really did hit the depths with songs like Brainbox and some of the stuff on Coup de Grace. Paul, why did it take so long for you to realise that you’re better off making your money crooning out old Sinatra numbers and imitating David Bowie. Why didn’t the band just go on sabbatical or dabble in a few solo projects and collaborations with other groups until the penny dropped for Hugh that he was never going to make the big time on his own? In fact, the mediocrity of the final Mk 1 album, 10, signalled a good point to take a breather for a few years before pressing the reset button.
Also, let’s not forget, Hugh did start the band. Don’t get me wrong, he can be a moaning old sod who sometimes struggles on stage to hide his semi-privileged roots, and his autobiography was riddled with nauseating name-dropping, but it was him who placed an ad for a drummer, not the other way round. Even the official Stranglers website, along with numerous other sources, seems to go to great lengths to perpetuate the myth that it started out as ‘Jet’s band’. To be fair to Jet is that, sure, the fact he ran an off-licence where the group could doss, practice and earn a few quid, was a great leg-up for a motley bunch doing the pub-rock circuit whilst trying to get signed. But at the end of the day, and he’s 82 this year having retired a few years back, as a drummer who wrote next to nowt for the band, he’s the second luckiest bloke in the annals of rock behind Ringo Starr. Plus, how did they let Jet get away with playing a drum machine on those 80s albums? Absolutely ruined Feline. The thing is, I still go and see them and in fact this is the first year I haven’t for over four decades. I say ‘them’ but really I mean ‘him’, especially now that JJ is the only member left from the original four. I’ve got tickets for the final gig of their ‘last full tour’ next year in Cambridge, the adopted hometown of keyboard maestro Dave Greenfield who succumbed, fatally, to the pandemic a few months ago. Can’t see me being too enthused to see ‘JJ and the All Stars’ beyond that, if they keep going. If you want real value for money and to be able to access a bar selling decent beer in proper glasses, go and see the very competent MIB tribute band Straighten Out bang out the early stuff on authentic gear, at touching distance, for only a tenner. They usually play two or three of the same towns on the same day as the Stranglers do on their tours so, in the Spring, why not really spoil yourself and see both within a few hours of each other?
