Interview (New Musical Express 4th December 1976)

So here then is an interview that appeared in the 4th December 1976 issue of the New Musical Express. A punishing touring schedule maintained throughout 1976 had earned the band some gravitas as a serious rock band, most certainly across Greater London. With continuous mentions in the weekly gig listings, coupled with increasing interest brewing over a handful of other London bands that together were coalescing into a 'punk' or 'new wave' new music scene. This extensive interview from early December '76 was amongst some of the earliest press that the band received from the big hitting music weeklies in the UK. 

For their part, Cornwell and Burnel, whilst harbouring a certain degree of suspicion towards the NME journalist, Phil McNeil (principally stemming from a review he wrote of the band's appearance at the Marquee the previous month), were yet to adopt their infamously hostile manner in their subsequent dealings with the music press. And, to be fair to McNeil on this occasion, he was not really in the business of giving the band a hard time. His observation that contrary to the band's implication that the music business was actively hindering the band, as of December 1976, the Pistols, The Damned and The Vibrators had had a relatively easy and rapid journey into a recording studio carried some weight. The Stranglers themselves had studio time booked at the end of the same month. Sure, they had undoubtedly put in the legwork to establish themselves as a live band but then again that was part of the rock 'n' roll apprenticeship that countless bands before them had served.

As to the interviewer's attempts to pin the two of them down in terms of their politics and philosophical stance on the new music scene that would serve them so well in the coming year, their responses were at best indeterminate or just confusing.

Despite the flaws in the interview it is great to read about The Stranglers and their views on the punk scene so early on. At that stage they had no records recorded or released, a live album, intended to be their debut, was due to be recorded imminently so things were looking rosy indeed for The Stranglers. As for punk, well, by the time that this issue hit the newsstands, knowledge of punk was no longer confined to music journalists and a few hundred London kids on the scene. The appearance of Sex Pistols on the Today Show on 1st December with Bill Grundy meant that by 2nd December the entire country had heard of punk.... and everything changed!

As much as I would love to present you with an audio of the Marquee performance to complement this interview I cannot, but I can add context by reference to the Marquee review referred to at the start of this interview (here) and I can direct you to a partial recording of the Nashville gig of 10th December, mooted to be their 'Dead On Arrival' album but vetoed by the band as not sufficiently representing their live act (here).

Hugh Cornwell and Jean Jacques Burnel, Stranglers lead and bass guitarists, are ready for me. The instant I walk through the door I’m assailed by their criticisms of my review of their Marquee gig which has appeared in the morning’s NME.

“You don’t look so young yourself.”

“Do you consider yourself mature then?”

“Come on then, tell us where we sound like The Doors.”

“Do you look at the audience when you review a gig?”

“Did you see how they were getting off on what we said about the Marquee?”

And so on…

This is just what I need, having leapt out of bed late , paid the earth for a cab, got soaked walking to the interview, got no cigarettes, had no breakfast, and when I’m still trying to force myself awake.

It’s especially galling, because apart from criticising the band’s “stance”, I’d given them a rare review. Musically they are one of the most exciting, adventurous combos I’ve heard in a long time.

Burnel, in standard issue black leather jacket, and Cornwell, swamped into an enormous, ostentatiously ripped overcoat, analyse my review point by point. It’s a novel experience, not simply because I am forced to rigorously defend every word I have written, but also because at no point during the interview/argument, or on our withdrawal to the pub, do the two Stranglers relax their suspicion of me.

They maintain that the Marquee is dead, despite the fact that two of this year’s most successful new bands, AC/DC and Eddie & The Hot Rods have launched themselves from Marquee residencies. That the club did not become a discotheque or strip joint years ago is almost enough to be thankful for.

They object to my linking the Rods with the New Wave, despite the fact that the Rods are the only band connected with that scene who have got nationwide exposure on TV, radio and the road,  and therefore may epitomise ‘punk’ in many people’s minds.

They carp at my Doors comparison, through it’s undeniable in their line-up and their keyboard and guitar styles, while they claim that it’s coincidence that Dave Greenfield bases his playing around 3rds and 5ths (Burnel trying to blind me with science) like Ray Manzarek.

But when we get down to my criticism of their onstage rabble-rousing we quickly dead end ourselves: “But I think you’re just battering your heads against the wall.”

“Okay, so where’s the wall?”

“Er, um, well… I dunno, I suppose it’s the music biz establishment…”

And at this point I confess to being checkmated.

But I shouldn’t have let myself be. See, The Stranglers get up on stage at the Marquee and rant about its obsolescence and tell the audience to smash the place up after the gig (“It wasn’t an order, it was a suggestion”). This I find quite unwarranted: if you don’t like it don’t play there.

The Stranglers, however, see the Marquee as a major stanchion of the system which they reckon has repressed their talent. Like most of their punk/dole-queue/new-wave rock cohorts, they are martyrs and rebels.

Humbug.

Let’s have a look at how martyred and repressed the Stranglers are.

They formed a band just a year ago. Since then they’ve been working constantly, they’ve supported Patti Smith on both her media blitz tours, and now they’ve landed a contract with United Artists. They’ve really had it tough, haven’t they?

While we’re on the subject, let’s look at a couple of their contemporaries. The Sex Pistols have just released a blow against empire called “Anarchy In The UK”, a pretty good thunderous single which I like a lot. But in going so these “anarchists” have signed themselves as miniscule fish in the colossal pond of EMI. Watch its foundations shake.

Oh, and the Damned. “Dole Queue Rock” is it? Look mate, I was on the dole for two years trying to launch a rock band. It had no bearing on the kind of music we played, and we didn’t presume to set ourselves up as spokesmen for some great new breed of Dole Queue Kids. The Damned claim to be society’s rejects – a very lucrative business.

The time happens to be right for a new youth craze, and self styled Angry Young Men are it. It’s a long time since anyone has had an easier route to a recording contract than the Pistols, Stranglers, Damned and Vibrators – none of whom have been playing in public for more than a year – and the ironic fact that their overnight success is partly due to the way the rock establishment is supposedly trying to make life difficult for them.

The Stranglers claim to be different to the other bands of new wave – while still laying claim to a place in its hierarchy – because they are “more politically aware” and are not just into showbiz, which they reckon a lot of the other bands are. Their politics? Well, that’s a tricky one – let’s leave that till later.

But they spout many of the same litanies as the other bands.

For instance, it is now apparently de rigeur for less mainstream punks to deny any knowledge of the Stooges before this year. The Stranglers like to be classified as psychedelic, though they’re at pains to tell me exactly what psychedelia is not (hippies of course), and disclaim any knowledge of the “Nuggets” bands who appear to be such a strong influence on them (Electric Prunes, Standells, etc etc). I can’t help thinking they are donning a mantle they’ve misconstrued.

Another new wave litany: they refuse to reveal what they were going before the Stranglers. It later slips out that two have teaching experience.

And another. Jean Jacques recites his “criteria for good rock”: “It’s gotta be energetic, it’s gotta rock, it’s gotta be economic and it’s gotta be aware. It’s gotta be neo-revolutionary, even if it’s just fucking people’s heads about a venue, political at that low a level. And the trouble with rock in the last few years is that it’s become verbose, self-indulgent and safe.”

What constitutes “safe” rock? I cite the Kinks, and most major beat groups as “safe” examples of great rock. Yet later I wind up arguing Cornwell and Burnel’s cause by wondering whether in these austere times, the emergence of a “new Rolling Stones” might not be a more real threat to social stability than the originals were in their heyday.

(In fact, while it may be a little complacent of me to point it out, the so-called rock revolution which is nowadays sneered at as a failure did, undeniably, play some kind of role in setting the social climate for , say, the legalisation of homosexuality and abortion, the end of the American presence in Vietnam, Watergate, and most non-economical leftward developments of the past ten years, from the SLA to Women’s Lib.

Another new wave litany: “There’s nothing worse than apathy or smugness at a rock gig.”

This from Burnel, who does most of the talking in his jumpy, boarding school voice. Cornwell, who sits, head bowed, between the two of us, occasionally fixes me quizzically and chucks in some remark.

“People are often surprised at the stances we take at gigs,” he tells me. “We only take a stance because it’s better than taking no stance at all.”

“You put over the music in the best way possible,” says Burnel. “So you use psychology. And that relies on the context and situation.

“Someone told be they saw Johnny Rotten and he looked bored, and the second time he looked bored, and the fourth time, and by the fifth time they were bored because it was the same…a stereotype. We’re much more organic than that.”

“ I think the whole scene is being manipulated.” Cornwell suddenly breaks in from nowhere.

By Malcolm?

“And other people too, who’ve got financial interests in it. They’re manipulating the kids away from what they really, y’know…”

To what extent does your audience clash or mix with theirs?

“There’s a certain amount of overlap,” Hugh reckons, “but we don’t attract the hardcore manipulated people…”

I ask why the Stranglers are sneered at in those circles.

“For not digging Iggy and the Stooges and telling them so,” erupts Burnel. “And, er, not digging really on plastic and not going down King’s Road to the Roebuck and the Sex Shop. That’s why we’ve been ignored a lot. We’ve been slated by the hip scene, only because we don’t wanna be into that trip.”

Seems to me these guys have no idea what it is to be really ignored. Later on Burnel tells me: “maybe we’re not popular because we don’t sing about pleasant little meadows and flowers and ‘I love you’, which is either bare-faced double-talk or a complete misunderstanding of current status quo. A realistic rephrasing would be: “maybe we are so popular because…”

The Stranglers, standing to one side within the punk explosion, can actually reap the benefits of the scene without foregoing their independence.

“By the end of next week there’s going to be twenty new punk bands,” mocks Burnel. “And they’re all going to be doing the same thing. It’s just going to be like a big melee… and we’ve going to come out from underneath. Because there’s no direction to a lot of them; the only direction is a commercial one, which is very successful.”

Cornwell mulls this over to himself while Burnel and I discuss Steve Miller as a brief diversion, then suddenly gives me his opinion when I turn Burnel back to the Pistols, Clash and Damned:

“Well, they rely a lot on their connections with the mental sort of agoraphobia of young kids. So I think they’re relying very little upon their music; they’re relying much more on the way that they are identifiable with their audiences.

“I think they’ve been manipulated.” The bands or audience, it’s not clear.

I put it to him that in a way the kids may have been manipulated into that agoraphobia anyway.

“You reckon? You don’t think that there’s any there anyway just because of disillusionment, a sign of the times?”

Having suggested it, I’m actually in no position to hazard any kind of guess as to whether I’m right or wrong – except that discontent rarely breeds unprompted. But I can suggest that had any of the new bands’ current audience seen them cold a year ago, there instant reaction might well have been that it was absolute crap.

“Oh sure,” Jean Jacques agrees.

“The fact that they play badly and people say ‘So what?’ That’s inverted snobbery isn’t it?”

“I reckon a lot of them suffer from bad musical systems,” says Cornwell. “Y’know, the PA’s terrible and it just comes out as a din. Once they get their musical systems together then you’ll be able to really judge if they’re doing anything.”

I suggest that maybe people don’t pick up on rebels automatically because they are rebels; they have to be told. This is a rebel for you.

Burnel agrees and cites James Dean as an example of this. “We needed heroes, so pick one out.”(Certainly it’s amusing to think of the number of people who stuck pix of Dean on their walls during the great Twentieth Anniversary media madness).

“It’s the same with the music scene at the moment,” opines Burnel.

“They’re picking out old heroes because at the moment they’re still trying to get new heroes together. That’s why Iggy… Iggy Bombom… is becoming a cult figure.

“The thing is, there aren’t any heroes. Politically there are no heroes either, that’s why everything’s going around in circles, very directionless.

Although the Stranglers play totally different music from most punk bands, they are, as I’ve said, similar (if more articulate) in their attitude – much of it, I suspect received from the rock critics’ post-Velvets intellectualisations.

Maybe they can shed a light on the Nazi fetishism that has crept in here somehow. “Well, it’s just ‘cause that is the only thing around, the only vibe, that is united and with a certain direction,” Hugh reckons. “People want direction.”

“Everyone is paranoid.” Jean tells me fervently. "There's decay everywhere. We've always lived with the assumption that things were getting better materially, progress all the time, and suddenly it's like, you hear everyday there 's a crisis, financial crisis. Things being laid off, people are not working.

Everything’s coming to a grinding halt," he goes on, while I start moving towards the door to nip out to Selfridges for a gas-mask. "No-one sees any heroes. The politicians have lost their credibility; political philosophies are no longer relevant. Sure they want something dynamic.”

Those sort of paranoid fantasies used to entice me when I was a speedfreak but I can’t work myself into a terror these days. Still, I suggest the one about the Stones not being so dangerous, as they arrived in comparatively affluent times.

The Stranglers agree. I ask if they reckon Johnny Rotten is going to be subsumed into the system in the way that Mick Jagger became tolerated as our kind of ambassador of Swingin’ London freakiness. 

“Definitely,” Burnel asserts. “Because he’s too stupid to be aware of anything larger than himself. To get to that powerful position – because rock is probably the most powerful medium in the world for young people – to get to that position, I think Rotten is too stupid, having talked to him, to be aware of anything more broader than that.

“He’s not coherent enough to sacrifice present gain for future gain.”

“I feel really sorry for him,” Cornwell states drily, “because he’s paranoid about what he’s put himself in. And he’s got to maintain this stance to the sacrifice of his own head.

“If you ever try to talk to him you can’t get any sort of, you can’t rap to him about, like what the problems are. He’s always wanting to keep it going.

“I feel sorry for him because he’s a paranoid clown.”

They don’t consider the Pistols’ EMI contract a sell-out, though they do say the Sex Pistols lost credibility through it and by, for instance staying in first class hotels when, according to Cornwell, they had said they’d never do that. Even so, the Stranglers are reluctant to admit the future probably holds similar luxuries for them, and labour the fact that they doss around. Y’know, real and street… and boring.

Returning to Nazi fetishism, Jean tells me it’s a symptom of something deeper, the country being weaker that at any time since Cromwell (hey, you can tell which one taught history). He saw Cabaret recently and reckons it parallels contemporary Britain.

“I think whether you are into it or not, it’s gonna happen. You know Plato’s theory that, um, democracy leads to oligarchy leads to aristocracy, and aristocracy leads to tyranny, or… there’s definite progressions, systems, and they always recycle. Well I think democracy has totally collapsed, it’s lost all its credibility.

“So we’re due for tyranny. People laugh at that, because England is the last place for that, but I really think it could happen.”

But you are at the centre of that scene, more or less, with the kids that wear Nazi emblems. Obviously little boys like Eater just see it as a pretty pattern on their trousers, but do you think that some of these kids are really right wing politically?

“No,” says Jean. “They’re not politically right wing but they are politically ripe. I reckon until there is another symbol to replace the swastika, or another ideal, they’re gonna stick to that one. It’s gotta be as strong as that… it’s gotta be seen to be as strong as that, as energetic as that.

“But it’ll happen within the next ten tears. Very strange things are happening, very strange undercurrents,” he adds darkly, and they’re getting louder and louder.”

Yes, but what I want is your attitude to it. As one of the leading bands, what would your influence be on the way these kids think?

Cornwell: “Well, they want to belong to something.”

Burnel: They want a change, they want to believe in something. And that is a very strong image. They definitely don’t want to be associated with leftist things, there aren’t any leftist heroes really…”

Tell that to the Russians, Chinese, Cubans, Yugoslavs…

“They’re not street level heroes, they’re all intellectuals, the leftist ones.”

Come again?

“Leftist heroes were very much middle class heroes. They want warrior heroes…”

We wander up this blind alley a while, till I realize I still haven’t got a straight answer. You’re very good at doom-mongering, Jean, but on which side of the barricades do you line up? He’s boasting about his musical sophistication being “another weapon” in his “armoury”, but… do you consider yourselves to have any sort of political ‘message’ beyond, er, self-liberation?

“Well, yes” he says. Then, after we’ve been talking little except politics for nearly an hour, he has the nerve to tell me: “But this is neither the time or place to get into it.”

Totally bemused, I try to coerce them by suggesting that if they don’t state their position themselves they leave it up to people to make up their own minds – and with all this gush about the imminent fascist apocalypse, well…

“But we’re not associating ourselves with any of the other bands,” Burnel protests. “We’re right out on a limb musically and philosophically…”

“Hey, that sounds a really heavy word, doesn’t it?” muses the guy who’s been reciting Plato.

A strange interview. The Stranglers are possibly the most self-righteous interviewees I’ve met. Modishly arrogant about their musical worth, and convinced that they have a part to play in the social upheaval they may paranoiacally see evidenced in the physical trappings of an in-crowd at whom, paradoxically, they sneer for being trend followers. Yet, when it comes to the crunch, for all their onstage aggression, they won’t commit themselves.

They are recording live at the Nashville on December 10, and they’re going into the studio at the end of the month to record a single, either “Go Buddy Go” or, more likely, “Grip”. The single’s out late January and an album, hopefully, in February.

I’m not enamoured of their spoken pronouncements, but make no mistake about it, these guys are great musicians who are going to make records that will be played until they wear out.

And as the Stranglers are well aware, that means power.