It's September 1982. The Stranglers are in the press again, but there is not much to promote. The band are in transition. Dropped by EMI they are about to embark on first recordings for CBS. Meanwhile EMI attempt (quite successfully actually) to extract the last few dollars out of their unanticipated asset (coming as they did onto EMI's roster as part of a UA job lot!) with release of the sloppy 'The Collection 1977-82'. Meanwhile, with little else to go on the music press focus on Europe, right wing thinking and the band's predilection for black clothing. In addition, rather wrong footed, they grapple with the concept of The Stranglers as a chart friendly concern (recent chart success in the form of 'Golden Brown' and 'Strange Little Girl', or is that 'Sweet Little Girl'?).
Neil Spencer takes a Dantean excursion into the cryptic world of The Stranglers.
Pennie Smith snaps the netherworld.
A MID THE BRIGHT motes of fairy dust caught floating in the spotlights of 1982's Top Of The Pops, the recurring shadow cast by the murky presence of The Stranglers has been one of the year's more bizarre chart events.
But there it has been: one camera cut away and a DJ’s plastic smile away from the raging limbs of this
week's chart sensation (is it a group, is it a dance troupe, is it a team of Moroccan tumblers?) and the old sewer rats are glowering out like the elder brother and his morose friends at a teenage birthday party.
Even more freakish, instead of slugging out the mawkish sweaty thud that their customary reputation would demand, the quartet have been piping melodies of almost saccharine sweetness. It's been hard to avoid the suspicion that there's some sinister sleight of hand at work here, some dark . lake troll lurking beneath the innocent, rippling waters.
Certainly many have dredged the lyrics to Hugh Cornwell's mesmeric 'Golden Brown' (incidentally, the group's biggest single success to date) for some concealed meaning, and as for 'Sweet Little Girl' - well, would you let your sister tell Jet Black where she was going?
Just as Cornwell denies any particular meaning to 'Golden Brown' - "just a few words strung together" - so both he and Burnel deny any cold blooded calculation in the shift of Stranglers music from the icy grip' of 'Black And White' to the tuneful ease of their recent hits. They see it as part of continuing
evolution. "The last four of five singtes haven't sounded like The Stranglers' according to most people," says Burnel, "they think there has,to be one sound, but we've always changed."
Now with a back catalogue of some-seven LPs - most of them chart successes - and a fair litany of hit singles, The Stranglers are on one level one of the most unlikely long-term survivors of the late '70s upsurge. They started older, already into their maturity, and with a music that was cited as having more in common with The Doors' '60s expeditions than the nouvelle vague of the time. "We never considered ourselves really part of what was going on" said Burnel, "nor out of it." Ln fact, the mainstream rock traditions of most of their output has helped maintain The Stranglers' momentum and appeal- never
really in fashion, and therefore never really out of fashion either.
No one talks much of The Doors connection these days, long since displacd by the group's later musical wanderings, but the acoustic leanings of 'Cruel Garden' and 'Sweet Little Girl' may,well have been inspired by a re-examination of another West Coast '60s phenomenon, Love - or at least, as much is ,
intimated to me by their publicist. "Actually," says Cornwell, "most of the music that interests me goes back 300 years – Vivaldi and stuff like that."
Both Cornwell and Burnel ascribe good relations between the foursome as one reason for their longevity, "A lot of bands start off as mates at s,chool," says Cornwell. "Then the egos start coming out and they find they're not such mates after all. With us it was the other way round - we didn't know each
other at all when we started playing and then we became friends."
Have you also handled the business better than some of your contempories?
"No, It was because we didn't handle our business better that drew us closer together. We had this terrible period around the 'Men In Black' LP when we had so.many misfortunes, disasters, over a period of 18 months that we 'came to the co'nclusion the only people we could trust were each other."
IN THEIR ENCOUNTERS with the gentlemen and ladies of the press, The Stranglers have variously abducted them, left them stranded in the midst of foreign wastelands, taped them to Ie Tour Eiffel, and otherwise berated and insulted them. To speak personally, I have always found Hugh Cornwell, the group's tall and somewhat angular guitarist and singer, an acerbic but - agreeable quantity, possessed of a certain Engllsh.diffidence and understatement. Now in his not so early 30s, he still looks like an
eccentric chemistry teacher.
Jean Jaques Burnel, though, still looks like trouble. Not that he is anything but urbane and intelligent at our encounter (I meet the duo separately)- but there's a lithe alert assurance, to his physical presence - as well as a proven ability to take out hostile Australian policemen with a few well aimed karate blows - that indicates a man unlikely to be daunted by the aggression of others.
Both men are in a confident frame of mind, optimistic about The Stranglers' future, which at present includes a new contract with CBS Records, pursuant on their departure from EMI. Cornwell: "We both realised It wasn't working and we came to an agreement to leave, They really got us by mistake, when
they took over United Artists, our original label."
While EMI plan an autumn release for a 'Greatest Hits' compilation, the group are currently ensconced in west country studios for their CBS debut. Cornwell will also be making a stage debut as the raconteur and presenter of a dramatisation of Hollywood Babylon, magician and film-maker Kenneth Anger's dirt-dishing tome on the Californian entertainments industry. Burnel's own solo career remains muted since his solitary . 'Euroman Cometh' venture stiffed out. More pressingly, he's been banned from riding his
beloved Triumph Commando, the result of driving the wrong way down a one-way street, on the pavement, during a bomb scare. “And I told these two motorbike cops that they'd stabbed the British motorcycle industry in the back when they bought BMWs," he recalls fondly.
I ask him about his reputation for trouble.
"Guilty, your honour."
And violence?
"I've always had a compulsion to fight," he admits.
"Not so much now. I've cooled down. Sometimes It's a question of honour though, there are occasions I may have done the wrong thing." .
Now 29, he's still committed to the martial arts he took up 10,years ago: "I'd like to take up Hap Ki Do because it's more artistic. Karate is more macho, It's not so subtle until you get higher up."
What have you got from It?
"It's helped me from becoming a down and out lush. It's easy to get a flabby body and a flabby mind…"
Like most musicians?
"They're a mess. And they're a mess mentally. They pack up their ideas and their bodie.,"
These days he spends a lot of time In France. His parents live there and he goes out with a French girl.
"When I grew up I insisted on being called John cos,l was ashamed of being French and of my mum speaking in a broad French accent and being kissed in front of the school gates. Inevitably kids want to have a go at you."
He's been able to draw on his French heritage musically, notably on 'La Folie', his personal tour-de-force on the album of the same title, a sombre piece of gallic angst, intoned in impeccable francais.
"I worked on that a bit to get the accent perfect. There's-some kind of intellectual snobbery in New York arts circles about people wanting to do things in French and It can sound hammy."
The French music scene is looking up, he tells me - he produced Taxi Girl, one of the top groups in France. In general, though, "the French are still insecure about modern music… at least there's a situation where a lot of people want to make music, probably for different reasons than people in England. It's relatively easy here to have a hit, to be a bandwagon jumper. You can be totally
obscure and still be this week's alternative chart buster. A lot of people in this country want to make money first of all."
Does the euro-man concept still beat strongly in your heart?
"Yes, even though it gets a lot of knocks because people identify the EEC as Europe and can't distinguish a grand ideal from the price of butter tomorrow. The idea of the nation state has run its course and I think contlnentalism is the next great step forward."
He's in favour of a United States of Europe, and remains unmoved by protestations that we are already surrendering our cultural and political identity to a centralized euro-monolith.
"Mind you," he says, "the idea of a country lacking such confidence or self-respect that it seeks to emulate another culture - that's appalling. I once said 'Americans have no brains' just as a wind-up job, and it worked wonders. Our A&M contract was ripped up just like that. American record companies
have this trip of getting involved artistically and interfering all the time."
The conversation drifts to the subject of politics and The Stranglers', uh, political . profile. Though they've been consistent in their support of CND, the Prisoner's Rights movement and other pressure groups, they've always avoided any rigid . commitments to ideology. Sure; they've eulogised Trotsky, but equally Burnel has also evinced his passion for Japanese author and extreme right-winger Yukio Mishima.
"I find the idea of left and right rather absurd, that particular division. A lot of .people think we're fascists cos direct action -like hitting someone - is meant to be fascist because it's not done by committee: Action seems to have been sewn up by the right.
"Then there's us digging Mishima, he wasan ultra right-winger, but he personifiedaction, and will."
A dazzling writer, certainly, but how can you hold an outright fascist like him as some kind of hero? All that worship of the Emperor, the militarism ...
Burnel is quite prepared to admit that many of the Japanese author's ideas were frightful. "but he wasn't just an old jingoist, he had guts, he actually set himself standards and lived up to them, he did what he said he was going to do and committed Hari-Kari (ritual suicide by disembowelment) after he'd
reached what he considered his peak, after his body had passed its prime ...
"Another reason why people think we're fascist is because we wear black, which means right wing to most people.”
SO WHY DO you always wear black? What has he got against colours? He shrugs and looks thoughtful. "Well, I do have a white jacket." I ask Hugh Cornwell the same question. What has he got against colours. He looks slightly non-plussed, raises a white plimsoll above the table and, on reflection,
Pulls tbe waistband.of a pair of bright blue underpants above his belt and laughs.
"Well, you know we did that documentary film on the colour black. How, for example, the authorities use it to create fear or awareness. Look at the way it's used by religions, those women who have to wear
complete black outfits ... "
You do it voluntarily.
"It's a lot easier to keep clean."
And you use it to create this austere, sinister image ...
"We look on it as a colour of neutrality; nothing is given away."
And the Men In Black? Most people seem to believe that the Men In Black are The Stranglers themselves - being an excusable misapprehension but a mere spin-off allusion according to the group. In fact, or so, the theory goes, the Men In Black are the minions of dark forces, supernatural powers that seek to have dominion over planet earth. They tend to show up around inexplicable, paranormal events and manifestations. UFO contactees frequently have brushes with them, for example. And… and the full, illuminati style conspiracy theory of Ultraterrestrial domination is available for the curious in books like Charles Keil's Operation Trojan Horse and Geoff Gilbertson and Anthony Roberts The Dark Gods…
Crackpot stuff of course. Of course. And yet there's no dispute that around the time The Stranglers first became interested in the' MIB during 1979, a relentless sequence of troubles and misfortunes began to befall the group. Cornwell was jailed for three months on a charge of cocaine and heroin possession.
Finances faltered. The group's artist designer Kevin Sparrow died on Christmas Eve, victim of drug and alcohol abuse. The group's management split with them. A tour manager died, aged 24, of cancer. The quartet were locked in the jail of the southern French burgh of Nice for the best part of a week. All
their gear was stolen as they entered America for a tour. Crucial tapes vanished, things fell apart…
Burnel wrote up the whole catalogue of misfortunes for Strangled magazine, the group's own publication, and of which they are rather proud.
"A lot of it is to do with the occult," says Cornwell when the subject of the Men In Black is raised, "with the unfathomable and inexplicable, and if you're not careful you become people who dabble in it, like a kid playing with a red hot poker and not, knowing it's red hot and, um .. , well, we're. still interested. The more you read about it the more you realize the implications are incredible, the way events happen, the way the planet's going.
"Us poor buggers doing whatever we're doing, we don't really have a grasp of who's pulling the strings. We think it's the politicians or whoever we're told on TV. All our information come. to us third hand anyway. Most folks would say this only shows your inability to accept the mundanity of political processes, a kind of paranoia…"
Well there's no doubt that throughout the last 2,000 years there are certain running systems in civilisation that are still around now.If they've existed for so long it would be naive to suppose they're not well organised and that they leave everything to chance. Being aware of their existence is half of
the solution.
"I think the way people live their lives ... we're creatures of habit, we adopt systems of behaviour. With that in mind, people aren't really aware of the forces operating on them ..."
Cornwell talks of the role of 'co-incidences', random accidents of fate that aren't really accidents at all (of Arthur Koestler The Roots Of Co-incidence, for example, or Jung's theory of synchronicity). What, then, did that idea make of his own time in prison? Did he feel that was that something that had to happen?
“Now it's over, yes, in a way I do feel that. It was a very good learning experience. My attitude to certain illegal substances was flippant and actually rather silly. It brought home to me the dependence others had on me. In a group, if you're out of action you're affecting them ... "
How can you go from that realisation to making 'Golden Brown'?
"Contrary to what is sometimes said, it's not about heroin. There's a lot of different things it could be about. People used to do this with old Beatles songs, finding cryptic messages. One. Dutch journalist even thought 'Golden Brown' was about the white slave trade - you know, 'How long have The
Stranglers been into white slavery?' Unbelievable ...
"There was a secret message on 'Have You Got Enough Time' on 'Black And White', a morse code message that said 'SOS This Is Planet Earth. We are fucked'. One guy wrote in and told us."
We enter a protracted and tortuous dialogue about The Stranglers' Euro-ideals. He thinks my hostility quaint, I find his enthusiasm disconcerting.
"The EEC thing seems to have gone wrong, a lot of people are writing it off already, but how long has it been in I existence? Only a few years, but it's something that must happen. You can see its growth among young people, the emergence of French and German music sung In their own languages - and these feelings and passions can exist inside a European framework.
"One area where the Euro-idealism Is getting screwed up.is with the no-nukes thing, which is a very positive and strong force. We played a No Nukes gig In Utrecht -I think it was the biggest indoor event in Holland ever - around 30,000 people. They weren't just Dutch, they were French, Belgian, German, Swiss - all you have to do is find an issue like that which goes right across the board.
"There's nothing wrong In being proud of being English, French, or whatever as long as you realise that there are people who have the right to be proud of what they are.
"One thing I was very pissed off about was that the - anti-nuke collection, 'Life In The European Theatre', wasn't a million seller. None of the audience I spoke to on our European tour had even heard of it."
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