Kilburn and the High Roads/Sex Pistols/The Stranglers Walthamstow Assembly Hall 17th June 1976

No, sorry to disappoint, I am not offering a recording of this gig, I wish I could. Sifting again chronologically through some old music press, specifically from 1976, it is interesting to see how week on week London's new music gained in prominence. Scan the music listings pages and it is clear that The Stranglers were thrashing the hell out of the ice cream van, all across the capital and beyond, from the beginning of the year. The likes of Eddie & The Hot Rods, The Jam and Squeeze were also out there. Come the summer more of the bands we know and love started to crop up in the listings. But this was before The Roxy and some of those now legendary gigs... The 100 Club Punk Festival, The Screen On The Green, Notre Dam Hall...

In the 5th June issue of New Musical Express a gig was advertised that was to take place in the grand Walthamstow Assembly Hall out on the north eastern extremity of the Victoria Line.

The line up was initially to be Ian Dury's 'Kilburn & The High Roads', a band who brought a piece of music hall tradition to the early to mid-'70s pub rock scene and in doing so inspired the next generation of bands such as the Pistols and Madness in particular, with support from Joe Strummer's pre-Clash band the 101'ers and The Stranglers.

The same gig was advertised in the NME two weeks later (19th June 1976), only 101'ers had dropped off the bill, being replaced by Sex Pistols.

The following account of the gig appeared in the pages of Record Collector online.

THE PISTOLS VS THE SUBURBS

NOT EVERY PISTOLS’ GIG SEEMED LIKE A LANDMARK AT THE TIME, RECALLS IAN McCANN

In a few months’ time, local authorities would be banning Sex Pistols from their boroughs, fearful of the teenage rampage. But on 17 June 1976, the band were welcomed to the Walthamstow Assembly Halls, part of Waltham Forest’s magnificent – if utterly pompous – municipal centre: all pillars, civic pride, magistrates’ court and huge circular fountain (in which I once micturated in a pathetic act of juvenile rebellion).

I was on an ill-tempered caravan holiday with my pal Mick in Walton-on-the-Naze when the Pistols were due to play, but with Ian Dury & The Kilburns playing their final gig, The Stranglers, and this new punk rock whatsit all on the bill, I wasn’t going to miss it for the world and caught the train back for the night.

I met my mate Steve outside on the steps, just as Ian Dury was staggering in on calipers, bless his heart. (My mum knew him by sight when he lived in Diana Road, half a mile away – “I was sure he was someone,” she told me when he was a star, though he wasn’t when he lived there.) There was the air of an event, but not one where we knew what it would be like, though Steve and I had previously seen Kilburn & The High Roads next door at the Polytechnic, and walked out.

Nothing wrong with Dury, but they were a shambles.

So, the Pistols, then. It’s your turn. Go on lads, impress us.

The place was not empty, but we were rattling around a bit in there. You could probably name many members of the audience if you were local. It seems to have become Walthamstow’s answer to the Manchester Lesser Free Trade Hall gigs in legend, but not in reality. Pete Stennett from Small Wonder was said to have been present, experiencing his Damascene conversion from Silver Apples to punk. But I didn’t see him. What we did see was a bunch of people who looked like they didn’t belong round here. Actually, they didn’t look like they belonged anywhere, dressed in tartan, ripped clothing, with bits hanging out but in a non-sexualised way. It was probably the Bromley contingent, and doubtless McLaren and Westwood; maybe Siouxsie. A phenomenon in the making.

I remember smirking to Steve, “What a bunch of fucking poseurs.”

Never let anyone kid you that punk came from the working class. Ordinary kids adopted it, played it, loved it, but its look and intellectual conceits (and yes, anarchy was an intellectual conceit then – we knew about socialism, we had dads who worked in factories and belonged to unions and history teachers who urged us to join the SWP, but anarchy was no more than a word for making a mess to us common kids) grew out of the art schools and fashion salons. To us, poseurs, more interested in looks and swanking than anything else. People who could afford to mess up because there was something to fall back on, whether it was family money, a nice house in the suburbs, a university education, or a boutique. In fact, just the same as almost everything else that becomes a media craze.

Rotten and co came on early, I am guessing at about 8:15, to a bit of half-hearted noise from the crowd and some shrill squawking from the art school crew. The Pistols were… pretty rubbish. Metallish guitar. Clattering drums. They could play but it didn’t hang together. (It came as a shock when Anarchy was released five months later: so you could fix anything in a studio after all.) Was this the new revolution? It stumbled, rattled, flopped. Lydon, however, was amusing, though he didn’t seem particularly confident and – unlike his later Paddington Bear really hard stare – he seemed to avoid your eye. In No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs, he recalls that he wore a rubber shirt and collapsed in the heat after three songs. That didn’t happen. Not in Walthamstow, anyway. There wasn’t much heat in the Assembly Hall, all cold stone and few windows, despite it being the “scorching summer of ’76” (© every lazy cultural commentator). The big event of their set was Glen Matlock busting a bass string. With aeons to fill in front of a mostly only vaguely curious audience, Lydon lolled on the mic stand, and invited comments from the requests. Perhaps he thought it was Two-Way Family Favourites. There was a vacuum, so, abhoring it like nature, I filled it by shouting “Substitute!”, knowing they played it. Lydon said: “We might – if we feel like it.” A further yell elicited the response: “Later.”

Bass string restored, they carried on. They played Stepping Stone, Submission, No Fun, among others. After they played Substitute, I yelled for it again as if it was unrecognisable, thinking I was hilarious. After a while, they went off. The world was not changed. Yet.

The Stranglers weren’t bad, but sounded a bit prog with all that noodly keyboard. Ian Dury & The Kilburns were less shambolic than Kilburn & The High Roads, but lacked warmth, and we left early again. In a short time, all three acts would be massive. But to us, it was a letdown. Was this the future?

In a curious postscript, the next spring I bought a Pistols bootleg from a badge stall in Petticoat Lane market. (They were concealed behind a curtain beneath the stall, so you had to know they were there to browse, which made shopping tricky.) I took it home – it was Indecent Exposure, taped live in Burton-on-Trent. But when I played it, quite clearly audible, there was Glen Matlock tuning up, and a dullard youth yelling for Substitute. Either there was two of me, or the credits, like Lydon’s tale of fainting after three songs, were about 135 miles north of reality. Maybe it was taken from a few gigs. Oh, and the band sounded great on the record…

This for me has to be one of the unsung gigs of the early days of the British punk scene. A handing over of the baton of sorts from the 34 year old Dury to the young Pistols (if not The Stranglers). It was to be the last gig that the Kilburns played for in NME of 17th July, the split of the band was announced on the grounds of Ian's health issues. In the event Dury's absence from the stage was a short-lived thing as with new outfit, The Blockheads, he went on to far greater success than he had enjoyed with Kilburn and the High Roads.

The other two bands performing in Walthamstow on that summer evening also went on to great success along with a certain amount of notoriety in both cases.

Ian McCann's account above seems to suggest that some of the gig (Pistols set at least) was recorded. Is much of it out there I wonder?

Newtown Neurotics Wasted Festival Blackpool 12th August 2006

 

From early in the reformation (of the Neurotics, not the Protestant Reformation... they have been around for a long time, but that is pushing it!) here are the Neurotics. This post is prompted by the delivery this afternoon of new Newtown Neurotics material on vinyl (see earlier post). I don't need a more substantial excuse than that to be honest.

Thanks to Peter for this one.... always appreciated!

The keen eyed amongst you may have noted an error in the artwork. It is stated that it took place in Morecambe, but in fact the then 'Wasted' had decamped to the Wintergardens in Blackpool by this point.

FLAC: https://we.tl/t-Fpxzm6F6PV

Artwork: https://we.tl/t-UPaPHw1tpX

Newtown Neurotics 12" E.P. With Safety Pin Magazine Issue 29

 

It is a standing joke in our house. As soon as the postman is spotted in the street I am on high alert. Should they come anywhere close to our door I am like a terrier without the bark! I have always loved receiving post but don't seem to get a great through the door these days (not even bills in this paperless age!).

Occasionally, something arrives bearing my name. Today was one such day, when this gem was delivered. Issue 29 of 'Safety Pin' magazine, for which the draw was the Newtown Neurotics and specifically  a four track 12" E.P. of material recorded during the sessions that resulted in the 'Cognitive Dissidents' album. This is not a soon to be dented flexi, or even a 7", but a brilliantly packaged, heavy weight 12" vinyl record complete with lyric sheet!

Now to locate the turntable (last seen peeking through a pile of calico works-in-progress, the handiwork of a 3rd year fashion student.... sorry Gunta!)

Available here.

Interview (New Musical Express 31st January 1981)

 Prior to the release of 'The Gospel According to the Meninblack' the band did the usual circuit of the music press. Here's their interview for NME that appeared within its pages on 31st January 1981.

THERE ARE four women in the cluttered cubicle of UA's cramped office. Press officers Pat and Kathy, Pennie Smith and myself are drinking tea and swopping chat while we wait for The

Strangles. Amongst the stacks of records and piles of correspondence some suprising discoveries are being made about the absent members of a group whose unpleasant reputation owes a great deal to their notoriously anti-women aura.

To Pat and Kathy they've so far proved model clients: polite, obliging, even slightly shy. Pennie,

who has met them many times before, quietly states that they're scared of women.

Bulky Jet Black has already arrived and at intervals blunders cheerfully in and out of the office, making a sudden, self-conscious exit when Pat plays some of the tracks from The Stranglers'

forthcoming album 'THEMENINBLACK'. These turn out to be a swirling waltz tune under demented laughter; plus a pleasant but unremarkable Stranglers-style pop song called 'Second Coming'.

When Jet Black bumbles back into the room he asks eagerly for my opinion. My polite but transparent lack of enthusiasm is not an auspicious start to our encounter.

It's almost an hour later when Hugh Cornwell whirls in, fresh from a session with Smash Hits, oozing apologies and oily charm. He plants a deferential peck on Pennie's cheek, shakes my hand and begins to recount a genial denial of The Stranglers' infamous Journalist Kidnapping episode, partly, I suspect, for my benefit.

He passes me a copy of their planned album cover, a reproduction of The Last Supper with the Man In Black (in real life a more mundane employee of EMI) superimposed amongst the disciples close to Christ. On the back there's a bastardised version of The Lord's Prayer with The

Stranglers themselves called Jet-In-Black, Dave-In-Black etc. And the concept is credited to Hugh-In-Black-In-Nice.

We drive to a nearby pub to discuss the significance of Themeninblack project. I'm also seeking some explanation of The Stranglers' bullyboy reputation, particularly in relation to their past portrayal of women. It seems to me that sexual politics is a subject for discussion, not dogma,  and I'm fully prepared for any reasonable justification of the attitudes they've appeared to propagate.

It also seems an appropriate time to once again air the topic of the group's controversial character, since Jet Black has just written a book about the Nice debacle. While he maintains that the fines and suspended sentence imposed by the French authorities were a face-saving exercise designed to stop the group suing for wrongful arrest, he also admits that it was suspicion of The Stranglers that led the University administration to try and stop the performance and indirectly provoke a riot.

Hugh Cornwell is not as sinister-looking as his photographs suggest. and he has a faint air of Jack Nicholson's comic madness: chin stubbled, hair askew and eyes aglint with a dangerous inner amusement. His expression this evening smacks of polite, amused tolerance mixed with a slight lasciviousness that fades pretty swiftly as our conversation continues.

Jet Black is a large, middle-aged man with an old, shadowed, rough-featured face. Sitting round a table in a pub full of excitable boozing city businessmen the interview starts innocuously enough with the original idea behind 'Themeninblack’.

 

IT WAS Jet who first developed an interest in UFOs and the frequent references to related, unexplained men in black. At the time The Stranglers were working on the 'Black And White' .

album; they also discovered a man in black lurking in the background of the cover to 'Rattus Norvegicus•. and this set of coincidences acted as the catalyst for combined investigations.

Who are these mysterious men?

Jet: "Nobody really knows. They appear and threaten people who talk too much about them. The puzzle is,  are they someone from the government saying Be quiet, you've sussed it and we don't want this to get out?"

An earthly government?

"Yeah,  or is it the reverse? Is it someone from a flying object? That was just the central thing that got us thinking about the religious context. When Jesus Christ came down in clouds of smoke, maybe he was in some kind of flying machine. Maybe he was just a mere mortal from another planet. I mean the whole Bible is full of stuff like that."

Hugh elaborates an idea that owes something to Erik Von Daniken's theories and adds that most phenomena that aren't understood are given a religious  connotation. He also explains that The Stranglers' research into the "spacemen" manifestations in the Bible led them to decide that God treated his people with marked malevolence, a statement which I assume refers largely to the Old Testament.

Jet: "The whole thing is that all the Bible is supposed to be a holy book which is supposed to dictate some code of conduct that people have-been following for thousands of years. What we're saying is maybe people should start questioning the traditional beliefs that the interpreters of the Bible have given them. Maybe they've got it completely wrong."

 

SO FAR our interview has been affable enough on either side, but things begin to go awry

when I ask about the strange connotations of the 'Men In Black' track on •The.Raven• album.

Hugh: "Well, one suggested explanation is that we're just a farm for beings from another planet, and that whenever they've got a function on, like a wedding or something, they come down and grab a human and take them back and eat them."

Jet hurriedly adds that the album is a more serious appraisal of those kind of ideas.

"Like, everyone's sitting round waiting for The Messiah to return. Well, maybe when he does he might not turn out to be a bloke with a ring round his head and a white suit on. He might come down and start herding people into space ships and take them off somewhere. I mean you don't know, do you?"

It's at about this time that I realise I'm smiling. My expression isn't complete cynicism so much as mild, well-meaning mockery of this earnest explanation of an outlandish idea. I'm also amused by the thought that such a sinister vision of the Second Coming seems so typically

Stranglers in its tortured, determinedly pessimistic theorising.

However, the effects of my disrespectful levity suddenly show when Jet Black begins to twitch with irritation.

"You might laugh at it, but you can't disprove it. It’s just as good an argument as him coming down to save the world." He barks belligerently, and spinning round savagely in his seat he stops the conversation.

I’ m just asking Hugh flow seriously he treats this space/religious mysticism - "Seriously enough to write an album about it" - when Black barges back into the interview, emphatically prodding the table with a meaty forefinger.

Jet, it seems had a strong Roman Catholic upbringing, and the dire consequences of disbelief that were impressed upon him at an early age have somehow led him not just to reject religion

but to totally deny the concept of love and substitute instead a woolly theory of total, universal, self-interest.

"I don't see any love anywhere. I mean, what is love? Show me some!" he demands ferociously. "All anybody ever wants to achieve is their own happiness. Any kind of love is just the opposite. It’s a totally selfish emotion. Absolutely!"

I disagree strongly, but since I'm unwilling to reveal my private convictions by exposing my personal experience. I'm at a disadvantage. The Stranglers treat this as a tremendous triumph.

On a different level I argue that if an action gratifies yourself and benefits someone else it achieves both aims, and what's wrong with that?

This prompts a fresh stream of nihilistic blabberings from the antagonistic Black, who entirely avoids my question and ends his outpourings by declaring that it'lI take about 5.000 years for him to get his views across to the vast majority.

While Jet sighs and he and Hugh indulge in some sympathetically complacent chuckling, I return to 'THEMENINBLACK. I say that whereas The Stranglers have previously celebrated the darker side of life without proposing solutions, on this occasion they seem to be trying to achieve

something positive by making people question accepted values.

Jet weighs in ponderously. "We want to stimulate brain cell activity. you know? That

means putting something on record that you actually have to think about. And they'lI

have to think about this one."

Taken widely that's a moral judgement on achieving something worthwhile, Therefore you've just indirectly said ...

"You're trying to trap me, aren't you?" Jet accuses sharply.

Yes, of course. You've just tried to trap me.

Jet: "I just think it would be wonderful if the human race stopped lying. Everyone, everywhere's telling a pack of lies .....

And he's off again on the utter deceit of moral codes, personal, political, spiritual ...

Manoeuvring back onto seemingly more solid ground I ask Hugh how he thinks Themeninblack concept is going to go down with Stranglers record buyers.

"I don't know. It's probably going to go totally over their heads." he laughs.

Then he contradicts himself by adding, "We've always aimed our records at people who like to think about what they're listening to, so hopefully they'll make an effort to understand it." This statement leads into my second line of argument.

 

I TELL Hugh Cornwell that a lot of women, including myself, found the songs on the first two Stranglers albums threatening and offensive. If, as he's previously said, The Stranglers claim to be trying to show something to their audience, then what were those lyrics supposed.to illustrate for me?

Cornwell, adopting a lofty air of Detachment,  replies blandly. "I'm surprised you found them threatening. Maybe that demonstrates your own insecurity."

I don't think so. Because…

"If you felt secure." Hugh interrupts, "then you wouldn't feel threatened by them."

But women aren't secure from violence in this world, are they?

Answering, Cornwell becomes sharper and more dictatorial in tone. "So that shows something then. That shows that a lot of women feel insecure."

Yes. But you were playing on those insecurities weren't you? .

"Not at all. I was playing on my guitar." (Great manly guffaws accompany this humorous gem),

"I don't see anything wrong with using song lyrics to extol the virtues of women. Yet women find that offensive. They should take it as flattery. An author like Vladimir Nabokov, who wrote Lolita, spends the first hundred pages extolling the virtues of young girls and yet that's treated as art. whereas a three minute song that's putting it bluntly isn't."

Staggered by such a sweeping comparison, I point out that Lolita is a work of art because it treats the subject truthfully and not as a prurient exploitation of the attractiveness of young girls. At the end of the book when Humbert Humbert finds a faded and pregnant Lolita, he is overcome with regret at never having made an attempt to explore her personality and at

having destroyed something in her by taking away her childhood.

"I'm not into people going round destroying other peoples' lives." Cornwell responds, "I don't want to praise that attitude ... "

So-what about lines from your lyrics like 'Beat you till you drop',

"That was about a particular situation where, um, where a girl is unfaithful and the guy reacted violently. It happens all the time." he adds dismissively. "It's just a document of life."

"Your argument is like saying Tolstoy should never have written 'War And Peace• ... Jet Black tells me.

I don't see how you can possibly compare that with your situation where you’re putting a viewpoint into a three-minute song directed at young people who may not have fully formed their views. It might have been construed, in fact at the time it was construed, that you weren't only advocating that attitude, you were actually glorifying it.

"Then We were misunderstood." Hugh states simply.

Does that give you any regrets?

"No. not at all. I feel disdain and sadness for the way in which our lyrics were interpreted. "

(And in case you've forgotten, let me remind readers of the references to 'pieces of meat', 'peaches', 'nubiles', 'treat you rough', 'smack your face', etc., and the general crass vindictiveness with which The Stranglers' early lyrics treated women.)

I don't think your explanation would satisfy someone who was offended by your songs. You obviously don't feel any sense of responsibility for what you've written.

"We admit certain responsibilities towards people who buy our sort of stuff."

Cornwell replies smoothly. "Of course, we have to. It would be irresponsible not to. But

just because we describe a certain incident, it doesn't mean we're saying go out and do it."

But you didn't make that clear. did you? In one interview, you were quoted as saying women like to be dominated.

"Well a lot of them do. It's down to their insecurity."

 

HUGH CORNWELL'S last statement takes him right round in a smug, simplistic circle of blinkered bigotry. And by this time it's clear that there is very little point in continuing our conversation since The Stranglers are now entrenched in the limited,  juvenile roles they're acting out, flashing conspiratorial grins and fuelling each other's flippancy with forced gales of

laughter.

It's now Jet Black's turn to sally forth from the safety of the defensive, locker-room mentality they've created in their corner of the pub, and he launches into a line of argument that leads him further into the realms of the ridiculous.

This time he pretentiously compares The Stranglers' songs to Winston Churchill's memoirs of the Second World War which, he insists, I'm implying shouldn't have been written either since both deal with strife and are open to misinterpretation.

There follows a tedious argument on the word sexism which Jet persistently declares that I’ve just this minute made up, although he does concede to having previously seen it in print. The only justification that The Stranglers are able to offer about the sexual attitudes illustrated in their songs is that they "love girls". and incidentally, the last person I heard use the old "I adore women" stance as an excuse was Whitesnake's David Coverdale, and that was immediately after he'd just described half the human race as "beautiful animals".

By the same token, they blame the violent incidents with which they've been associated on the absent Jean-Jacques Burnel, and when I ask whether they either disassociate themselves from his actions or can offer any explanations, since they are representing The Stranglers to me tonight, they lapse into muddled denials and more grating mirth.

Eventually Hugh does magnanimously announce that he believes men and women to be equal, but there is of course a catch, and it's my turn for amusement when he trundles out the most banal and boring cliche in the book.

"I think women's mentality is more emotionally geared than men's. You don't?" he snaps, irritated by my smile. "Well, it's just down to personal experience, isn't it. I'm not going to say you're wrong."

TALKING TO two grown men well into their 30s and 40s who treat any attempt to seriously

question their work by retreating behind an unnecessary belligerence or a smug wall of sniggers is a wearing experience that leaves one little inclined for niceties of expression.

I'd say The Stranglers are wrong on many counts, not least their refusal to consider or even admit the existence of any possible causes for the sour, sullied reputation that they've either actively fostered or done little to dispel, and that ultimately degrades and damages them more than anybody else.

Their sort of wilfully perverted pessimism is a dullard's defence against the  blows of

existence that has very little to do with the realities of life for most men and women. Music has moved on since their bleak brand of nihilism first caused a stir, and it's long since left The Stranglers stranded and rattling the bars of their bearcage.

However, back at the bar, they've suddenly revealed that there's an unsuspected and largely unseen streak of humour in their work whose essence Jet loftiiy describes as just "too subtle for the masses".

Giving examples as they go, they solemnly trace this rich vein right back through their work - although I personally don't find 'Bring On The Nubiles' amusing; I can't see anything edifying in the dull darkness of 'Black And White' or even any entertainment in the more varied textures of

'The Raven'.  And I doubt very much whether I'll find much enlightenment in tile unearthly

mysteries of 'THEMENINBLACK' especially when on the evidence they offered me, The Stranglers haven't yet solved the simple, human problem of relating adequately to the opposite sex.

Still, as Hugh says, The Stranglers do represent a sad humour in life.

And, as Jet adds, they are both comedians and tragedians who "observe everything around us and end up singing about it, you know?"

Of course, Jet.

It's just like Winston Churchill.

Bristol Locarno 9th February 1981- Remaster

 

45 years ago to the day (9th February 1981) The Stranglers released 'The Gospel According to the Meninblack'. Back then it was a release that pretty much bamboozled  fan and critic alike, but from a distance of almost half a century it is fair to say that it is now viewed as a classic of experimental post-punk. In other words it is brilliantly weird!

On the same day of the release the band kicked off a promotional tour at the Locarno in Bristol. To mark the occasion DomP has remastered a recording of the gig and in comparison to what came before, it is a huge improvement and this tour opener is now eminently listenable. Cheers Dom...  a great bit of knob-twiddling there!

In a review of another bootleg version of the gig it was mentioned that this gig was the only one of the tour to include 'Don't Bring Harry'. I'll be honest, I haven't gone through subsequent dates to verify this, but I think it is true... it certainly conforms to an established Stranglers' MO of dropping stuff that they do not consider to be coming up to scratch live within a few opening gigs. What happened to JJ's vocal but it disappears part way through giving way to an audience singalong and seeing that such rock star antics were not a part of The Stranglers' repertoire, something else must have happened, equipment failure? A fight?

Oh and if anyone can translate Hugh's piece into the vocoder, please leave a comment!

Clearly some of the untested material that was being unveiled on this night was challenging to play for them all, especially Dave it seems... listen out for some interesting playing on 'Hallow To Our Men' and 'Waiting for the Meninblack'. Overall, a great listen from the band's next chapter.

FLAC: https://we.tl/t-u2gAdhSo08

Artwork: https://we.tl/t-77a2dTF3Ll

The gig was reviewed, less than favourably as became par for the course as the '70s gave way to the '80s in the Sounds issue of 28th February 1981.

The Damned Albert Hall Manchester 28th January 2026

 

Here are The Damned playing their much talked about 'covers only' gig at Manchester's Albert Hall. Many thanks to rbose1 for the Dime upload. In the event it the set didn't honour the gig tag of 'Not A Single Damned Song' as three slipped the net on the night. Not my place of course to write the set list, but given the chance to bring the gig back in line with the claim I would have brought in 'Help' for '1 Of The 2' or 'Feel The Pain' and 'Citadel' in for 'Disco Man'.

I am not sure what to make of the album. I feel that several of the covers are so faithful to the original that they bring nothing new to the songs which for me has always been the benchmark for a worthy cover version.... to be sure with 'Eloise' they made the song their own (with Barry Ryan even stating that theirs was his preferred version!). A song like 'See Emily Play' whilst a great song and indeed a song with which The Damned have had a long association doesn't move on from Pink Floyd's original. In terms of homage to 1960's psychedelia, Naz's 'Give Daddy The Knife Cindy' is a superior offering in my opinion.

Fair play, the album and dates are a tribute to their founder and friend Brian, but I get the feeling that this album in comparison with most of the band's other studio albums will not get too much turntable time, interesting project though it may be.

FLAC: https://we.tl/t-8Ioj1e0Gbm

Artwork: https://we.tl/t-GcL9i4UUAY

Dave's Massive Swelling Organ Rises Again! (Repair Shop BBC1 4th February 2026)

 

It's a television phenomenon that has been known to make the nation weep as Joe Public's much loved, battered but cherished heirlooms and keepsakes are restored to their former glories. Last night's episode may have got a few bald ex-punks reaching out for the tissue box as our own Toby Hounsham squeezed some very familiar notes out of Dave's scarred Hohner Cembalet keyboard. This was made possible after some extraordinary repair and renovation by the 'Repair Shop' team. There is something quite wonderful about musical instruments that have clearly done the rounds (Gary Numan's Les Paul or Segs's Fender Precision come to mind) and Dave's Hohner certainly did that. The wooden surround is scratched and scarred from endless night's of being man-handled on and off stage and up and down countless flights of stairs! The damage is just part of its story.

As part of the laborious restoration process, David Burville scraped crud off of the organ reeds, the residues of smoke and sweat deposited over a 1000 nights (maybe a few less!) in the dingy basements and backrooms of London's many clubs and pubs.

The story of this instruments journey from neglected dilapidation in a Bristol rehearsal room to primetime TV salvation is touchingly related by Owen, who I am sure won't mind me reproducing his words here.

Over to him:

'Early in March 2020, I was involved in an exchange of emails with a guy that was emptying a rehearsal room/studio in the Bristol area. He had worked with ex Stranglers’ roadie Bruce Gooding and had found one of Dave Greenfield’s old keyboards, a Hohner Cembalet, which was sadly no longer working. 

He attached photos and I recognised it immediately, especially with the large white STRANGLERS stencil on the back. He wondered if Dave wanted it back and I sent an email to the Greenfields to pass on the message. 

I wasn’t aware then but Dave was poorly in hospital at that time. Dave’s wife Pam kindly sent me a reply saying ‘Dave wants you to have it’. So I drove to South Wales to pick up the piece of band history from the guy in late March. The Cembalet remained at our house until autumn 2022. 

During a chat with Toby Hounsham, the new keyboard player in the band, in Cologne, he revealed that he used to collect the models of keyboards that Dave owned & played. Only one type of keyboard had always eluded him, you’ve guessed it, the Cembalet. 

I had always felt guilty (& unworthy) of owning such a historical artefact and I immediately brought up pictures of the keyboard on my phone & showed Toby. He was amazed & asked who owned it, without a second’s hesitation, I replied ‘I do but you do now…’

On our return from the European tour, I delivered the Cembalet to Toby in Nov 2022. He was absolutely blown away & also very emotional that he now owned a keyboard that belonged to his hero. 

He set about trying to get the keyboard repaired but every enquiry, frustratingly, drew a blank. It was such an old keyboard that few craftsmen were even able to work on it & parts for it were impossible to source.

Fast forward a year or so, it was suggested that the BBC programme The Repair Shop may be an option, where the show’s experts restore family heirlooms & valued items. 

TRS was contacted and agreed to try to repair the Cembalet. Toby dropped it off to the TV studios last summer & then collected the newly repaired keyboard around the time of the Roundhouse shows last autumn. 

So, after a long wait, the programme finally screens on BBC1 tomorrow night (Wed 4th Feb) at 8pm. 

As a fan, it was a real privilege to be the short-term keeper of such a special item in band history and to be able to pass it on to its new rightful owner, the person who keeps Dave’s legacy alive. 

I’ll be glued to the TV tomorrow night and, even if the BBC edit my involvement in the story out (as the Mirror piece did), I’ll still be immensely proud of my part in it…'

DVD image: https://we.tl/t-Y5g8Y3LiDV

Artwork: https://we.tl/t-mrSuSuA3nI