I want to say thanks to laurence Prior who has taken the time to post some '76 gig reviews and music press gig ads up on the Facebook memorabilia site. It is refreshing to see this material from the early period of the band's existance pulled from the back pages of the UK music papers and shared. This stuff is not easily accessed. Old copies of the music press attract a premium price (when considering what they are) and if fans are going to be parted from their cash it is most likely to be exchanged for '77/'78 copies that feature major aticles on the band rather than a 2 inch square gig ad listing The Stranglers as the bottom of the bill supporting act culled from page 46 of Sounds from April 1976!. And yet this is the best archive stuff, the genesis of the band from a time that pre-dated the entrenched media position on the band. They were new on the nascent London punk scene and music journalists were in still in the process of formulating opinions on the band.
There are quite a few histories of the band around now but it would be fantastic to see one dedicated to the pre-history of The Stranglers (say one with a hard cut off of the 15th April 1977, the release date of 'Rattus' in the UK). A guy by the name of Paul Goodwin wrote a book along these very lines called 'Tubeway Daze, The Untold Story of Tubeway Army'. Many will know that the story of Tubeway Army is effetively the tale of two distinct bands, a punk version that disbanded in June 1978 after a violence marred gig in Acton with The Skids and the electronic version that shot to fame after 'Are 'Friend's' Electric?' graced the nations TV screens. The punk band's biography across '77 and into '78 is brief, but the book manages to bring pretty much all that ever appeared in relation to that band in the press together in one place. That is what I would love to see for The Stranglers.
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