Gary Numan Interview (8th September 1979)

 

Here's an early interview conducted for Record Mirror on the eve of the start of the 'Touring Principle'. At this point, Record Mirror were largely sympathetic towards the man and his music... a position that turned somewhat in the years that followed.

Record Mirror (8th September 1979)

A brisk jaunt from the Broadway station, along High Street, Ealing, and Beggar’s Banquet lies before a new car-park site, down the road from Crists and War On Want. Further on is The Park – not necessarily that Park, but it’s called The Park nevertheless.

Come early, early evening, Ealing is a quiet, blank place. Pubs don’t open until seven on Sundays, but that’s when it happens. That’s when the can gets kicked through the streets until the frustrated constables feel inclined to intrude, and that’s when the Safeways trolleys get sprung loose. Ealing is a strict boozer territory, 10 pints of Fullers a night and ripped-off burgers from Crusts.

In Beggar’s Banquet, Gary Numan is playing ‘The Lodger’ and fiddling with a TV control unit. He’s relaxed, smiling, perfectly affable and he tells me that he knows someone with a control unit that even controls the treble and bass on the set. Gary Numan is not the inverted Alien I’d perhaps anticipated, and I disregard the multitude of delving technological questions I’ve equipped myself with.

Numan happens to be a genuine nice-gut who confines himself to the shade through lack of trust and security; it’s “paranoia” In his own words. He’s trapped between two poles. I feel influenced and motivated by the rock ‘n’ roll sparkle, the flash of a Hank Marvin guitar on sixties TV, entranced by the breadth of Bowie and Burroughs; he relishes his success, but at the same time feels inclined to withdraw from the limelight which that success naturally bestows.

It’s obvious when we parade down the local burger pit for a take-away that Numan is uncomfortable; all heads turn in his direction and he’s swift to make a retreat.. Later he explains, though his music is sufficient to suggest a recluse character – Gary Numan of ‘Replicas’ is more a breed of Real-Life-Gary-Numan-Alter-Ego than anything else.

But we're back at Beggar's and he starts by explaining his exploits pre-Tubeway Army ...

"The only relevant stage, I suppose, was leaving school around ‘73, and working. First thing I did was about two and a half weeks putting air conditioning in - had to give that up 'cause it meant real hard work in basements… with freezing water coming down, walking round in ice particles. I got pinned against a wall by a big giant tube, the main air-conditioning tube ... and that was it.

I ran home "that day and never went back. And after that, it was mainly air-freight for two years, working as an import clerk.

"I think the first time I got interested by music was when I was four, and I saw Hank Marvin. It wasn't the musical side - just the look of the guitar, flashing in the light."

THEN there was a band. Numan and his current bass player were part of an outfit which eventually evolved into Mean Street, before-which Numan was slung out. There was Tubeway Army, initially pubescent-punk mainstream, until Kraftwerk, Bowie and, in particular, Ultravox made their respective marks. Tubeway Army's last live performance was in early 1978, an Acton White Hart gig shared with The Skids.

"There was always that thing about Hank Marvin's guitar," enthuses the.passive interviewee, "the knobs and gadgets - I found that fascinating. But I was starting to get fed up with-guitars, being through the Punk thing and realizing it wasn't going anywhere. It wasn't changing, wasn't getting any better ... and I couldn't write songs on guitar anymore - it was boring; I realised there was nothing you could do that hadn't gone before. And then I saw Ultravox. I became aware of the depths you could get, the changes you could put them through - like a dozen instruments rolled into one… they were like toys."

There's some foundation to the comparisons people have made with Bowie and Ultravox?

"Yeah; a certain amount – but no-one mentioned Ultravox 'till I mentioned them in interviews. So when I see things like that now I lose interest in their opinions."

Why did you drop the Tubeway Army monicker and revert to Gary Numan?

" Well... I wanted it to be Gary Numan before the first album, really, but Nick and Martin from Beggar's wouldn't let me because of the comparatively good little following we had then. But really, when you read what the press have said about it, it's obvious to them that it's not a group effort.. I can't work with other people - their ideas and mine are always separate - I like to be in control. So I'm lucky to be in this position."

'Replicas' was where things began to gel: it was part-successful world of science, alienation, soli tary figures in dark, dull rooms. It was Numan's highly, vaguely, personalised feelings locked in a different context - impenetrable, futuristic ideas provoking charges of almost-justified pretentiousness. But alI he'd done was to approach the album as Ballard approaches a novel; his imagination had produced a living, breathing society of the future, indirectly born through today's possibilities and realities ...

"I wouldn't have thought it was difficult to understand but apparently most people seem to have trouble with the lyrics… but, anyway, I've always seen machines as being . powerful and cold - and, for me, the only way to be successful is to be cold. And the successful nations have always been essentially cold - the Romans and the Germans. I don't think I'd ever enjoy being that, but - Gord, look at that!" he beams, wheeling his gaze round in the direction of the TV screen'. "Gord ... I love Grand Prix.

"Aw, sorry … I was saying, I don't think it's too far away from the stage where they'll be constructing a machine which is superior to us ... but the 'Replicas' thing wasn't about machines taking over, destroying us - well, it may be in a sense, but the thing I was thinking about when I wrote it was that machines wouldn't need to take over, since we'd g.t rid of ourselves. Because they were doing everything we wouldn't need to work. The unity's going ... there's total lack of unity. The terraced houses are disappearing, the neighbours don't talk anymore…”

I enquire as to whether The Park was hemmed into 'Replicas' as a pure escapist alternative to his mechanised society.

"The Park? Aw, The Park is simply something very frightning. I don't walk alone in parks anymore at night, I don't think many people do. I saw this programme about Central Park - they were saying 'All this violence thing is completely overblown' and in the background there all these sirens going - it was stupid, I just couldn't believe it. They were saying how you don't get drug smuggling there, and they were actually dealing right out in the open. It really does happen."

Numan's writing process – which generally involves taking a particular line from, say, Burroughs, then converting and writing around it before disgarding the original line - is obviously more heavyly connected with an authoristic approach than with standard rock lyricism.

"Replicas', the album sleeve – the main part of it where I'm standing by the window - represents a Machman. Really, the album's all about ... well, I was writing a book, which I dropped because I'm better with short stories…  but I'd started with an attempt at what London would be like in 10 or 20 years and what happened was that the Government made a machine which made all the decisions - like a dictator - but the people weren't allowed to find out.

"The machine decided that the only thing holding back the State was the people themselves, so they decided to stage a quota test under the pretence that if you weren't up to quota-standard, you were taken and re-educated. Where, in fact, you were simply got rid of.

"The people who sat the quota test were the Crazies, the' people who set it were the Grey Men, and people collecting the ones who'd failed the test… were The Machmen, who were used as a special police force. The cover is a Machman looking through a window at a friend, and ‘Are Friends Electric?' is about friends…"

It seems to suggest the loss of friends.

"I wrote it because I lost friends when I was younger: I didn't lose them so much as·them getting rid of me. Which bothered me quite a lot because it was unnecessary… like getting thrown out of Mean Street ..."

"A lot of the songs are about friends - losing me girl at one time."

So do you feel alienated?

"I suppose that's the case. I can say I don't like mixing with people one day, and it'll be completely true. Another day it might be different, but there are days,I can't go out and walk down the street. Doing what we did then, going to Crusts, I get nervous doing that. It's only 'cause there were four of us that it was OK – but I wouldn't do it on me own. It's not that I feel I don't fit in, so much as I stand out - and it's not so much egotistical as· paranoid.

"Things have happened that way as I've grown up, since my mid-teens, initially because deliberately, I wanted to be very different… and since , because other things have happened, emotionally or otherwise. Like, I may grow out of it - I may . not. I may I commit suicide or I may, one day, be completely alright. I don't  really  enjoy being like it any more. I did at one time, when I thought I was really different, but now ... "

Were the songs written in this particular frame of mind?

"Most of them are concerned with me, or me putting myself into another place - and perhaps how I’d react in that situation. The songs still are that way. They're still about me - not me as me - but me as a figure, a kind of underground figure which 'is always there, always ominous.”

BZZZZ Click. The tape recorder has been observing us. It is promptly switched off and stashed away and 'The Pleasure Principle' is played. Written post-'Replicas', its studio completion coincided with Are Friends Electric's first week at number one. Numan is pleased with the result: it represents perhaps his most stable, professional recordings to date, still very much in the mould, but with a face-life.

Numan isn't exactly gambling with 'The Pleasure Principle', he's not treading tight-ropes and he's not. staring commercial disaster in the face. Merely, he's sticking limpet-tight to his little box and improving what he's got. He enthuses about the Polymoogs he's acquired and employed - £1,500 a shot - and eagerly points to their role in the scheme of things as the music progresses.

He explains away the arsenal of visual effects he'll be touring with - robots, computerised newsreader, the works. At this stage - the tour is already guaranteed a 25 grand loss, and no-one seems to be too worried by it all.

Numan is as personally un-stable as he is financially stable. But for all the cold, distant exterior, for all the inverted complexities of-his music, the little recluse has something. There's no way his work can be branded "emotionless" - it's just powered by emotions of a very personal, inhibited nature; it never contrives to be anything it isn't.' There's another level, too, and the one which looks like rooting Numan at the top of the tree for some while yet: he's producing some of the most optimistic, forward-facing Pop of the seventies, no matter what you may design to throw in his direction. He may be as irrelevant as you wish him to be, but Gary Numan's time seems to have come.

As I prepare to embark on my brisk jaunt to the Broadway Station, along the High Street, he invites me to turn up at rehearsals and investigate the great delicacies of his Polymoogs. If there's one way to a poor critic's heart ...

Gary Numan The Apollo Glasgow 20th September 1979 - MAJOR UPGRADE (TFTLTYTD #20)

This is something rather special (at least if you have anything for Numan's music). This one I dedicate to Paul Gardiner, co-founding member of Tubeway Army and Numan's bass player from 1977 to 1981. Sadly, Paul lost his life to heroin in early 1984 at the age of just 25. 

Paul Gardiner with Tubeway in early 1978

I was very excited to receive this recording. Numan's first step onto the big stage as  'The Touring Principle' kicked off in Glasgow at the long lamented Apollo. This is a major upgrade on what has been previously in circulation. This is the work of the non-profit making team that go by the name of 'Rescued Recordings', ably assisted by DomP who applies his technical expertise to clean up recordings  so that they are as good as they can ever be. The sole intention of this team is to preserve as many gigs as possible that were played in this iconic (now demolished) venue with its baffling 15 foot 6 inch high stage!. The Apollo played such a big part in the musical lives of Glaswegians throughout the 1970's and early 1980's and this is one such memorable gig.

This is an audience recording of the full set and I have to say well done to the original taper. It could not have been an easy task to capture the gig in such quality with those bone rattling keyboards to contend with. Thanks to all involved in putting together this great slice of aural history.

FLAC: https://we.tl/t-8b16p3crTc

Artwork: https://we.tl/t-uyPnW61fYo

Ruts DC Opera House Winter Gardens Blackpool 7th August 2025

 

Here's another from that peerless celebration of all things punk rock, Rebellion Festival, This is Ruts DC's first of two appearances over that weekend. Here they are plugged in for their electric set in the Opera Hourse. A great at performance as ever from this irrepressible trio. Many thanks as ever to Chatts for the share! Uploaded here as 24 bit as received. If you want to burn to CD remember to convert to 16 bit format.

FLAC: https://we.tl/t-4uCrlAzVum

Artwork: https://we.tl/t-JBsoZH10mB

Chris Gabrin R.I.P.

Photographer Chris Gabrin has died. He was one of the many photographers that were lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time to be able to document birth and development of punk and new wave in the UK. Some of his photographs will be very recognisable.

In addition to shooting The Stranglers, he was the man behind the lens for some truely iconic images of Buzzcocks, Blondie, Elvis Costello, The Damned oh... and Johnny Moped.

Queensway Hall Dunstable 2nd October 1977

 

Now, the photos and the interview were merely a prelude for this, an early recording pretty new to circulation. The Stranglers are now into week two of a marathon of a UK tour. The sound on this one is pretty good for an audience recording of this vintage. Whilst it is quite difficult to discern what Hugh is saying between songs (at least for my cloth ears!), the band are clearly giving it 100% in what is clearly a boisterous gig in Bedfordshire. Listen out for the drawn out ending of the new song, '5 Minutes'. Thanks to DomP for his audio work on this one and forsharing the file.

FLAC: https://we.tl/t-5DE1tZUhwn

Artwork: https://we.tl/t-TnjfegvfAi

Bracknell Sports Centre (24th September 1977) - A Few Photos by Pete Still

These photos by Pete Still are well known from the night featured in the recently posted Tony Parsons interview for the New Musical Express. And by the looks of it JJ really was enjoying the company of the invited Hells Angels!

New Musical Express Interview (8th October 1977)

The Stranglers launching their autumn tour in 1977 promoting the 'No More Heroes' album was a big deal, to the extent that the music press sent their big gun writers on the roadto interview/harry/slate the band. Not least in this group was Tony Parsons, then writing for New Musical Express. This brought him into contact with the Finchley Boys, who from limited discussions that I have had with former personnel from that gang, were rather put out with the Nazi/latent homosexual aspersion that he laid at the door of the Finchleys. Parsons was on the offensive as he spent the opening two nights in the comapany of The Stranglers and their entourage, Cambridge Corn Exchange (23rd September) and Brackness Sports Centre (24th September).

I have to say that when reading some of the coments coming from the band my toes curl a little! I do though like Parsons' description of Dave and his playing...

'Just like gonorrhoea, The Stranglers' music is way too ' catchy for anyone to be certain they will not fall under its lethal spell. A contagious celebration of the cess-pit employing as chief hook the hypnotic, sinister, swelling organ of Dave Greenfield, his addictive tool discharging a bewitching mucus of Hallucinogenic Fairground Paranoia, Greenfield stands like a Chinese Mandarin who quit his job for Leary.'

Please excuse any typos... it was a bit of a beast to transcribe!

New Musical Express (8th October 1977)

Words: Tony Parsons Photos: Pennie Smith

VICTIMS OF social disease have never-had it so good. High Finance Capitalism and Orthodox Rebel Rockers sign six-figure contracts until ambidextrous writer's cramp sets in; punk-polemics grab lucrative F. Street front-pages amidst perennial can't - tell - the - girls - from - the – boys Shock Horror Outrage controversy; compulsive-purchase commercially viable vinyl sells in Silver/Gold/Platinum quantitie… irresistibly catchy instant street-culture (by Nescafe) and, in 1977, last year's outlaws are this year's veritable inlaws.

And - Quirk Of Almighty Karma! - The Stranglers are the first name washed up on the good ol’ polluted Wave Nouveaux to get the music business/industry positively DROOLING all over their expense accounts in mute molten awe at the band's first two albums going double-barrel precious metal, a string of hit singles backed up by ostensibly satirical appearances on TOTP, and - at this very moment! – a mammoth 36-date box - office – smash - sell - out - pack - 'em - in - to ~ the - rafters Tour Of The U.K.

Yeah, the Black Sheep.turned out to,be the Golden Boys, and if their university backgrounds, tabs of Purple Haze and facial hair meant they were decidedly unpeachy-keen to the Orthodox Punk-Rockers in the seminal flowering of our aural-apocalypse, then the reactions , they provoke in the worshipping lumpenproletariat and their hordes of critics these days would seem to indicate that The Stranglers are. well . on the route to becoming the-'70s equivalent to The Rolling Stones ... as wantonly offensive, as grossly immoral, as that, as universally idolised, as outrageously successful, as affluent and Establishment as that.

"We're up there singing 'No More Heroes' and in front of us are thousands of kids going crazy," Hugh Cornwell muses thoughtfully. "It's almost as if we're perpetuating the very myth we set out to destroy…"

As a Trotskyist; Hugh, you should remember that today's revolutionaries are tomorrow's bureaucrats. The adoring hordes who come to see you should remember' that teen-idols got feelings , too. Though nothing will keep us together, we could be heroes, just for one day.

Cultural Revolution-comes from a hand with a gun, not a plectrum. Do you want me to get your name plus one on the guest-list of the next riot, baybee? The honeymoon's over, the N.W.naive euphoria of 1976 has subsided enough for everyone to turn on the light, straighten the hem of their plastic bin-liner and work up the bottle for imperative re-evaluation judgements.

Ah, spit it out., Parsons – WHERE DID WE GO WRONG??? Well, The Music should have been for the Revolution, but it worked out the-other way round. Like, Che Guevara never had a Press Officer. And The Stranglers just became the first band coming out of the notoriety of NW/PR folk-music to attain Solid Gold Status.

If they could see me now! That little gang of mine! They would probably break me legs…

THE MACHISMO cross-over factor: the Corn Exchange resembles a giant air-hanger and is located smack-dab centre in the muusical backwarer of prolonged further education - Cambridge. "Tonight's Friday man, and the town's usual atmosphere of oh-so-civilised academic oppression is temporarily relieved as both the weekend and The Stranglers' gargantuan asault on the English Towns starts, how you say, HERE.

Crushed tighter than the North Bank in a sauna bath and emanating sweat-drenched stench, the children of the wealthy with no heritage of violence are finding their mandatory poses of contrived belligerence a severe strain, and eye the urban malevolence of The Stranglers' private army, the Finchley Boys, with awe, envy and fear

"In 1977 rock has become very much a gladiatorial sport," Jean-Jacques Burnel asserts to me with a proud smile prior to the gig.

Almost Nietzschean, I murmur, casually slipping out of my usual role as Primitive Genius for a reference to - the German philosopher who originated the idea of The Superman, a being capable of human perfection through ultra-violent self-assertion and being totally above the accepted morality of lesser mortals.

The kids love it, of course. The Stranglers are the perfect band for manly reassurance to the nightmare of adolescent insecurity.

Someday I'm gonna smash your face! Bring on The Nubiles! What a piece of meat! Why did you lay me? Had no real need for chicks! Why don't you all go get screweed? Blue jeans and leather, her heels·are high! She's just trying to impress us! Sharp teeth, deep breath, lots of diseases! I gave it to a thousand girls, I can see their astonished eyes! No love in a thousand girls! I'm with my friend Bud having a good time! Straighten out!

Irresistable, right! A fraternity – a brotherhood! - stressing THE MANLY VIRTUES, quite naturally appealing equally to Heavy Metal in denim and long-hair, safety pin fledgling punks, sporting crews of team-game enthusiasts plus the masses of Pop Kids who, when the 70s started last year, were alienated by the more fashion-conscious, London-orientated urban guerillas but are too fascinated by this new, uh, movement to dismiss it altogether, those who were curious but not converted, they all discovered The Stranglers, millions of 'em, all thanks to The Macho Cross-Over!

To Know Them Is To Love Them… hey, you, whatcha gonna do now I'm back with the boys again? Locker-room misogyny secure in its non-droop erection for so long as Boys' Club Rule Number One . remains securely locked inside its closet-case. REPEAT AFTER ME: IF MALE IS PROMISCUOUS HE IS TO BE HELD IN HIGH ESTEEM - IF FEMALE IS LIKEWISE SHE IS TO BE - AT LEAST - USED AS A SHOE CLEANER AND - AT BEST MURDERED AFTER THE ACT OF RAPE. Yeah, I'm alright and unthreatened with the boys.

Of course, it's all about as progressive as burning witches and the widespread success is indisputable proof (if you still needed it) that large numbers of this nation's youth are as reactionary, repressed and retrogressive as their parents.

"The trouble-with women," comments Jean-Jacques, "is that their bodies decline so quickly by the time they're 40 they're soft and flabby, whereas you see handsome men at 40."

THE LOVELY Pennie Smith is the only member of the female gender in the pre-gig locker-room. The Stranglers go on stage in jeans and leather jacket over tee-shirt street-chic clothes, so the Zen Calm ace photographer don't have to look the other way when they change.

The Finchley Boys hang out with the band and I sit with Pennie in a corner. As I'm doing this one of the Finchley Boys - who have been regarding me with much suspicion because I'm from the eNeMeEy - expresses his hostility by squirting a water pistol at me.

We exchange a stream of expletives and the Finchley Boys immediately form their ranks for a who - you -screwing - John! stare down. Butch creature that l am, I don't flinch an inch, not even when one of them throws an empty fag packet at me.

You got me trembling in me D.M's I sneer urbanely. It throws them for a second,and then they laugh contemptuously and discuss a. suitable chastisement while I gaze into the wall-mirror and contemplate how much I am going to miss my boyish good-looks…

"You take them the wrong way'" Jean-Jacques tells me with a sympathetic smile. "They're more like you than we are. The Finchley Boys come out, of the same background as you, you should talk to them."

JJ tells me about a kid who came up to him recently and, after telling him how much he loved The Stranglers, spat in,his face.

"That was great," JJ smiles happily.

But he wouldn't have done that a year ago…

JJ's thoughtful.. "Maybe not, " he concedes. "But you've changed a lot since you. wrote your book The Kids, you move in different circles now, you',re not like that anymore… the Finchley Boys help us keep our feet on the ground."

The lads themselves group around me and tell me that I've got to pass their “Initiation Test". I say that I don't have to pass anybody's tests. They stubbornly insist I've got to go through this ritual, presumably to prove that I'm a man, MANHOOD: (noun) State of being a man; manliness, courage; the men of a country.

And what a state to be in if you've, got to prove it with tests, rites and rituals… ain't the manner in which you live your life sufficient? Doesn't such contrived masochism as an Initiation Ceremony smack of an almost desperate need for virility reassurance? I decline the Finchley Boys' offer. They look at each other and back at me. They're about 19, dress in'the functional threads of football terrace veterans and carry themselves in the manner you would expect - a malevolent cockiness in their youth, a quite justified confidence in their capacity for violence, and the repulsive/terrifying gang mentality that's as sickening and one-sided as a pack of hounds running their prey.to the ground, the selective intimidation of the play-ground rat-pack, Jew-baiting, Nigger-hunting, Paki-bashing…

Luckily, chronic terror is easier to live with when tempered with contempt.

Ah, mamma, can this really be the end? Listen, God, I'll do a deal.

Somebody up there evidently loves me because RIGHT NOW is time for curtains up,and light the lights for the first gig of the tour, Thanks, Lord', ain't nothing to' hit but the heights.

JUST LIKE gonorrhoea, The Stranglers' music is way too ' catchy for anyone to be certain they will not fall under its lethal spell. A contagious celebration of the cess-pit employing as chief hook the hypnotic, sinister, swelling organ of Dave Greenfield, his addictive tool discharging a bewitching mucus of Hallucinogenic Fairground Paranoia, Greenfield stands like a Chinese Mandarin who quit his job for Leary. - Meat-and-spuds powerhouse drumming chores worthy of John Bonham are taken'care of by the bearded biker bulk of Jet Black, relentless and workmanlike with less than zero flash content; you remember he was once a qualified carpenter, and he entered the music business after he had built up from scratch his own ice-cream business.

It was Jet's ice-cream van that the boys once used for transport from gig to gig, and it's certainly indisputable that The Stranglers have truly grafted for their current success, never off the road through the last 18 months and gleaning support from the masses by simply playing regularly at places most bands didn't know existed… A grass-roots Working Band who were rewarded for their dedication to the road by their rodent-breeding hardcore followers gobbling up their first album "Rattus Norvegicus IV", like voracious vermin devouring a mountain-of-Kraft Cheese Spread.

As the majority of people earning their rent money in the record industy see more of BBC television than they do of live rock music, everyone was caught with their bondage strides down around their ankles and pissing blithely into the wind of change. 

Boy, were their faces ever red!

Understandably, the attention of both the media-merchants and the pop-kids themselves has been for the ' most part focussed on the two front-men with plectrums in their hands and a Quality Gimmick Selling-Point that has only been surpassed for sheer commercial potential by The Beatles (and the Fab Farts only edge into top position becapse they appealed to grown-ups as well as us pop-kids).

Advanced Intellectual Credentials and Babylon Street Savvy, the two roles totally interchangeable between the double-striking power of Cornwell (twanging guitar riffing) and Burnel (voluble bass throbbing), a pretty tough combination of Campus Literate and Comprehensive Lout, educated and frustrated, cynical and savage, verbose on the Russian Revolution and Rioting Regeres (a rapidly growing Swedish political party described as a cross between the NF and the Hell's Angels who recently trashed The Stranglers' road-crew and £3,000 worth of the bands’ equipement), and – The Stranglers Notorious Ambivalence Number One, their confused sexuality/sexual confusion which apparently strikes a chord in a phenomenally high number of, uh, rock 'n' roll hearts.

New Wave cognoscenti vogue-combos league aside, (you can put it on the.floor, that's fine) the major critics of The Stranglers have been those who feel that there's no love in a thousand girls and doing alright with the boys is a cause for concern.

PRE-WRAPPED misogyny is much loved by girls. too; the ones who desire a libido that's pushing the exploration of sexual cruelty to the very limit of human pain/pleasure endurance. But here its strictly third-hand thrills, voyeuristic and vicarious. Although the reception is most rapturous·, and by the end of the set the stage is packed with ecstatic dancing kids, the entity is such contrived, clever, common-denominator grossness that it's closer to C & A than S & M.

The second album, "No More Heroes" , is the logical progression of the first, with more blood-stained pubic hair. It's performed with. stunningly calculated miasma and although it takes no risks whatsoever and there's less that you'd want to whistle while you're shaving your legs - it's such a brilliant example of mass production product that in all probability it will still be showing on the album charts this time next year.

Because The Stranglers kind of rock music has replaced wars and football fields as the answer to macho sexual liberation.

"Women like to be dominated," Cornwell once pointed out to me. "I think that subservient women are pitiful…" he added. Somewhere Ernest Hemingway is smiling.

THE LOCKER-ROOM apres-gig; The Stranglers are a band who do their best to keep prices down, who are against record business receptions and related liggerama, who want to be with real People… and who are going to be the most idolised heroes in rock/pop culture ("It is pop-music," JJ concedes as they wheel in the nubiles), the biggest mirror-image the industry has seen since David Bowie and Donny Osmond.

No more heroes? Does that mean you're gonna pass on the royalty cheques and mass adulation, fellas?

Ain't nobody gonna kick sand in JJ's visage no more…

"I used to get beat up everyday at school in Guildford," he remembers with the faintest hint of of-avenged bitterness. "Because I'm French; b9th my parents, are French but I was born in Notting Hill Gate. So, because I was different, because I. was French, I couldn't make friends. I found it very hard to make friends and I was always getting beaten up. So by the time I was 17 I was a Nazi. "

Wilhelm Reich wrote in his prophetic The Mass Psychology Of Fascism in 1933: "Fascism is the collective expression of average human beings whose primary biological needs have been ruthlessly crushed by an authoritarian and sexually inhibited society. Any form of organised mysticism feeds on the longing of the masses and we must be foreed to realize its potential destructiveness…"

JJ never got to invade Poland. When the school authorities discovered the homegrown self-appointed Master Race dreaming visions of swastikas in the public school prep-room, Burnel and three fellow Nazis got kicked out.

"That's when I lost interest in all that bullshit and took up karate, I've  got a brown belt now… I was 17 and very resentful and no-one was ever going to push me around agaIn."

The same year, while at university JJ-joined a gang of surrogate Hell's Angels.-He's owned a muscle-power bike ever since, and the next night at Bracknell 50 GENUINE. USA-recognised Hell's Angels from Holland and England who are personal friends of The Stranglers, are due to turn up at the gig. JJ admires them a great deal.

"They dress filthy, but their bikes gleam, their bikes are spotless…and their women look even fiercer than they do.!" he enthuses. "The Angels we met from Holland live in their own exclusive community in Amsterdam and they don't have to worry about working for a living because all their women ARE ON THE GAME! They're able to devote all their-time to their bikes. It's great," JJ says wistfully. "They've created a totally new society…”

How wonderful, man…

THE BLONDE nubile is flirtatiously cute, puppy-fat voluptuous .and too much mascara, a middle-class Cambridge coquette loving every second of JJ's Disque Bleu charm, switching from anglais to francais and back agai  with impressive ease, a pulling talent magnetic to all nubiles who want their man to be a combination of Bruce Lee, Marlon Brando and Sacha Distel.

"Everyone should be multi-national," JJ testifies. ''I have both British and French passports."

"Ooeooh, I didn't know you were French! I'd love to, I really would, but my parents would worry where I was if I didn't come home..."

Win a few, lose a few, huh, JJ?

"All the girls who come to see us are dogs but shit-bands are always walking around with incredible nubiles…”

Yeah, but that's because it's usually their steady date, their girlfriend, the only one they got… maybe they're in a better position .to devote themselves to a lasting relationship than you are…

"Yeah, your bargaining power goes uP. when you're successful," JJ nods, and Pennie Smith sighs.

The Finchley Boys are now much more friendly towards me and we discuss their devotion to The Stranglers and the Stretford End, their need for individual obscurity, and accusations that they wear swastikas.

"That just ain't true. The photograph you're talking about is from The Damned gig at Eater's school, and the geezer who had one on his face only done it that once. We ain't fuckin' Nazis and we don't wear swastikas."

One of the FBs engages in passionate debate with JJ when he denies that The Stranglers are either punks or proles.

"I'm not from a working-class background and won't pretend I am," says JJ.

"But you've done a lot of dossing! I know you ain't punks, John , but… they always mention your name with the Pistols an' that, don't they?"

"Everyone inventing proletariat backgrounds." Cornwell say's grimly.

Cornwell's 28 now. Born in North London's Kentish Town, he went from Highgate Grammar School to read chemistry at Bristol University and from there to explore pharmaceuticals under the guise of 'research' and play in bands with Yankees on the run from their country's compulsory carnage in Vietnam.

Despite his deep affection for chemistry he stresses - like Burnel - both prime physical fitness as well as a highly cultivated intellect.

"You should be really fit," he chides. "Speed's no good, it sends me to sleep… and dope keeps me awake!"

"Drugs make your body and mind soft and flabby," JJ says contemptuously. "We don't need that kind of decadence."

"Jean-Jacques and I are naturally very speedy guys." Hugh smiles.

JJ discusses with one of the FBs the possibility of hostilities at a forthcoming gig in Canterbury where they have had trouble in the past. When I hear the lengths to which the Finchley Boys would go in order to win any confrontation I realise for the first time just how fanatical their dedication is to the role of The Stranglers private army. No more heroes? If The Stranglers ain't heroes then what are they? Even Trotskyists have to sign autographs.

JEAN-JACQUES BURNEL'S recent trip to Japan and more specifically his discovery of the writer Yukio Mishima who committed seppuku (ritual suicide) in 1970 at the age of 45, has had an enormous effect on him, almost as if he feels a total empathy with Mishima's samurai code of complete control over mind and body.

As The Stranglers, the Finchley boys and three nubiles met at the gig sit around someone's hotel room, JJ waxes lyrical on the man and his lifestyle.

"He was often wrongly accused of being right-wing and a latent homosexual, just because he had a private army of young men and he took great pride in his body, he didn't like his body getting old…he got into karate very late in life and attained black belt status very quickly... he was very conscious of his body, it was a very erotic, narcissistic thing... like being on stage… I mean, I love the feel of the guitar in my hand..."

JJ digresses to tell me how disgusted he was the last time he was in Canterbury to see a gang of kids all kicking seven shades of excrement out of one lone victim.

I know he truly believes it was a sickening display of playground-bully GBH, but feel the need to relate the story he once told me concerning the 100 Club meeting of the eulogised Dagenham Dave (their first disciple and a 30-plus year old labourer who blew his sizeable wage-packet on a life-style of total hedonism) and the then neophyte.followers the Finchley Boys.

On that night Dag Dave was the victim of pack-mentality and later committed suicide by jumping off Tower Bridge. Wasn't that exactly the kind of selective destruction you despised in Canterbury?

"No, it wasn't… Dag Dave started it because he was jealous and… he changed a lot in the last year of his life, he really did… he was in his own world at the end…"

"He fought the lot of us," a FB says with deep respect."

He was so far ahead, he was in his own civilization…"

"He was in the mud by the river for weeks before they found him," JJ tells me.

How do you feel about suicide, Jean-Jacques?

"I think… it 's a cop-out, a bit of a cop-out… BUT, Yukio Mishima committed the seppuku of the Samurai Code… and Dave was just so far ahead…"

THE NEXT day we drive to Bracknell after stopping off at the gaff in Knightsbridge where Hugh Cornwell lives on a mattress in a hole in the wall . A I7-year-old ex-student of Cornwell's plus his girlfriend-nubile have come to see him. The kid just got busted for acid I coke I speed I dope I name it when the I5-year-old nubile's mother turned him in to the law.

"Great kid," JJ says as we hit the road. "And what a nubile."

"I've told him to try for Jesus Christ," Cornwell tells JJ as they sit talking in the front seat of the combo's van , and later someone tells me Jesus Christ is a university in Cambridge.

We arrive at Bracknell Sports Centre for the gig and JJ says that he used to enter karate competitions at this venue.

"Maybe you'll be in another one tonight ," Cornwell jests, referring to the imminent arrival of their Hell's Angel  mates. As it happens, the Angels show up as planned prior to the gig, rancid and ferocious on sparkling Harleys, but they create no trouble whatsoever ... the only abrasive moments coming when the band tell the Angels they can sit on the stage behind them while they play their set, which shades the eyes of the Finchley Boys with faint green envy.

The band spend a lot of their time after the soundcheck hanging out with the Angels, and graciously accepting the bikers offer to throw an Angels party for the band after the gig.

The second date of the tour gets a reception of mass-orgasm so rapturous that it would appear The Stranglers are now achieving such mass-worship proliferation that their policy of playing only venues with no seats will be virtually impossible.

It's like a sauna in the gig with numerous pogoers flaking out. One of them, a nubile, is pulled on stage and carried to one side as the band play "No More Heroes" and the Stranglers stop the song and say they're temporarily leaving the stage.

"Until we find out if the chick is alright."

The Stranglers are touched with genius. Okay, boys, take it away .... "I've got to lick you little puss and nail you to the floor…"

Applause.