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.'
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.
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