Here's one that I dredged up recently. As far as I can see I haven't posted this before. Broadcast on 12th December 2021, this one hour mix of music and chat looks both backwards at a long career and forwards, 'Dark Matters' having been released a few months before. So cast yourself back to that Covid period of suspended animation for 59 minutes.
FLAC: https://we.tl/t-kO6Min26Qy
Artwork: https://we.tl/t-d2fP4CrJMf
Here's another from last year's French tour courtesy of Chatts with a bit of ooomph added by DomP with artwork by MeAnIe and myself. Cheers all!
FLAC: https://we.tl/t-58Y5HZgXnM
Artwork: https://we.tl/t-w70ldYl5Wg
Here is another brilliant recording from the recently concluded tour, this time from The Transbordeur club in Lyon, the 3rd night of the European tour that contracted to become a French tour! Thanks to Chatts and DomP for their sterling efforts once again.
CD artwork has a split between 'La Folie' and 'White Stallion'.
N.B. Artwork splits 'Lines' and 'Go Buddy Go' whereas they are not separated in the WAV file.
WAV: https://we.tl/t-5yoJ2E1jmB
Artwork: https://we.tl/t-kS6lM139LA
01. Intro-Toiler On The Sea
It pains me a tad to put this up, this being one of the two French gigs that I had lined up until the omichron variant reared its little bastard spikey head and made travel impractical once again. Nevertheless, I am very glad to have it as I think that it is one of the best recordings that Chatts has achieved and I thank him for it. Dom also sprinkled some audio fairy dust over it and what you have is an extremely good document of the European leg of the last full tour. Okay, 'And If You See Dave' was yet to make an appearance (that emotional roller coaster was held in reserve for the fans back home), but there is 'La Folie' in there and I am never gonna complain about that being in a Stranglers set! Enjoy this gem from Bordeaux!
If you wanna split it the artwork reflects CD 2 starting with 'White Stallion'.
FLAC (16 bit): https://we.tl/t-i5CvfuXogT
Artwork: https://we.tl/t-FLLQ2UnL6M
Here is what I am sure will be one of the definitive documentary records of 'Dark Matters' era Stranglers. From the ARTE Concert series 'Ground Control' here is a fantastic TV gig from Paris recorded on the European leg of the tour. Brilliant stuff!!
DVD iso image (suitable for burning to disc): https://we.tl/t-s1qFRPcBKN
MP4 version: https://we.tl/t-JSRsfLE8S5
Sleeve: https://we.tl/t-6loG8SJoKK
01. Water
I have an exclusive here! The band's December performance in Nantes. Many thanks to Chatts for this! I understand that there is a near complete video of the gig on Youtube but this is the complete gig in audio. In the usual spirit of collaboration, DomP has spruced up the sound with his own patented knob twiddling magic and I have to say that this recording sounds absolutely fabulous, a pointer to what was in store for the UK dates.
After the COVID drought... water has come. Enjoy!
FLAC (24 bit): https://we.tl/t-iGjuMTIUBb
FLAC (16 bit): https://we.tl/t-urbMMek4bu
Artwork: https://we.tl/t-C6EHscMRW3
In true Stranglers' fashion the band have come through one of their worst periods of their long career (and things don't get much worse than losing a founder member of the band to COVID-19) with their heads held high and their reputation as one of Britain's finest and most enduring bands intact. 'Dark Matters' topped the magazine's Festive 50 as the best album of 2021. If I believed in the afterlife it would be nice to think that Dave Greenfield would raise a glass of whatever's on the optics up there to acknowledge a job well done!
Best Christmas song for 30 years!! Basil Brush knows... don't argue! I love that creature. Boom! Boom!
Very saddened tonight to hear that Mensi of The Upstarts has succumbed to COVID. How terribly sad for a devoted father of a young family.
The first time that I met Mensi would have been a brief encounter when we demonstrated against the annual march by the National Front just on Remembrance Sunday, just an hour or two after the real deal,to lay wreaths at the Cenotaph in Whitehall to commemorate those that that fell in the struggle against nazism and fascism.... all the while holding aloft swastikas..... I mean, I ask you!?
Before the early afternoon ended with an adrenaline filled game of cat and mouse with officers of the Metropolitan Police, I walked past Mensi in the crowd,. I said 'Hi Mensi', to which he replied 'Awreet son' without his steely gaze ever deviating from the street corner from which we knew that the NF column would first appear. Total commitment.
I first saw the Upstarts live at about the same time, 1988, Marquee, supported by Blaggers ITA and Atilla. As I remember Max Splodge was carried off his drum stool and the stage in a comatose condition. Mensi was in his element with the crowd, would not leave the stage until the management pulled the plug on him.
On another occasion I saw The Upstarts at the Garage in Islington I think and someone passed Mensi in a Skewdriver shirt. Bad mistake, the young nazi acolyte ended up shirtless.
Sleep well big man, you were an inspiration.
As I write this I should be at the front of The Stranglers at the Bikini club in Toulouse. To hell with it, as one of the first few gigs that I could have attended in the last 18 months and more I may even have worn a bikini to mark the significance of the occasion!!
However, it wasn't to be thanks to that little spiky bastard ball in its new omicron guise. The costs of the required PCR testing instantly doubled the cost of the trip which coupled with issues spiraling out of control at home on an extensive home renovation resulted in me bailing out of a long anticipated trip to France.
I do however have a recording of one of the gigs already with more to come. But as ever, these will not be posted until the French leg of the tour is done and dusted.
Back in the game.
Here's one to ponder. With new product to promote, why have there been no radio sessions? Clearly the 1970's feuding with BBC over past misdemeanors is a distant aspect of the band's history. JJ in particular has been interviewed on numerous occasions which is great, but it is all talk and no music.
The Damned on the other hand have been well catered for by BBC 6 Music with a session to promote the 'Evil Spirits' album and a Christmas gig no less.
You've got to love a radio session as it is by no means unusual for a session track to be superior to the version that the band spent weeks creating in a plush studio.
I may write to 'Points of View'!
My God, do I need The Specials in my life right now. I tend to shy away from politics on this site, but recent events, fuel shortages, sparse goods on supermarket shelves and to cap it all the nausiating greed driven skullduggery of the mega rich and their creative, loop hole savvy accountants revealed in the 'Pandora's Box' papers is almost enough to make me want to don my revolutionary cap and man the barricades! The good news is that The Specials are feeling it too!
Promoting their new album the band appeared on Steve Lamacq's BBC 6 Music show last week with a mix of old songs and new songs showcased from the 'Protest Songs 1924-2012' album. The Specials always had an eye for he cover and they retain that skill to this day.
FLAC: https://we.tl/t-msBn0bJeD4
Artwork: https://we.tl/t-kdLPVIdZRC
01. Interview
Well it has been a long time coming and we all know the tragic circumstances that plagued its late stage gestation. The fact that the album is tied in with the last major tour that the band will do, the poignancy of the material with respect to the loss of Dave Greenfield, now recognised quite rightly as a British musician whose virtuosity has placed him among the ranks of the greatest rock musicians of all time, has heightened the media's interest in the album. 'Dark Matters' has had the most coverage of any album probably since 'Black & White'!
For my part I am still absorbing the tracks and my opinion, for all that it is worth, will be shared in the coming days. In the meantime here are some of the music press's online reactions to this their 18th studio album.
Uncut Magazine 10th September 2021
Nick Hasted
Death puts the Men in Black in sombre, elegiac mood.
3.5/5
Even punk didn’t want The Stranglers: the movement for damaged outcasts drew the line at these Surrey brutes, seen as too thuggish, ancient, sexist and straight. Before that, pub-rockers too thought themselves above this glowering crew, with their corduroy-wearing biochemistry graduate singer, 37-year-old jazz drummer with a taste for home-brewing, a brooding bassist ever itching to use his karate skills, and a hippie keyboardist whose unfashionable solos inspired flashbacks of the verboten Doors, though he expressed a preference for Yes. Such faces certainly didn’t fit Malcolm McLaren’s Situationist programme, leaving them as uncomprehending rock press pariahs, blindly lashing out at their tormentors.
And yet the blows keep coming. Their once terrifying drummer and founder, Jet Black, retired in 2015 with enough health problems to give Python’s Black Knight pause. Like Don Corleone near The Godfather’s end, he no longer runs things, but still offers wise counsel. So when Dave Greenfield, their jazzy, proggy keyboardist, died from Covid-19 on May 3, 2020, it was Black who told the last original Strangler standing, Burnel, to press on.
The band’s 18th album, Dark Matters, was largely finished before Greenfield died, when lockdown windows allowed Warne to visit Burnel’s French home, and was completed remotely. After the snarling insensitivity that once defined The Stranglers, it’s reflective and poignant. Even if you strip away the late touches acknowledging Greenfield’s loss, the mood is suddenly grave and inevitably valedictory. “We’re a bunch of old guys now,” Burnel agrees, “and I wanted our music to reflect that.”
Greenfield might have generally been the quietest member of the band, but when they started to play, it was him, head bowed at the keyboard, who always set the mood, his fairground swirl energising the others. So it still is on Dark Matters, as the opener Water sees his playing surge and then explode into a mighty Stranglers riff, Warne’s guitar and the keyboard then trading slashing blows. In an album that took nine years to cohere, Burnel’s lyric, with water a metaphor for the Arab Spring’s thirst for democracy, sounds sadly stranded in history.
And If You Should See Dave… is the most notable posthumous addition, with Burnel considering “things that should have been said, eternal regrets”; “This is where your solo would go”, he adds, the lush music arranged around that gaping absence. “Innocence has left this house, to wander among the stars”, begins Burnel’s other new lyric, on If Something’s Gonna Kill Me (It Might As Well Be Love), showing Greenfield’s almost sanctified Strangler status, somehow stood apart from their bruising battles. “Our glory’s far behind us”, Burnel acknowledges, “and I miss ya”.
The Sunderland snap of Warne’s vocal bites down with relish on This Song, a co-write with Mathew Seamarks that imagines burying feelings for a sundered relationship with manic completeness. The Stranglers’ bracing, unapologetic bile rises here. Payday, too, rains contempt on callous leaders with a nod to the history-steeped lyrics of No More Heroes: “Alexander was never the same after he speared his old companion/It led to Ptolemy and Cleopatra…”
But it’s Burnel’s husky, burnt-out ballad voice that defines Dark Matters. The Lines counts life’s cost in the face in the mirror, Greenfield’s honky-tonk organ shadowing a country strum. Down is a sunken elegy sung to Spanish guitar, ’til hopes rise again like the sun. Breathe is the best and last song here, beginning as a ’60s pop chanson. Greenfield’s synths dance above its final minutes, the keyboardist both in a world of his own and with his bandmates one last time, until the only sound left is a transmission signal, blinking out, leaving the survivors in limbo. If wouldn’t be the worst way for a last Stranglers album to close.
Louder Than War 11th August 2021
John Robb
9/10 for The Stranglers first release for a decade, the aptly titled Dark Matters, is a masterpiece to get lost in and a tribute to their late and great keyboard wizard Dave Greenfield. The album sees the band embrace all the nooks and crannies and styles of their fascinating journey in a late career flourish – a genuine highlight that ranks with those classic and game changing first 5 albums.
Famine, plague, death, destruction and the end of the world…since the last Stranglers album, Giants, was released ten years ago. It’s not been easy on the world stage or the band’s tight inner circle but The Stranglers finally deliver their 18th album fittingly named Dark Matters. It’s been a long time since we heard any new material and the album has been overshadowed by the death of core band member Dave Greenfield and his genius keys, and the final retirement of the great Jet Black but the record has been worth the wait. It’s an eclectic and fitting testament to the keyboard wizard and a great late period document of this idiosyncratic band.
Somehow, despite everything, The Stranglers have delivered one of the finest moments in their bizarre career. Either as an act of closure or the beginning of a final chapter, Dark Matters, bookends their unlikely sojourn and is kinda like a grown up Rattus. It retains all the dark melodic inventiveness and distinctive sound of that most classic of debuts from 1977 that reflected the sewer like survival of mid seventies London but has been upgraded decades later into an album that is full of an emotional introspection as well as a well worn and well earned wisdom with an added dystopian twist and embrace of everything that life chucks at you. There is also a genuine sensitivity and emotional clout that may have been hidden away in the older stuff but always lurked somewhere just beyond their charismatic bravado and was explained in this very open interview by JJ Burnel with John Robb a couple of months ago.
Of course the death of Dave Greenfield hangs heavy over the album musically and thematically but he was around long enough to play on eight out of the eleven tracks. Fittingly some of his career best keyboard runs are on the album which is a fitting epitaph to his genius. From the opening track, ‘Water’, Dave’s brilliance is underlined. The tracks classic keyboard runs show that his dexterity and sense of texture and melody were as strong as ever. The keyboard lines and bubbling runs are at his trademark best. He made this kind of stuff feel effortless – it’s the real signifier of just how good he was that his classic style pours out of the tracks like it was totally natural. The complexity and originality of his playing is often overlooked because its so perfect for the song and at the band’s best it was the crucial texture that made them stand out and allowed all the instruments space to serve the songs.
One of the keys to the band was that no note was ever wasted by Dave or his comrades and the constituent sounds of each instrument was rich and textured whilst playing its own lead lines. Dark Matters is full of this classic Stranglers technique. The opening ‘Water’ sets this stall. The track has been in the band’s set for some time and the recorded version is honed to perfection as it weaves its watery way building and twisting and turning. The liquid metaphor runs through the lyrics that deal in the future wars caused by the water running out – classic Stranglers reportage like from The Raven period which this track could easily be from. A few decades in and a smart band understands what made them great and plays with those themes and reinvents them in new shapes. Nature themes and the power of the elements have always been at the Stranglers core painting sonic pictures out of the sensual power of the elements. That’s what Water does as reflects its subject matter in that classic old school lysergic way of the band – painting pictures in your head musically and mystically. It sounds like water and is a liquid slice of punk prog with danceable powerful and yet strange time structures dealt with by Jim Macaulay – the comparatively young buck drummer who has really stepped into Jet Black’s shoes and will make the old codger guffaw with pride at his taking up of the mantle. The track sets the album’s stall and embraces the prog epic stylings of The Raven period – the rising bass lines and bubbling keyboard magic, the driving yet off kilter song structures and the lyrics that look at the big picture sung by JJ channeling a rich James Douglas Morrison croon.
Team Stranglers are on fine form – this is no tribute band and very much an ongoing creative concern. The album is restless with this creativity and explores all the band’s nuances and classic textures. The classic clipped JJ bass sound is back to the fore threading the tracks together (like all old school Stranglers fans I look to the bass sound to see if the band is on top of its game – it’s one of the classic sounds in British rock) and Baz Warne is on fine form all over the album which his bluesy guitar lines swerving from melodic to quirky and his vocals maintaining the balance between belligerent and sensitive.
The album comes in all shapes and sizes and the earlier clutch of tracks released to the public only give part of the story with their melodic introspection. There is plenty of old school tough gnarl on the record like on the second track that rasps in with the rat pack mentality of the Rattus period. This Song sounds so Stranglers it’s hard to believe that it’s actually a cover brought in by album producer Louie, who once produced a band called The Disciples of Spess who had a tune called, This Song Will Get Me Over You which still lurks on Spotify.
One Stranglerfied it’s become classic riot period Stranglers and full of grinding bass, driving drums and a huge chorus snarled and cajoled by Baz Warne as he works his way around yet more classic Dave keys. The playing on the track is faultless and like the rest of the album, the musicianship is on another level. All the band’s classic hallmarks are back unlike the fallow nineties period when they seemed to lose confidence in their own sound. Since the 2004 Norfolk Coast album its been a journey of rediscovery as the band woke from their nineties slumbers.
Dark Matters is full of classic twists and turns as the band make sense of their own eclectic nature. Already released and very well received, the touching lament ‘And If You Should See Dave’ is a touching JJ paean to their fallen brother in arms and contours up his spectral presence that hangs over the album. The tracks introspective musings and glorious chord changes are reminiscent of classic sixties French pop and it’s a heartfelt touching moment that even leaves a space for the played keyboard solo which you can imagine in your head.
If Something Is Going To Kill Me (It Might As Well Be Love) is soaked in the romantic side of the band that initially emerged in the Feline/Dreamtime period. Those autumnal baroque and lush melodies were even hinted at even in the early days on their own Princess Of The Streets or their cover of Walk On By or and it’s that song’s writer Burt Bacharach that is the key here with his classic, timeless sense of crooning melody dripping from the track which also features a Chet Baker style trumpet break at the end as well as nicely off kilter keyboard as the main chassis.
There is so much diversity on the record as the band explore all their nuances. The Stranglers were never really playing by the rules – they were out of step even in a time when being out of step was au fait. The Stranglers have always prided themselves on their range of styles, their restless creative range has always been the core to their experience and Dark Matters further explores this making the early promotion of the record tricky. Just how do you choose a defining single from an album as far ranging as this? Even at their thrilling belligerent gonzoid peak there was always something else about the Stranglers. The late period band further explore these styles trying to make sense of who and what they are.
If the previous two tracks are the sensitive melodic Stranglers they are not the sound of the whole album – fear not doc marten wearing older fans there is plenty of snarling Stranglers here like on No Mans Land which, like Payday a couple of tracks further down the album are full of plenty of snarling action, fast running bass, scratching scrapping guitars and guttural vocals with the vowels bent out of shape and killer hooky choruses – classic Strings. Both tracks also have killer bass lines with Payday having one of those classic Burnel Baroque Bordello style 4 string workouts as Baz delivers an unlikely vocal about Alexander the Great and Greek classics! Both songs also great old school Stranglers intros.
The introspective sparse acoustic confessional of The Lines deals succinctly with ageing The Lines and Down is a lush melodic affair and a sumptuous mournful ballad dealing with the black dog of depression. The atmospheric The Last Man On The Moon is a bass driven epic with added classic Stranglers and already a live favourite with its driving bass line and film score vocal harmonies.
There is also the welcome return of the moody soundscapes and almost film-score wide open spaces on the album’s two climactic cinematic tracks that close the album and sound like nothing else the band have done. White Stallion has a 4 to the floor disco kick drum, a driving bass intro, a pummelling post punk groove, a choir, berserk strings and an off kilter melody. It’s glacial in its ambition as it warns about the rise of China and the unstable geopolitics of the 21st century whilst sounding like Hans Zimmer on steroids. This is a dystopian film score and it really works in its bonkers brilliance. Breathe sees off the album with a quirky and atmospheric of jazzy soundscape that drips with a perfumed sensuality that sinuously builds into a triumphant and climactic ending even with its introspective nature.
The perfectly named Dark Matters could be the band’s last statement and there would be logic in that. It could also be a launching pad to a new era – there are plenty of enticing angles left to explore and plenty of creative powder kegs left. Being this inventive this deep in a career curve is unexpected even after the bold statements of the Norfolk Coast, Suite XVI and Giants albums that put the band back in business. Dark Matter is bigger, bolder, more eclectic and wider in scope. It somehow sounds both idiosyncratic and modern. Ironically for an album that deals with the ghosts of the past it is also surging forward and shows that daring to explore your own creative obsessions is the only way forward.
Classic Rock Magazine 14th September 2021
Johnny Sharp
The Stranglers: Dark Matter and the death of Dave Greenfield.
Forty-four years on from their first hit and almost 10 since their last album, The Stranglers have weathered storms and return with a new record dedicated to late keyboard player Dave Greenfield.
There have been times recently when it’s seemed as if the whole world of music had gone into slow motion – if not suspended animation. Shows and festivals cancelled en masse, albums and tours postponed and then postponed again… But the gestation of The Stranglers’ new album, Dark Matters, has made those timelines look like mere blips by comparison.
If we point out that opening track Water was written as a contemporary response to the 2011 Arab Spring (when anti-government protests and uprisings took place in much of the Arab world) that gives you an idea of when the songs began to take shape. Some other ideas have even earlier origins.
“We’ve got a hard and fast rule,” frontman Baz Warne says, “whereby nothing ever gets thrown away.”
Hence ideas that first emerged even before The Stranglers’ last studio album, 2012’s Giants, have slowly been firmed up into a spiky, eclectic set that shows how the grouchy rumble of the classic Stranglers sound has long-since diversified. Maybe that was inevitable, given that two cornerstones of that sound are now no longer in place.
The elder statesman of the group, drummer Jet Black took a dignified bow out of the band as an active member in 2015, and the declining health of the now 82-year-old prevents him from having an active working role in the band. He’s still part of the set-up “in a consultancy role”, to use Warne’s words, but his robust playing is absent from Dark Matters, the band’s eighteenth and latest studio album.
Thankfully, keyboard player Dave Greenfield did contribute, putting his distinctive sound on eight of the album’s 11 tracks. Then the band were dealt another, more heart-breaking blow when Greenfield passed away in April 2020, after he caught COVID-19 while in hospital with heart problems. With the band’s Final Full UK Tour already postponed due to the pandemic, the question inevitably arose: is this the end for The Stranglers?
When Classic Rock talks to bassist and founder member Jean-Jacques Burnel in southern France, where he now lives, he pauses for thought before addressing this understandably emotional subject.
“Well it was the same as when Hugh [Cornwell, guitarist/singer] left the band over thirty years ago,” says Burnel, his gentle Home Counties tones reflecting the fact that while he has French parentage he was born and bred in London and Surrey. “I thought: ‘Well, that’s it,’ you know? The others talked me into keeping it going. But then you can’t replace a guy like Dave.
"I mean, there are people who play just as well as Dave, because he’s got disciples. But my first thought was: ‘Well, okay, let’s finish what we started [the album] and that’s it, really.’
“But I spoke to various people, and we had all these shows on sale, and they were still selling. I’m thinking: ‘What the fuck? Don’t they know that Dave has gone?’ And they do know that Dave is gone. I said to our agent: ‘So what the fuck is this all about?’ He said: ‘I think they want to hear the music.’
“The Stranglers isn’t really about personalities any more, I don’t think. It’s just about a certain musical imprint that has been around for quite a while now.”
Nonetheless, there’s no doubt as to which Stranglers personality their recent single was about. And If You Should See Dave… is one of several songs on the new album to touch on issues of ageing, relationships and mortality. But, unsurprisingly, given the context, it’s the most moving.
It’s a faintly ghostly meditation, built around shards of sun-dappled surf guitar, chiming bells and Burnel’s whispering vocal, which admits the powerful feelings that so many of us experience when we lose someone close: ‘How does it feel to be left in mid-conversation, no less / And things that should have been said, now left as eternal regrets?’ And yet at the same time there are touches of affectionate humour there as he sings: ‘No one told him I was waiting with a glass at the bar… see you at the bar?’
Towards the end he then admits: ‘It would be nice to say hello, this is where your solo would go.’ Hence the “conscious decision” not to have keyboards on the track (which topped the iTunes download chart briefly in May).
The video for And If You Should See Dave… pays further visual tribute to the song’s subject: a girl, with a keyboard propped in the back seat of her car, roams around Los Angeles, crossing paths with such curiosities as a rat (norvegicus, we presume) crawling across the pavement, and signs referring to ‘The Men In Black’, passing venues such as the Whisky A Go Go and the Regent Theatre, where The Stranglers played several notable shows, the latter being the scene of their last US performance with Greenfield.
“I honestly think he would have loved the song,” Warne says of Greenfield. “Because he loved that West Coast American sound, which is kind of the vibe it has. His wife also loved it. When we saw the video it was lump-in-the-throat time.”
And so the surviving Stranglers consists of Burnel, the sole remaining founder member, and Warne, the guitarist who took over as vocalist in 2006 but who has been with the band since 2000, along with drummer Jim Macaulay, who co-wrote several songs on the new album.
Anyone concerned that Burnel’s days as a thrusting bass monster might also be numbered can at least be reassured by the fact that he’s a famously fit individual, who as well as being a keen motorbike fan teaches karate, and achieved his Seventh Dan in Japan six years ago.
“This vehicle I inhabit, it’s taken me round the block a few times,” he says. “So I have to keep it serviced much more often than it used to. And I mustn’t abuse it as much as I used to! But I’m pretty fit for a bloke my age, yeah. I can do fifty to seventy push-ups at one go, I’ll do a few hundred crunches on a daily basis. And I’ll try and lift my motorcycle up if it drops.”
Even people in peak condition aren’t immune to the coronavirus, though. Back in May, when trying to meet up with his bandmates for the first time in 16 months, while en route to Calais Burnel was told that his PCR covid test had come back positive. He had to return home. Given that Burnel is 69, well inside the generations that are more at risk from the virus, he was perhaps fortunate not to suffer any symptoms, and talks of the episode with a faint air of puzzlement.
“I had no symptoms, but then you think, shit, maybe I’ve still been spreading it about. But then everyone I had been in contact with in the week before, they all had to test and they were all negative. So maybe mine was a false positive?”
He finally made it across the Channel to the UK in June, and plans to be involved in promotional activities for the album here, as well as touring with the band from January.
These days, of course, The Stranglers have reached a stage of their career where they don’t need to prove a great deal, but there’s a broad range of songs on Dark Matters that manage to retain trademark elements of their sound, not least Greenfield’s keyboard runs on songs such as Water, with its pounding tribute to the Arab Spring protesters, and Payday, which echoes the band’s 1977 hit No More Heroes in its gutsy combination of Burnel’s inimitable bass churn, freewheeling organ and Warne’s malevolent vocal attack.
Elsewhere, the beautifully poignant Lines has just an acoustic guitar accompanying Burnel tracing his own ageing process as he whispers: ‘There’s triumph and disgrace in the lines on my face’, while the piano lament Down is laced by Warne’s Spanish guitar. While there are mellow moments on the record, though, they’re offset by its fair share of gnarly rage.
The staccato jerkpunk of No-Man’s Land, for example, takes dead-eyed aim at a selfie-obsessed culture, sneering: ‘Stop thinking of yourselves for a minute,’ (in a lyric written by drummer Macaulay), and Payday accuses society of becoming ‘bisted and Twitter’.
Burnel endorses these sentiments. “It’s slightly pointed towards people who seem to want to believe any conspiracy theory going,” he says. “And a lot of that is spread by social media. Such as refusing to be vaccinated because you believe the government is trying to plant a chip in you or something. It’s quite a selfish thing. We’ve become so self-important that we have to share the minutiae of our lives with the fucking world.
"Why? I’m not on any of these [social media channels]. I’ve had too many years of being criticised, and it’s just toxic. And I think we’ve collectively created a monster. I don’t see too many positives in it. You can call me an old c**t to my face, and I really don’t care, but I find it’s a distraction from real life.”
These sorts of lyrics reflect a band who, while having voiced some pretty boorish sentiments, have always been unafraid to experiment and to make social comment.
“I think the British press, especially music press, always really wanted the rockers to be either rock'n'roll animals, or arty and intelligent,” says Burnel. “But you can never combine the two. But I always thought we did.”
Although Jet Black is still an honorary band member, Macaulay has been drumming with the band for nine years, while Baz Warne has been a Strangler for 21, first as guitarist, now as singer – a considerably longer tenure than original Stranglers frontman Hugh Cornwell. But that doesn’t stop some people from considering that anything but the classic line-up is an inferior facsimile. Including Cornwell, who in 2018 said that since he left the band in 1990 their songs “have been sequestered by a bogus version of the group with only two original members”.
Burnel laughs when he is reminded of this. “We’re more successful than ever now, and he isn’t, so I think it’s a bit of sour grapes on his part. I mean, after all, it’s a bit hypocritical for a bloke who, if he does two sets, will play one set of Stranglers stuff.
“I think he’s quite bitter,” Burnel continues. “We did this movie, for instance, a few years ago, and he won’t give permission for it to be released. That’s a shame, because the only person slagged off in it is me – by Hugh!”
The current Stranglers line-up has sounded pretty formidable in recent years, and Baz Warne for one, insists that this is now a band “champing at the bit” to get back out and play, and he hints strongly that The Final Full Tour won’t mean the end of The Stranglers as a live act.
“We didn’t want to do another twenty-, thirty-date tour of the UK,” says Burnel. “We’ve done it almost every year for so long, and although it’s enjoyable it really does tire you out.”
“It was all publicised and all arranged before Dave passed away,” says Warne. “And once the dust settled and we were even able to speak about it – because we didn’t want to talk about it for months, you know – we decided, well, we should honour the dates. And once we announced we would do that, the response, the love and respect we received, was quite overwhelming. I do recall sitting with moist eyes, reading some of the things people had said: ‘You’ve got to do it.’ ‘You must do it.’”
As for what comes next, Burnel isn’t looking too far ahead. “I’ve always said we think of every album as if it’s our last,” he says. “So you invest yourselves entirely in it. If we started thinking about the next thing, we wouldn’t give ourselves a hundred per cent to this. But I’m writing. I don’t have creative diarrhoea, but I do write regularly.”
One thing in no doubt, though, is that The Stranglers’ next live show is going to be an emotional occasion.
“When these shows do happen, they’re going to be highly charged,” Warne says. “I can’t even begin to tell you how it’ll feel. And then after that, who knows?”
As many of you may have seen, there was a very well written piece in the UK’s Guardian newspaper on the band. Rising above the usual fayre that fills the column inches of most mainstream articles on The Stranglers i.e. a focus on violence and misogyny, Dave Simpson turns his attention to the longevity and musicality of the band both then and now as in reflective mood they discuss ‘Dark Materials’ and the loss of Dave.
As to the mysterious tattooed fan… one can only wonder who that could be….
Dave Simpson.
Punk’s dada surrealists … the Stranglers at the Nashville Rooms, London, in 1977. Photograph: Ray Stevenson/REX/Shutterstock
They brawled with the Sex Pistols, gaffer-taped a journalist to the Eiffel Tower and got thrown out of Sweden twice. Now, for their 18th album and final tour, the punks seem to be maturing at last.
As Jean-Jacques Burnel drily admits, the Stranglers had “a bad reputation for quite a while”. During the punk years, their many outrages ranged from being escorted out of Sweden by police with machine-guns (twice) to gaffer-taping a music journalist to the Eiffel Tower, 400ft up, upside down, without his trousers. However, the singer and bass player says the biggest outcry actually came when they got themselves a keyboard player.
“It was seen as sacrilege,” he laughs, recalling this supposed affront to the ramshackle garage punk ethos. “And worse than that – he had a synthesiser. We were called heretics and ostracised. Nobody wanted anything to to do with us. But look what happened a couple of years later: synth pop!”
By then, Dave Greenfield’s glorious baroque playing was all over the charts. Before his death from Covid in May last year, the keyboard wizard had spent 45 years in the Stranglers, appearing on 23 top 40 singles and 17 top 40 albums as they established themselves as one of Britain’s most enduring bands. Next month, some of his final recordings will appear on the band’s 18th album, Dark Matters, which Burnel calls “our first genuinely grownup album”. The album contains untypical, beautifully raw ruminations on depression, ageing and mortality. Most of it was put together after Greenfield’s death, a process that singer-guitarist Baz Warne, a genial and open Wearsider, found cathartic. “We opened up a huge well of emotion,” says the 57-year-old.
As the band’s original singer Hugh Cornwell tweeted last year, the keyboard player made “the difference between the Stranglers and every other punk band”. Fans grew to adore Greenfield’s rakish blend of eccentricity and proficiency that meant he could reel off a sublime solo with one hand while sipping Cognac with the other. “We always knew Dave was special, but we didn’t realise how special,” smiles Burnel, a karate-toned 69, over Zoom from their West Country studio. “They’ve got a name for it now. Very high-functioning autistic.”
Cognac-sipping solos … Dave Greenfield. Photograph: Ian Dickson/REX/Shutterstock
This condition – undiagnosed for years and never made public – left Greenfield endearingly awkward in social situations. Warne remembers an incident where the keyboard player had worn a flying jacket to a wedding, leading a tipsy guest to joke: “Where’s ya fuckin’ Spitfire?” Warne says: “Dave went, ‘I don’t have a Spitfire and I’ve never been in one, but I do have a friend who has one and we could go up in it if you like.’ And then he went into a classic detailed answer that went on for ages and left the whole bar incredulous. Bless him, he had no idea what they were laughing at.”
Burnel remembers Greenfield as a gentle soul who was rarely involved in their punk-era ruckuses, when being ostracised left them with “a siege mentality”. He goes on: “It was the Stranglers against everyone else, but the only time I saw Dave violent – well, almost violent – was when he had [Sex Pistols frontman] John Lydon up against a Transit outside the club Dingwalls, when we faced off against members of the Ramones, the Clash and the Sex Pistols. But even then, he just sort of held him.”
Meanwhile, Greenfield’s condition gave him a highly idiosyncratic approach to making music. “He couldn’t improvise,” says Burnel, “and if we wanted any last-minute changes to the setlist, he’d just freak out.” However, Greenfield’s devotion to creativity was such that he thought nothing of taking three days to learn the electronic pattern on the song Genetix, note by note. “He ‘programmed’ himself,” smiles Burnel. “People thought it was a sequencer. It was a human being.”
The Stranglers’ notorious capers have often overshadowed what an adventurous and inventive band they were. Jazz singer George Melly, who sang on their track Old Codger, called them “punk’s dada surrealists”. Greenfield was playing a vocoder as early as 1978, while other experiments ranged from looping bass drums to slowing rhythms down to half speed. After Burnel and Cornwell made the unusual “creative decision” to take heroin for a year, the band’s increasing musical strangeness culminated in The Gospel According to the Meninblack, a semi-electronic concept album about alien visitations.
Such behaviour was too much for one producer, Martin Rushent, whose remit was to create hit singles, such as the thrilling No More Heroes. “He just said, ‘I can’t be doing with this’ and walked out,” says Burnel. “We just carried on. We were kids in a candy store. It was the start of digital technology and we had a keyboard player who could outplay anyone. Fantastic.”
Burnel at a Stranglers gig in Paris in 2019. Photograph: David Wolff-Patrick/Getty Images
Greenfield came up with the music for their most famous song, 1982’s Golden Brown, a harpsichord piece in 6/8 waltz time, which lyricist Cornwell later said was about both heroin and a girl. When the record company rejected it, the band invoked a contractual clause to make them put it out. “They released it at Christmas, expecting it to be drowned in a tsunami of Christmas singles,” Burnel recalls with relish. “After it was a hit all over the world, they asked for ‘another Golden Brown’. So we gave them a seven-minute song in French.” This was La Folie, which made allusions to Japanese necrophiliac murderer and cannibal Issei Sagawa. It charted at No 47.
When Cornwell left in 1990 and everyone wrote them off, it was Greenfield, with founder drummer Jet Black, who persuaded Burnel to carry on. “I’d started writing more by then,” he says. “I’d always looked up to Hugh, because he was older and smarter than me. But all the voices telling him ‘You’re the star, you don’t need the band’ had pissed me off. We weren’t short of motivation.”
Warne watched all this from afar at home in Sunderland. He was a childhood fan who was “Bonnie Baz” in Wearside punks Toy Dolls before joining the Stranglers in 2000. It has not always been easy. “The week after joining, I was singing to troops in Kosovo, a war zone,” he says. “I had hair and a waistline before I joined the Stranglers.” Not that there haven’t been highs, such as “an unforgettable day at Glastonbury in 2010, when we played to 80,000 people – apparently more than U2.”
Burnel adds: “The funny thing is, Glastonbury never wanted to put us on. We weren’t exactly banned, but Michael Eavis doesn’t like us and refused to put us on for 30 years.” What changed? “Well, here in the West Country, the Stranglers play second fiddle to the real Gods, the Wurzels,” he says, referring to the jokey Somerset folkies who sing about cider and combine harvesters. “Eavis loves them and wanted to book them, but our manager manages them as well.” The two men laugh. “So I think we had some leverage.”
‘Bless him’ … Greenfield on right with the band in 1978. Photograph: Sheila Rock/REX/Shutterstock
Today, Burnel is the only original Strangler remaining in the lineup. Drummer Black, 82, last played with them in 2015. He had a stroke last year but has become a “talisman”, urging: “Don’t stop! Don’t get sloppy!’” By 2019, Greenfield was becoming weaker. “We’d been doing 50 to 60 gigs a year, around the globe, and we didn’t want to kill him,” says Burnel. So they announced a “final full tour” for autumn 2020, postponed because of the pandemic.
“Dave was 70, so he was put in quarantine,” Warne recalls. “He said, ‘I don’t know how I’ll cope.’ I told him to chill out, but I was desperately worried. The band had been his life for 45 years. He’d always needed something to focus on, so I was worried what sitting at home would do to him.” In the event, Greenfield died during a long stay in hospital for heart surgery. “He was already very poorly,” Burnel sighs. “Covid was the last nail in his coffin.”
Much of Dark Matters was put together remotely. “Finding these fragments that Dave had left us felt exciting,” Warne explains. “We got permission from his widow, which was important, then we realised we needed to pour it out.”
The band will assess the future once they’ve been through the “emotional wringer” of the tour. But, for now, they want to honour the rearranged dates, with a Greenfield “disciple” playing his parts. The first single on the album is a sublime tribute called And If You Should See Dave. It was recorded without keyboards, but contains the poignant line: “This is where your solo should go.” The line has struck a chord with fans. “One guy’s getting it tattooed on his arm,” says Warne. “Dave left a lot of love.”
Dark Matters is out on 10 September. The Final Full Tour reaches the UK at Lincoln Engine Shed on 25 January.
I am once again indebted to Chatts99 for sharing a real, genuine gig from 2021!!!
Here is Mr Cornwell at the Stone Valley Festival South that finally took place at Great Amwell in Hertfordshire. Really should have attended this one but my mother turned 80 on that day so priorities kicked in. Oh well, I an sure it won't be too long before I get back into the gigging swing of things.
FLAC (24 bit): https://we.tl/t-WuZcwVG0Q9
Artwork: https://we.tl/t-lJLlL05KNn
I have just finished reading this gem of a book. Compiled from taped interviews conducted with Pete Shelley by his friend Louise Shelley (no relation) about ten years ago, this book forms a delightful and very comprehensive account of Buzzcocks in their first incarnation... straight from the memory banks of the man in the centre of that particular punk storm.
It is the clarity of Pete's recollection of nearly every aspect of band life from touring to recording back to touring that is extraordinary. Dates, events, people, it's all there in place. I have no idea if whether he was one for keeping diaries and such, but the detail of his recall will undoubtedly offer much, even to the band's most ardent fans. Ask a Strangler about events that occurred 40 plus years ago and the chances are the memories will be vague in many instances and it is not as if it was the drugs that make the difference. Buzzcocks too gained a reputation for excessive chemical abuse at the point where they were living the life of rock 'n' roll excess to the fullest extent.
Each track that the band recorded is discussed within these pages. These discussions about song construction and the technical tricks that the band employed to such great effect in the pre-digital age has given me an even greater respect for those songs that already mean the world to me and have been a staple in my life for 35 years or so.
I have heard them referred to as Manchester's Fab Four and it is easy to understand why. Their brand of pop is every bit as vital as that produced by that other Fab Four over Liverpool way. The quality of the writing and musicianship is wholly comparable, but as Pete Shelley explains, punk gave them the freedom to turn the familiar themes of The Beatles material on its head. For example, whereas The Beatles rejoiced in the confident certainty that yes, 'She Loves You', Pete and the boys lamented youthful insecurity and the paranoia of rejection with 'You Say You Don't Love Me'. The Beatles comparison can also be extended to the all important band/producer/engineer relationship. First there was John, Paul, Ringo and George and George, then along came Pete, John, Steve, Steve and Martin. Martin Rushent being in terms of studio innovation to Buzzcocks what George Martin was to The Beatles.
Everyone knows that Pete's brand of love song rarely has that 'happy ever after' vibe running through the lyrics! Reading through this track by track breakdown (no pun intended) you could become quite disillusioned and cynical towards the human condition yourself, but listen to those songs, so bright and sharp, from 'Breakdown' to 'Are Everything' and you must forgive the man completely!
As well as the band's peerless lyricism and musicality, it was the visual element of the band and the attention that they lavished on it that made them stand out amongst the punk throng as effectively as they did. If not so much a contributor to their success it did wonders for their appeal.
Apparently, when asked to comment upon Buzzcocks sartorial look, Joe Strummer declared 'Orphans!' And there is probably some harsh justification in that, but whilst they eschewed the 'Heavy Manners' stencilling favoured by Joe's boys, Buzzcocks' approach to their 'brand' style was far more coordinated and largely down to the artistic talents of Malcolm Garrett. Garrett was a graphic design student at Manchester Polytechnic between 1975 and 1978, a classic case of 'being in the right place at the right time'! In collaboration with Malcolm, the band were able to control the visual impact of Buzzcocks across the board. The creative freedoms afforded to the band by United Artists's Andrew Lauder and his team must be mentioned at this point and all credit to their belief in their artistes. Stage wear, record sleeves and music press ads were all paid meticulous attention and the overall canon of work in this respect is just stunning. From the Mondrian inspired shirts to the geometric typesetting of the singles sleeves.... it all worked and it screams 'Buzzcocks!!' (probably in a rather camp, Northern voice). It was punk, not in the narrow sense of the music alone, but from the perspective of a different way of thinking.... the way of thinking that has reverberated across four subsequent decades in the form of art, writing, film-making, fashion and yes, music.
Even when the band were cracking under the pressures of fame and the drudgery of life on the road with drink and drugs in constant supply, the quality of Buzzcocks product never waivered. The music changed for sure, bright, quick fire pop being replaced by darker, introspective material that reflected those late career pressures that the band were experiencing, not to mention the acid intake.
Thanks Pete (and Louise) for bringing to Buzzcocks fans such a valuable tome to add to the punk bookshelves!
Over the weekend, Aural Sculptors passed a hit rate of 1,500,000! Not quite viral but not bad for a humble fan site. Many thanks to readers, contributors and donors alike for supporting this site since July 2011.
Cheers,
Adrian.
Well, what to say? New material, a good thing for sure... then again always a rather apprehensive time for the fan of a band that have enjoyed a long tradition of challenging the expectations of critics alike.
Thus far we have been offered 'And If You Should See Dave…' which has done very well I believe thus far in Spotify's Rock Chart (for whatever that means). It is indeed a heartfelt track that penetrates deeply in to the near 45 year relationship between Dave and JJ. That in itself puts the song above reproach from an emotional perspective. From a musical perspective, it is my understanding that Dave's keys feature on 8 of the 11 tracks that make up 'Dark Matters' but it is entirely fitting that our first taste of the new material puts the absence of Dave Greenfield's contribution to 'that Stranglers sound' starkly in the spotlight. Use of the tubular bells offers a contrast to guitar and bass in the obvious absence of those keyboard sections and they fit very well. In my personal opinion, lyrically the sentiment is delivered a little clumsily with the line 'It would be nice to say hello, This is where your solo would go'. I have of course read the comments posted about the song and fully appreciate that it is loved by many and so it should be. Also in conversation with friends, this is the 'lump in the throat' lyrical highlight of the track.... nobody is right, nobody is wrong. So before readers climb the nearest hill to erect a gallows for my pudgy lockdown beer neck.... I am a fan through and through but also one who winces somewhat at obvious rhyming couplets... I hope that you can find forgiveness in your hearts.
For those people who regularly attend gigs, approximately half of the material will be familiar, 'Water', 'This Song', 'Payday' and 'The Last Men On The Moon' as well as the now released 'Dave'. I am sure that the remaining new tracks will represent a fitting swan song for the most important band of our lives.
