 |
| At the beginning... |
Who They’re For:
Depends on when you listen: punk (or thereabouts) from 1977 to 1979 (Rattus Norvegicus, No More Heroes, Black and White, maybe The Raven), art/proto-goth in 1981 (The Gospel According to the Meninblack), and what one Wiki-editor called “sophisti-pop” from 1981 to 1984 (La Folie, Feline, and Aural Sculpture). I struggled with their late-middle catalog - i.e., when they sought to establish “cult status” in the States (Dreamtime and 10). Stranglers in the Night aside, Spotify either lost track of or didn’t bother with the rest of their 1990s material - though I read good things about Norfolk Coast - but I well and truly rate their last studio work, 2012’s Giants, which is just straight, savvy rock.
A Little More
“Not anyone can be a Strangler. Paul Roberts and Jon Ellis could sing and play very well but they didn’t feel like Stranglers. Baz on the other hand does. He has the attitude and the music.”
The Stranglers were a rain-check from one of my earlier, dog-pile playlists - the one of two featuring pioneering punk bands - and it foundered on my need for variety. That’s never an issue with The Stranglers, a band with enough catalog for five. This feels like a good starting point:
“Burnel: There were some funny incidents in those early days. We were booked to play a Young Conservatives dance.
Black: At the start of the first song, there were 300 people in the hall. By the end, there were four left watching. But they started following us. It was a similar story all over the country.”
The “Burnel” in that quote is Jean-Jacques Burnel, the band’s original bassist and…arguably, The Stranglers’ standard-bearer as they enter their fifth decade; “Black” is Jet Black (aka, Brian Duffy), was the band’s drummer/founder, but he was always older than the rest of them. The rest of the key members were Dave Greenfield, their second keyboardist after Hans Warmling, and Hugh Cornwell…and, holy shit, there’s a story. The Stranglers came together piece-by-piece but several came in with hefty resumes - e.g., Cornwell had spent time with the well-respected Richard Thompson, Black spent some years as a jazz drummer, while Burnel had enough polish to play with symphony orchestras. When they became The Stranglers, they kept the smarts and quality, but embraced the liberty of playing under the “punk rock” banner.
Black funded the operation (on a shoestring, by all accounts) with the success he built from “a fleet of ice cream trucks.” At least one of those trucks carried the band and its gear all over the United Kingdom in their early years. They packed it full, sometimes with the band traveling on top of the equipment and, as related in a (very useful) 2014 word-of-mouth history in The Guardian (honestly, it’s the source for all the good stuff), spent some nights in fields with cows or on lawns by the sea; good, romantic stuff from a band’s struggling days. They had very wild times that most people just call assault these days – e.g., squaring off in a brawl against The Clash, the Sex Pistols and The Ramones, gaffer-taping a pesky French journalist 400-feet up on the Eiffel Tower, concierges locked in closets, a couple riots in Sweden, with at least one featuring “Teddy Boys” and Molotov cocktails, etc. - all of it very punk…or, because the 70s, the things bands did out of a combination of meeting expectations and because no one stopped them.
The ties to the UK’s punk scene followed more to the time and place they arrived, but also their sound, antics, and attitude; neither of them wanted much to do with the other: the punks mistrusted The Stranglers’ musical virtuosity, commitment to the concept, and their age. Which was fair, because The Stranglers couldn’t play straight punk past three albums (it was a fling, basically). They had, however, “moved units,” which handed them carte blanche for their next project…which they used to make the concept-laden, sonically-experimental album, The Gospel According to the Meninblack…and probably that year in “a surreal, dark and necromantic abyss” courtesy of a year of “experimental heroin use” by Brunel and Cornwell, aka, a project in idle hands. They repaid the loan and borrowed time with even better sales and the more sophisticated sound of La Jolie, Feline, and - their biggest stab at the broader European market, Aural Sculpture. The Stranglers had real, trailblazing success in the UK (States-side, not so much), and that kept labels coming to them with paychecks and artistic freedom. An article in an outlet called Louder Than Wartook a pretty good swing at defining their quality and appeal:
“They also have an unconventional melodic prowess – not the tried and tested blues-based melodies of rock n roll but a symphonic, almost European classical feel which you can hear in the Burnel inspired classics with their longer, swooping, instrumental pieces…Songs, where it felt like the Stranglers, were, perhaps, based more in a European classical than in American 12 bar roots. The Chassis of their music may have been initially a blues rock but fundamentally it’s actually very European.”
The finer years ended when Cornwell left the band in August 1990, and with mutterings about “a spent force” artistically and real anger at Burnel, in particular (but…heroin year?). In all the post-mortems I’ve read – and from both sides of the divide – the split caused serious disruption and, to this day, no one still in The Stranglers talks to Cornwell, or vice versa. Even with a divide that sharp and total, no one shows much for hard feelings (then again, these are Englishmen of a certain age). They continued playing and touring for nearly five decades, even if with players falling out of the live act little by little. For Black, the band’s elder statesman, it went from playing parts of tours to parts of shows, then finally passing the sticks to a presumably middle-aged drummer named Jim Macaulay. Louder Than War clocks all the names, but The Stranglers pulled in new members as needed - some worked and some didn’t; see the quote at the top - but Burnel and Greenfield held together the project all the way up to 2019. They even had another studio album in the works, with select songs like “Men on the Moon,” “Anger,” and “Stallion” already made available, if just for reviewing (I couldn't find clips/audio). And then, like it happened everywhere, COVID-19 hit and took Greenfield with it. The end?
A hell of a run for a hell of a band. I don’t like everything The Stranglers put out, but that’s becoming less important. As I've listened to more music over the past three, four years and more closely, an idea devloped, one I find I’m using more while applying it to fewer bands/artists: that the quality comes through sometimes, even in the stuff I don’t like. Not many bands can change their sound like that - or just say “fuck it” and decide not to have one - and hold on to an audience. The talent and quality gave The Stranglers the brilliance to back up the balls. They put out albums I don't like, but I don't think they ever put out a bad album.
About the Sampler
I wound up making less a sampler than a 25-song work-in-progress. If you like what they do, you can’t help but want to spend more time with a lot of songs (and a lot of them didn't make the sampler). As implied above, I have my favorites and nothing about this second pass at The Stranglers changed that. I still rate their “punk stuff” among the genre’s best - represented here by “Goodbye Toulouse,” “Go Buddy Go,” “(Get A) Grip [on Yourself]” (Rattus Norvegicus), the pulsing “Straighten Out” and (site fav) “Something Better Change” (No More Heroes), the ragged “Toiler on the Sea” (Black and White…which needs more time), and (what the hell?) “Dead Loss Angeles,” “Baroque Bordello” and “Nuclear Device (The Wizard of Aus),” which somehow shared space with “Duchess” (on the transitional, The Raven. If I’m happy about anything, it’s how well some songs from their “new wave-adjacent” period held up since I last listened to them: about half the sampler comes from La Folie (“Tramp,” “Golden Brown,” and “Cruel Garden”), Feline (“It’s a Small World,” “Ships that Pass in the Night,” “The European Female (In Celebration Of),” and “Let’s Tango in Paris”), and Aural Sculpture (“Skin Deep,” “No Mercy,” “Spain,” and “Laughing”). Je regrette rien…
The one thing that most impressed me about The Stranglers the first time ‘round, it was how much I liked an album made by straight-up old guys. Some loose math puts Jet Black in his mid-70s when that came out, a number I’d assume put Brunel and Greenfield round about their mid-60s at least. And yet they put out “Giants,” “Lowlands” and “My Fickle Resolve” on Giants in 2012. They get away with it because they can…
Depends on when you listen: punk (or thereabouts) from 1977 to 1979 (Rattus Norvegicus, No More Heroes, Black and White, maybe The Raven), art/proto-goth in 1981 (The Gospel According to the Meninblack), and what one Wiki-editor called “sophisti-pop” from 1981 to 1984 (La Folie, Feline, and Aural Sculpture). I struggled with their late-middle catalog - i.e., when they sought to establish “cult status” in the States (Dreamtime and 10). Stranglers in the Night aside, Spotify either lost track of or didn’t bother with the rest of their 1990s material - though I read good things about Norfolk Coast - but I well and truly rate their last studio work, 2012’s Giants, which is just straight, savvy rock.
A Little More
“Not anyone can be a Strangler. Paul Roberts and Jon Ellis could sing and play very well but they didn’t feel like Stranglers. Baz on the other hand does. He has the attitude and the music.”
The Stranglers were a rain-check from one of my earlier, dog-pile playlists - the one of two featuring pioneering punk bands - and it foundered on my need for variety. That’s never an issue with The Stranglers, a band with enough catalog for five. This feels like a good starting point:
“Burnel: There were some funny incidents in those early days. We were booked to play a Young Conservatives dance.
Black: At the start of the first song, there were 300 people in the hall. By the end, there were four left watching. But they started following us. It was a similar story all over the country.”
The “Burnel” in that quote is Jean-Jacques Burnel, the band’s original bassist and…arguably, The Stranglers’ standard-bearer as they enter their fifth decade; “Black” is Jet Black (aka, Brian Duffy), was the band’s drummer/founder, but he was always older than the rest of them. The rest of the key members were Dave Greenfield, their second keyboardist after Hans Warmling, and Hugh Cornwell…and, holy shit, there’s a story. The Stranglers came together piece-by-piece but several came in with hefty resumes - e.g., Cornwell had spent time with the well-respected Richard Thompson, Black spent some years as a jazz drummer, while Burnel had enough polish to play with symphony orchestras. When they became The Stranglers, they kept the smarts and quality, but embraced the liberty of playing under the “punk rock” banner.
Black funded the operation (on a shoestring, by all accounts) with the success he built from “a fleet of ice cream trucks.” At least one of those trucks carried the band and its gear all over the United Kingdom in their early years. They packed it full, sometimes with the band traveling on top of the equipment and, as related in a (very useful) 2014 word-of-mouth history in The Guardian (honestly, it’s the source for all the good stuff), spent some nights in fields with cows or on lawns by the sea; good, romantic stuff from a band’s struggling days. They had very wild times that most people just call assault these days – e.g., squaring off in a brawl against The Clash, the Sex Pistols and The Ramones, gaffer-taping a pesky French journalist 400-feet up on the Eiffel Tower, concierges locked in closets, a couple riots in Sweden, with at least one featuring “Teddy Boys” and Molotov cocktails, etc. - all of it very punk…or, because the 70s, the things bands did out of a combination of meeting expectations and because no one stopped them.
The ties to the UK’s punk scene followed more to the time and place they arrived, but also their sound, antics, and attitude; neither of them wanted much to do with the other: the punks mistrusted The Stranglers’ musical virtuosity, commitment to the concept, and their age. Which was fair, because The Stranglers couldn’t play straight punk past three albums (it was a fling, basically). They had, however, “moved units,” which handed them carte blanche for their next project…which they used to make the concept-laden, sonically-experimental album, The Gospel According to the Meninblack…and probably that year in “a surreal, dark and necromantic abyss” courtesy of a year of “experimental heroin use” by Brunel and Cornwell, aka, a project in idle hands. They repaid the loan and borrowed time with even better sales and the more sophisticated sound of La Jolie, Feline, and - their biggest stab at the broader European market, Aural Sculpture. The Stranglers had real, trailblazing success in the UK (States-side, not so much), and that kept labels coming to them with paychecks and artistic freedom. An article in an outlet called Louder Than Wartook a pretty good swing at defining their quality and appeal:
“They also have an unconventional melodic prowess – not the tried and tested blues-based melodies of rock n roll but a symphonic, almost European classical feel which you can hear in the Burnel inspired classics with their longer, swooping, instrumental pieces…Songs, where it felt like the Stranglers, were, perhaps, based more in a European classical than in American 12 bar roots. The Chassis of their music may have been initially a blues rock but fundamentally it’s actually very European.”
The finer years ended when Cornwell left the band in August 1990, and with mutterings about “a spent force” artistically and real anger at Burnel, in particular (but…heroin year?). In all the post-mortems I’ve read – and from both sides of the divide – the split caused serious disruption and, to this day, no one still in The Stranglers talks to Cornwell, or vice versa. Even with a divide that sharp and total, no one shows much for hard feelings (then again, these are Englishmen of a certain age). They continued playing and touring for nearly five decades, even if with players falling out of the live act little by little. For Black, the band’s elder statesman, it went from playing parts of tours to parts of shows, then finally passing the sticks to a presumably middle-aged drummer named Jim Macaulay. Louder Than War clocks all the names, but The Stranglers pulled in new members as needed - some worked and some didn’t; see the quote at the top - but Burnel and Greenfield held together the project all the way up to 2019. They even had another studio album in the works, with select songs like “Men on the Moon,” “Anger,” and “Stallion” already made available, if just for reviewing (I couldn't find clips/audio). And then, like it happened everywhere, COVID-19 hit and took Greenfield with it. The end?
A hell of a run for a hell of a band. I don’t like everything The Stranglers put out, but that’s becoming less important. As I've listened to more music over the past three, four years and more closely, an idea devloped, one I find I’m using more while applying it to fewer bands/artists: that the quality comes through sometimes, even in the stuff I don’t like. Not many bands can change their sound like that - or just say “fuck it” and decide not to have one - and hold on to an audience. The talent and quality gave The Stranglers the brilliance to back up the balls. They put out albums I don't like, but I don't think they ever put out a bad album.
About the Sampler
I wound up making less a sampler than a 25-song work-in-progress. If you like what they do, you can’t help but want to spend more time with a lot of songs (and a lot of them didn't make the sampler). As implied above, I have my favorites and nothing about this second pass at The Stranglers changed that. I still rate their “punk stuff” among the genre’s best - represented here by “Goodbye Toulouse,” “Go Buddy Go,” “(Get A) Grip [on Yourself]” (Rattus Norvegicus), the pulsing “Straighten Out” and (site fav) “Something Better Change” (No More Heroes), the ragged “Toiler on the Sea” (Black and White…which needs more time), and (what the hell?) “Dead Loss Angeles,” “Baroque Bordello” and “Nuclear Device (The Wizard of Aus),” which somehow shared space with “Duchess” (on the transitional, The Raven. If I’m happy about anything, it’s how well some songs from their “new wave-adjacent” period held up since I last listened to them: about half the sampler comes from La Folie (“Tramp,” “Golden Brown,” and “Cruel Garden”), Feline (“It’s a Small World,” “Ships that Pass in the Night,” “The European Female (In Celebration Of),” and “Let’s Tango in Paris”), and Aural Sculpture (“Skin Deep,” “No Mercy,” “Spain,” and “Laughing”). Je regrette rien…
The one thing that most impressed me about The Stranglers the first time ‘round, it was how much I liked an album made by straight-up old guys. Some loose math puts Jet Black in his mid-70s when that came out, a number I’d assume put Brunel and Greenfield round about their mid-60s at least. And yet they put out “Giants,” “Lowlands” and “My Fickle Resolve” on Giants in 2012. They get away with it because they can…
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