Hugh Cornwell, who was once the lead singer and guitarist in the Stranglers, has a new internet radio show devoted to movies and their music. You wouldn’t know it from his most famous song about Hollywood, but Hugh loves the moving pictures.
MrDeMilleFM is Cornwell’s second internet radio venture dedicated to film. (The interviews he did with Debbie Harry and Brian Eno for the first one, the now-defunct Sound Trax FM, have vanished along with their former home, but Cornwell says they will return in time.)
Where else could you hear John Cooper Clarke set up the themes from Johnny Guitar and Vera Cruz? Only on the half-hour special on the career of onetime Universal City mayor Ernest Borgnine the punk poet guest-hosted for MrDeMilleFM, you lucky bum! Cornwell himself has hosted ten shows so far, among them affectionate looks at the careers of Lee Marvin (whose delivery on “Wand’rin’ Star” inspired JJ Burnel’s on the Stranglers’ “Thrown Away,” incidentally) and the Marx Brothers (whose “I’m Against It” preceded the Ramones’, of course). Trailers for those two episodes are embedded below.
Cornwell’s most recent album is last year’s collaboration with John Cooper Clarke, This Time It’s Personal.
The Lee Marvin episode:
The Marx Brothers episode:
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Punk poet John Cooper Clarke sings ‘MacArthur Park’ with the Stranglers’ Hugh Cornwell
Men in black: The Stranglers’ BBC documentary about the color black, 1982
Robin Williams’ friendship with the Stranglers
The Stranglers appear in a BBC documentary about surrealism, 1978
The Stranglers’ 1979 cricket match against the UK music press, featuring Lemmy and a bag of drugs
The Stranglers’ live performance of ‘Nice ‘n’ Sleazy’ with a bunch of strippers from 1978
When DEVO met the Stranglers
The Stranglers’ secret recordings as Celia and the Mutations, 1977