Robin Williams’ wholesome friendship with The Stranglers
In the early 1980s, Robin Williams – the manic, motormouthed comic whirlwind who’d just gone supernova thanks to Mork & Mindy and a turn as a spinach-slurping sailor in Popeye – was forming an unlikely bond with one of the UK’s finest purveyors of post-punk menace: The Stranglers.
Yes, that Robin Williams. Yes, those Stranglers.
It started with a mutual friend: JJ Burnel, the band’s bass-wielding frontman, was dating someone who knew Williams through a cameraman in LA. One thing led to another, and next thing you know, Williams’ crashing with Burnel in Cambridgeshire and dropping in on rehearsals at Jet Black’s country home while the band worked on Feline. At night, they’d hit the pub. In between pints, the shy locals witnessed Williams morph into a one-man vaudeville act, holding court with rapid-fire banter and full-blown character monologues. The band was floored. Here was this American superstar just… riffing with a bunch of scruffy punks like he’d wandered in from another planet.
Williams was already deep into the first wave of his fame, but it hadn’t changed him. When Burnel visited him in Napa Valley, the comedic actor treated him like royalty, entertaining an entire restaurant just to deflect attention from his guests. It wasn’t shtick. It was something like kindness with a punchline.
Eventually, Williams and his then-wife Val stayed at Burnel’s place in the Fens. According to Val, it was there—somewhere between the flat farmlands and the fuzz pedals—that their son Zak was conceived. “I’d like to think it was the laid-back atmosphere,” Burnel would later write with a wink.
Hugh Cornwell, the Stranglers’ original frontman, remembers it slightly differently. He claims Williams visited during the La Folie sessions a year earlier and even joined him for morning jogs through Gloucestershire. Cornwell recalls the comedian keeping pace like a pro, tossing off surreal one-liners between breaths and poking fun at Jet Black’s over-modified Ford Fiesta. “Does it tow a battery trailer for all those lights?” Williams cracked.
The dates might be fuzzy – chalk it up to the memory fog of life on tour and the timewarp of fame – but what’s undeniable is the affection both Stranglers felt for him. Burnel recalled losing touch as Williams’ star rose ever higher, but he never forgot the warmth, the generosity, the genius.
When Williams died in 2014, Burnel penned a moving tribute. He called him a “genuine person,” a “genius,” and someone whose death, if by his own hand, was a reflection of just how deeply he felt the world. It was a surprisingly tender eulogy from a man whose band once wrote songs about hanging fascists and peeping Toms.
And in the end, what’s more punk than turning a Hollywood megastar into your drinking buddy, jam partner, and houseguest? Only Robin Williams could fit that role—and wear it with such irreverent grace.