The Stranglers took a short break in between Black and White and The Raven. While JJ Burnel worked on Euroman Cometh, Hugh Cornwell went to LA to record Nosferatu with Captain Beefheart’s drummer, Robert Williams. Cornwell writes that the album got its name from a series of late nights:

I was buying a lot of cocaine at the time and we were constantly leaving the studios at five in the morning and going to sleep as day was breaking. I think that had suggested the vampire connection to me, hence the album’s eventual title, Nosferatu.

There are famous guests all over Nosferatu: Ian Underwood of the Mothers plays synth on a few tracks, the Clash (credited as “various people”) sing backing vocals on “Puppets,” and Ian Dury turns up as “Duncan Poundcake” on “Wrong Way Round.” Cornwell and Williams co-wrote one song, “Rhythmic Itch,” with their brothersbaughs from other Mothersbaughs, DEVO’s Mark and Bob 1.

For the next two minutes, you’ll be listening to a song recorded in late ‘78 or early ‘79 by Mark Mothersbaugh (lead vocals and Prophet synthesizer), Bob Mothersbaugh (guitar and backing vocals), Hugh Cornwell (guitar), and Robert Williams (drums and bass marimba). Have fun in punk/new wave heaven, or hell, as the case may be.
 

 
On September 16, 1979, the Stranglers held a cricket match to promote their new album The Raven and raise money for Capital Radio’s charity Help A London Child. They assembled a black-clad group of punk and reggae musicians to face a team made up of their usual adversaries and objects of abuse: rock journalists. Earlier that year, JJ Burnel had gaffer-taped writer Philippe Manoeuvre to the Eiffel Tower (Burnel: “it was only about 300 feet up”) and left him there, with his pants pooled around his ankles. “He wasn’t best pleased,” Jet Black remembers.

Cricket is played by teams of eleven, but the Stranglers were only four. To fill themselves out to the Stranglers XI for the charity match, the band recruited members of Motörhead, the Damned, X-Ray Spex, Flying Lizards, Steel Pulse, and other bands—a lot of people, according to their opponents in the Music Press XI, who claimed they saw a few supernumerary players on the field. Even Eddy Grant was on the massive team of rockers (“as many as 40 [...] at any one time,” the NME reported) that assembled at Paddington Recreation Ground on that storied day.
 

via Aural Sculptors
 
Lemmy showed up with a note from his doctor excusing him from the match because of a wart on his foot, but he lent his team moral and chemical support, while Kate Bush cancelled, according to Hugh Cornwell’s account in The Stranglers: Song by Song:

That was a fantastic event. [The Stranglers’ publicist] Alan Edwards came up with the idea of playing against the music press and managed to secure Brondesbury cricket ground in north London. Our team were dressed head to toe in black and wore black pads, black gloves and black caps. We even used black bats.

Kate Bush was going to play but pulled out. Lemmy turned up but had injured himself and had a sick note from his doctor, which was quite funny. He said, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll be watching on the boundary. If anyone needs a pick-up, my friend has a bag of whizz!’

Jet played and maybe John did. Some of the Finchley Boys played and a couple of members of the Damned. It just so happened that a friend of our dealer at the time had been a Hampshire [C]olt and was a demon fast bowler in his youth, so we got him out of retirement.

We batted first, with Jet and one of the large Finchley Boys opening the batting. We were all out quite cheaply, but managed to secure a tie because when the other team batted we kept sneaking on extra fielders to stop the run flow.

The opposition started complaining, but it was all for charity, so it got a bit ridiculous. The funniest point was when Richard Williams, who was editor of Melody Maker, came out to bat. He was brimming with confidence and had very expensive new equipment and strode out looking very professional. But our dealer clean bowled him almost immediately and Richard became very upset.

 

via Aural Sculptors
 
The blog Aural Sculptors has three press clippings about the match, and all of them contradict Cornwell on its outcome (“a fairly comprehensive drubbing,” the NME reported; “the Stranglers [...] spent a lot of their time lying down and threatening to take the bus home”), but at least Record Mirror corroborates Lemmy’s “bag of whizz”:

The Motorhead bit of the team had to keep vanishing behind bushes and under trucks. I really couldn’t figure out if this was for Lemmy to rest or to have some more talcum on his feet which he kept whipping out from the little paper bag. At least [I think] it was talcum, you never can tell with these rowdier boys.

Continues after the jump…

George Melly (1926-2007)
 
I have a hard time picturing the Dangerous Minds reader who wouldn’t fall in love with the rakish, bisexual jazz singer and surrealist George Melly, a bon vivant who spent his life playfully defying authority, rationality and good taste. The Telegraph’s obituary included this telling incident from Melly’s career as an ordinary seaman in the Royal Navy:

... in 1947 he was dropped from a Royal Naval Command Variety Performance after Warrant Officer Perkins discovered a pile of anarchist leaflets in his locker. Since the number he had been intending to perform before the King was his own highly suggestive rendition of Frankie and Johnnie (a song that became a standard in his repertoire) it was probably as well.

 

The Stranglers c. 1977
 
When London’s Hayward Gallery held the exhibition Dada and Surrealism Reviewed in 1978, the show was the ostensible subject of BBC2’s George Melly in “The Journey” or The Memoirs of a Self-Confessed Surrealist. Demonstrating that surrealism was not an “artistic movement,” in Melly’s phrase, but a wish to transform everyday life, the TV documentary follows Melly as he walks from his North London digs to the Hayward, reminiscing about his Dadaist and surrealist comrades along the way. He shaves, eats breakfast, enters phone boxes (to dial numbers at random and declaim surrealist verse), pisses in a urinal, and bumps into the Stranglers, who happen just to be hanging around, as if it were their full-time job to stand on the street, hating the Queen. Recognizing kindred spirits, Melly salutes the band: “Long live the Stranglers!”
 

George Melly (and is that harmonica player Lew Lewis?) on the back of the Stranglers’ “Walk on By” single
 
The five musicians hit it off so well that the Stranglers invited Melly to record a song with them. It’s fun to imagine the louche session that produced “Old Codger,” a blues number about the joys of pederasty which the Stranglers released on the B-side of their Doorsified “Walk on By.” From the irritating, unreliable, and official Stranglers biography No Mercy:

‘Old Codger’ was sung by Liverpudlian jazz maestro and hep-cat, writer and broadcaster George Melly, who had recently featured the Stranglers prominently in a BBC2 documentary on the impact of surrealism on contemporary art. Suitably flattered that their activities had been endorsed by the cognoscenti (his 1972 book Revolt Into Style: the Pop Arts in Britain was one of the most influential of its day), the band asked Melly down for a spot of brandy-drinking and crooning, and he obliged with a great vocal for the ‘Old Codger’ track.

And Hugh Cornwell’s autobiography includes this scene:

Alan Yentob is making a BBC2 documentary about Dada, and George Melly asks for us to be in the programme. We appear as the inheritors of Dada, and I write a song for George to sing with us, called ‘Old Codger’ about an ageing man with an obsession with a choirboy. I show the lyrics to George and he says, ‘Very nice.’

Keep reading after the jump…

 
When Robin Williams died in August, one of the most unexpected eulogies came from JJ Burnel, the bassist and singer in the Stranglers, who says that he and Williams struck up a friendship in the early 80s. Burnel writes that Williams visited England in 1982 and stayed at the house of drummer Jet Black, where the Stranglers were rehearsing the songs for Feline. Williams then stayed at Burnel’s house in Cambridgeshire, where the comedian and his first wife, Valerie Velardi, reportedly conceived their son Zak. Burnel remembers:

It is with great sadness that I woke up on Tuesday 12th of August to learn of the death of Robin Williams, the actor, comedian, musician and all round genius.

The word genius is often too readily used but having known the man I can vouchsafe the term is appropriate in his case.

I met him through a girlfriend of mine in the early eighties. She had met him in Los Angeles through a film cameraman called Dave Stump, a friend with whom he played in a band. At the time he had just become famous through a tv series called Mork and Mindy and the film Popeye.

When the Stranglers were to play on the west coast of the US he had invited me to stay at his house on his ranch in the Napa valley. He was a wonderful host and I soon started to appreciate his fame when I went out to dinner with him in San Francisco and saw the effect he had on a whole restaurant when he entertained them as a distraction to afford us, his guests, a diversion from the attention.

I reciprocated the gesture when he flew over to Europe with his then wife Val and met him at Heathrow. The Stranglers were in the middle of preparing Feline at Jet’s house in the west country and he was going to hang out with us at Jet’s and then come over to my house in Cambridgeshire for a few days.

Every evening we would stop rehearsals to go down to a local pub before resuming work. He would come down with us and that was when we would discover the multiple personalities and the continuous flow of ideas and comic repartee that had us all in stitches. He would literally have conversations with himself and the other personalities he inhabited.

After a week at Jet’s I drove him over to my house. I would like to think that it was the laid back atmosphere on the Fens that allowed him to conceive his son Zak at my house in the summer of 1982. At least that’s what his wife told me later.

After that, as his Hollywood career took off, he would call me whenever he was in London.

Over the years we lost touch but I have nothing but very fond memories of a very talented and genuine person.

If it is true as to the way of his death it is only testimony to his great sensibility and humanity and the world is a much poorer place for his disappearance.

The Stranglers’ original vocalist and guitarist, Hugh Cornwell, devoted two pages of his 2004 book A Multitude of Sins to memories of encounters with singer Robbie Williams, drummer Robert Williams, and comedian Robin Williams. Cornwell’s account would put Robin Williams’ visit with the Stranglers about a year earlier than Burnel’s, but Zak was born in 1983, so Cornwell is either mistaken about which album they were working on or recalling a separate visit.

I’m jogging with Robin Williams in Gloucestershire. John Burnel has met him somewhere at a celebrity dinner and he’s come down to hang out with us while we rehearse before recording the La Folie album. He’s a lovely bloke and expresses a desire to come running with me first thing every morning. He’s in good shape and is keeping up with me, even though I’ve been doing it regularly. He’s a bundle of energy and constantly comes up with funny life observations. Jet’s got a souped-up Fiesta with lots of lights mounted on the front bumper and Robin asks me if he has to pull a trailer carrying a battery for the extra lights.