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Dave Greenfield’s pre-Stranglers bubblegum single
09.28.2018
07:48 am
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The Italian sleeve of the Blue Maxi’s 1970 single (via Discogs)
 
Keyboardist Dave Greenfield had been playing in rock and roll bands for over a decade when he joined the Stranglers in 1975. I have not yet managed to hear the pre-Stranglers groups the Initials (pictured below), Freeway or Credo, but Greenfield’s old prog band Rusty Butler, whose name suggests a particularly arcane and challenging sex act, has a few tracks up on this YouTube channel, and a record survives by a combo called the Blue Maxi.
 

The Initials in Germany, 1967; Dave Greenfield on organ at far right (via SMART)
 
Here’s what the Stranglers’ “authorised,” “uncensored” and way out-of-print biography No Mercy has to say about Greenfield’s early years in music:

Dave left school at 17 before his A levels, and spent the whole of his 18th year in Germany playing covers at gigs in American bases and civilian clubs. The next half-a-dozen years or more were spent travelling to and from the continent, working in England to raise the capital to finance a music career in Germany. In the late 60s and early 70s, Germany was home to some of the greatest talents in the pantheon of rock – Kraftwerk, Can, Faust, Cluster and Tangerine Dream . . . But Germany was also an important market for more mainstream pop acts and had a booming club circuit, ideal for both the journeyman professional or the ingénue keen to learn his or her trade. Back in Brighton in the frequent gaps between tours, he earned some extra cash tuning piano and mastering the now out-of-date technique of compositing for his Dad’s printing firm. Like JJ, he also developed something of an infatuation with motorcycles, although his interest has not maintained the Burnel proportions of idolatry still in evidence to this day. Dave was the only one of the band who was a true musician before becoming a Strangler and, in his spells in the UK had worked professionally in groups such as The Initials, Rusty Butler, and Credo.

 

The French sleeve of the single (via Discogs)
 
In 1970, Greenfield played on the Blue Maxi’s lone 45, a bubblegum (psych-pop?) cover of Jerry Keller’s 1958 teenage idyll “Here Comes Summer,” released on the Major Minor label. Greenfield’s organ is lower in the mix than it is on the Stranglers’ records, but that’s unmistakably him pictured on the sleeve of the French single, third from the left, flashing a peace sign. To my ears, the Blue Maxi sounds like it would have been at home on Buddah Records. Enjoy its sunny, uncomplicated groove below.

Posted by Oliver Hall
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09.28.2018
07:48 am
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That time Robert Fripp and Peter Hammill played in the Stranglers
08.24.2018
08:44 am
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JJ Burnel, Richard Jobson and John Ellis on the cover of ‘The Stranglers and Friends Live in Concert’
 
Busted for possession of various drugs late in 1979, Hugh Cornwell was tried the following January and sentenced to an eight-week stretch in Pentonville. The sentence was bad news for Hugh, and it was bad news for ticketholders to the Stranglers’ upcoming engagement at the Rainbow with opening acts UB40 and the Monochrome Set (night one) and Joy Division and Section 25 (night two).

The Stranglers rallied. Instead of canceling the Rainbow dates, they put together a special set with guests from the Cure, the Members, Steel Pulse, Hawkwind, Stiff Little Fingers, Dr. Feelgood and the Vibrators. Hazel O’Connor, Toyah Willcox, Ian Dury and Richard Jobson took turns at the mike, and the missing singer and guitarist was hung in effigy to mark his absence. 

Best of all, they got Peter Hammill to sing two songs from The Raven, the title tune and “Shah Shah A Go Go,” along with the crowd-crushing first track from Black and White, “Tank.” On the second night’s performance of “Tank,” they managed to reunite Hammill with his sometime collaborator, the good, great and excellent guitarist Robert Fripp. “Tank” was the only number to feature both men; Fripp also played on the evening’s versions of “Threatened” and “Toiler on the Sea,” the latter sung by Quadrophenia star Phil Daniels.
 

JJ Burnel and Ian Dury onstage at the Rainbow (via Aural Sculptors)
 
There are fewer photos of these shows floating around than I would have thought, considering how many and how vivid are the images they conjure before my mind’s eye. One concertgoer remembers that when Billy Idol tried to join the company onstage for the second night’s encore, he “was promptly put on his arse by JJ Burnel.”

Highlights of the second night at the Rainbow appeared (at least semi-officially?) on the CD The Stranglers and Friends Live in Concert, and a bootleg with additional tracks exists. Cornwell wrote about his time behind bars in the booklet Inside Information, which is reprinted in his autobiography, A Multitude of Sins. Below, hear the angelic sounds Hammill and Fripp made as short-term Stranglers.
 

Posted by Oliver Hall
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08.24.2018
08:44 am
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Brian Eno, Debbie Harry play movie soundtracks on ex-Strangler Hugh Cornwell’s internet radio show
06.28.2018
08:18 am
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The March 3, 1979 issue of ‘Record Mirror’
 
Last summer, I posted clips from MrDeMilleFM, the new internet radio venture of former Stranglers singer and guitarist Hugh Cornwell. It’s devoted entirely to movies and their music, and it’s fun. Hugh’s got specials on William Wellman, John Frankenheimer, Lana Turner, Gloria Grahame and Steve McQueen; he’s got interviews with Ken Loach, John Sayles, John Altman, Peter Webber and David Puttnam. Behold his mighty hand!

Since that time, two episodes of Cornwell’s old internet radio show, Sound Trax FM, have surfaced in the MrDeMilleFM archive. These will interest DM readers, because Hugh’s guests are Brian Eno and Debbie Harry, playing and talking about their favorite movie music.

Among the records Eno spins during his 80-minute visit with Cornwell are Samira Tewfik’s “Hobbak Morr,” the source for “A Secret Life” on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, and “I’m Deranged,” the immortal track from Bowie and Eno’s Outside that David Lynch took as the theme for Lost Highway. Speaking about which, Eno praises the still unreleased album-length improvisation he and Bowie recorded at the beginning of the Outside sessions:

In a room together, we played for 72 minutes a kind of suite, really, which he improvised the singing over, and it turned into this amazingly complex and interesting story which finally became something called “Leon,” which sort of became the backbone of the album Outside. But the original improvisation, which I listened to not very long ago, is absolutely incredible! You think: How could anyone do this without having a plan in advance?

 

 
Debbie Harry’s episode is too short at 47 minutes, but she brings along the best song on the Performance soundtrack and talks about working with David Cronenberg on Videodrome and John Waters on Hairspray.

Tracklists and the shows, after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Oliver Hall
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06.28.2018
08:18 am
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Ex-Strangler Hugh Cornwell has an internet radio show about film history and movie music


 
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).

More after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Oliver Hall
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08.31.2017
09:06 am
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The Stranglers’ secret recordings as Celia and the Mutations, 1977
02.02.2017
09:06 am
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During the summer of ‘77, the new wave band Celia and the Mutations released its first single, an update of Tommy James and the Shondells’ “Mony Mony” backed with a cover of the Stranglers’ “Mean to Me.” Celia was a new face, but there were clues to the identity of her backing band: that Stranglers tune on the B-side, for one, and the distinctive sounds of Dave Greenfield’s keys and JJ Burnel’s “Barracuda bass” on the actual record itself, not to mention the ads in the music papers that paired Celia’s face with the same image of the Stranglers’ silhouettes that was printed on the back of the record sleeve. In fact, these were not so much clues as a series of billboards, blimps and skywriters announcing the Stranglers’ participation; I think that, if you were a Stranglers fan, it would have taken genius to miss the Mutations’ true identities. “Yes, we know!” the ads screamed over the outlines of Cornwell, Burnel, Greenfield, and Black. “But who is Celia?”

Celia Gollin’s discography is easy reading. Just before the Mutations, she and Brian Eno were credited as the vocalists on Gavin Bryars’ “1, 2, 1-2-3-4” from Ensemble Pieces, a 1975 release on Eno’s Obscure label. Then there are the two Celia and the Mutations singles, and “the rest,” in the words of Albion’s ever-living poet, “is silence.”

Gollin came in contact with the Stranglers through their manager, Dai Davies, Burnel says:

Dai Davies came up with the idea of us working with Celia and to lend our kudos and musicianship to this girl he was trying to push. He wanted me to write songs with her, one of which featured Wilko (Johnson) too.

Sounds profiled the Mutations in July, after writer Chas de Whalley witnessed their performance of “Mony Mony” during a Stranglers gig at the Nashville. De Whalley gave Celia’s last name as “the Tolkienesque Gollum,” and reported that Davies had discovered her singing “camp cabaret” in a Chelsea restaurant, where she was accompanied by Kilburn and the High Roads’ keyboardist, Rod Melvin. Davies:

She was mixing Marlene Dietrich songs with Kinks and Velvet Underground stuff. And she sounded so polite and English and proper that I thought it would be really great to see her singing in front of a nasty dirty rock band like the Stranglers. The contrast would be incredible.

But if we credit the comments section of this discography, years later, Davies told a different story to the Stranglers’ fan club magazine, Strangled:

She was a make up artist who had done the band’s make up for one of the albums. The Mutations idea wasn’t as successful as we hoped, but we did a new Mutations which consisted of Terry Williams the drummer from Man, Wilko Johnson and Jean-Jacques [Burnel].

 

 
Make-up artist was one of the professions listed in the Sounds profile; that checks out. But who knows what to believe anymore, in the “age of computer”? Could up be down? ¿¿¿Could future be past???

The “new Mutations” Davies refers to above recorded Celia’s second and last single, “You Better Believe Me” b/w “Round and Around.” The change of personnel might explain why the A-side is credited to “Celia and the Fabulous Mutations” and the B-side to “Celia and the Young Mutations.” But who knows what to believe anymore, etc.

After the jump, hear both sides of Celia and the Mutations’ thrilling debut from 40 summers ago…

READ ON
Posted by Oliver Hall
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02.02.2017
09:06 am
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Twenty hilarious minutes of Hugh Cornwell from The Stranglers insulting the audience
10.06.2016
09:11 am
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The Stranglers arrested for inciting a riot in Nice, France, 1980
 
One of my favorite Stranglers tracks belongs to the spoken word genre. The B-side “An Evening with Hugh Cornwell” is just 20 minutes of Hugh talking to audiences on the Aural Sculpture tour, c. ‘84/‘85. It’s a bit like Lee Ving from FEAR winding up the crowd in The Decline of Western Civilization, but slower to build and, for me, even more hilarious. It made me sob uncontrollably with laughter the first three or four times I listened to it.

The other two tracks on the Stranglers’ Official Bootleg twelve-inch, “Hitman” and a live version of “Shakin’ Like A Leaf,” surfaced on the recent B-sides compilation Here & There, but “An Evening with Hugh Cornwell” has never been released in digital format.

A sampling of Hugh’s wit and wisdom that doesn’t spoil the best laughs:

What’s wrong? What’s happened? Has it been a depressing day in Sheffield… again?

If you paid ten pounds, you’re a mug! You’re an absolute mug. I wouldn’t pay ten pounds to see us. I wouldn’t! I’d go out and buy two LPs.

Most—all musicians would come up here and say what a great place Newcastle is and you’re all such wonderful people, but I’m not going to say that, ‘cause I think that Newcastle’s awful. Oh, it’s an awful place.

Someone up here is really thick ‘cause he’s thrown his identity card here. He’s gonna forget who he is. Oh no, it’s a lady.

Listen, after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Oliver Hall
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10.06.2016
09:11 am
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The Stranglers’ live performance of ‘Nice ‘n’ Sleazy’ with a bunch of strippers from 1978
01.25.2016
11:15 am
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Jean-Jacques Burnel and Hugh Cornwell on the stage at Battersea Park in London, September 16th, 1978" height="277" width="465" />
Jean-Jacques Burnel and Hugh Cornwell of The Stranglers on the stage at Battersea Park in London, September 16th, 1978
 
Back in 1977, the members of the Greater London Council were not the biggest fans of punk rock instigators, The Stranglers. According to legend, (and detailed in the book, England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond) at a show at The Rainbow in London, Strangler vocalist Hugh Cornwell wore a shirt with the word “fuck” on it. This didn’t go over well with the GLC, and The Stranglers set was cut short. After that, the GLC banned the The Stranglers from booking and playing gigs around London. Finally, on September 16th, 1978, the band was able to organize and play an outdoor gig at Battersea Park in London. And thanks to the fact that The Stranglers love trouble, it wouldn’t go off without a good dose of controversy.
 
Hugh Cornwell and his
Two of my favorites things; Hugh Cornwell of The Stranglers and the word “fuck”
 
Showbill for The Stranglers at Battlesea Park, August 16, 1978
Showbill for The Stranglers show at Battersea Park, August 16, 1978

The line-up for the show at Battersea included Peter Gabriel, Scottish punks the Skids, English band The Spizzoil (better-known in the US as Athletico Spizz 80 and for their “Where’s Captain Kirk?” single, also known as Spizzenergi and The Spizzles), a band called The Edge, and a comedian that was being managed by Cornwell at the time known as “Johnny Rubbish.

Everything was pretty mellow until nearly the end of The Stranglers set when the band slid into “Nice ‘n’ Sleazy” from their 1978 record, Black and White. During the song, The Stranglers brought a group of strippers onstage (both male and female) and a guy with a whip (because why not?), who all proceeded to serve up some daytime strip-club, full-frontal glamor for the audience. Although the show was filmed, the footage that’s gotten around isn’t amazing quality by any means. Lucky for us, the five-minutes of the completely bonkers (and NSFW if you haven’t already figured that one out) performance of “Nice ‘n’ Sleazy” is pretty great, and I’ve posted it below for your viewing pleasure.
 

The Stranglers and their stripper posse performing “Nice ‘n’ Sleazy” at Battersea Park, London, 1978

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Men in black: The Stranglers’ BBC documentary about the color black, 1982

Posted by Cherrybomb
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01.25.2016
11:15 am
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Punk rock icons get the comic book treatment in ‘Visions of Rock,’ 1981
11.18.2015
09:24 am
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John Lydon by Brendan McCarthy
John Lydon by Brendan McCarthy
 
Like many of you, I was once an avid collector of comic books. While it’s still in my nature to pick up an occasionally graphic novel (my last one was The Big Book of Mischief from the great UK illustrator, Krent Able), I was naturally drawn to the illustrations of the punks from the 70s done by several artists who would go on to make great contributions to the world of comic book art in a publication from 1981, Visions of Rock
 
Visions of Rock by Mal Burns (on the cover Chrissie Hynde, Rod Stewart and Debbie Harry)
Visions of Rock by Mal Burns (on the cover Chrissie Hynde, Rod Stewart and Debbie Harry)
 
Although including Rod Stewart on the cover is a bit perplexing (as are some of the illustrations in the book itself) loads of incredibly talented illustrators contributed work to Visions of Rock such as Bryan Talbot (who worked on Sandman with Neil Gaiman), Brett Ewins (of Judge Dredd fame who sadly passed away in February of this year), Brendan McCarthy (who most recently worked with George Miller on a little film called Mad Max: Fury Road, perhaps you’ve heard of it) and Hunt Emerson whose work appears in nearly every book in the “Big Book Of” series.

Inside you’ll find comic book-style renditions of your favorite 70s punks like Sid Vicious (equipped with a chainsaw no less), Elvis Costello, Brian Ferry (wait, he’s not a punk rocker…), The Stranglers and others. Here’s a bit of the backstory on the making of Visions of Rock from comic book illustrator, David Hine (who worked with Marvel UK back in the 80s and whose work appears in the book):
 

This company that put out Visions of Rock, Communication Vectors, was run by a guy called Mal Burns, who also produced the comic Pssst! It was a weird setup, I think the (our) money came from a mysterious French millionaire. We were all paid about $200

 
The Stranglers by Stuart Briers
The Stranglers by Stuart Briers
 
I must admit, I’m a huge fan of Brendan McCarthy’s caricature of John Lydon (at the top of the post) looking like a crazed super villain descending upon London, compelled by the powers of both filth and fury. If you dig the images in this post, Visions of Rock can be had from third-party vendors over at Amazon for about $20 bucks, or less.
 
Sid Vicious by Brendan McCarthy
Sid Vicious by Brendan McCarthy
 
Elvis Costello by Brent Emerson
Elvis Costello by Hunt Emerson
 
More comic book versions of punk rock royalty after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Cherrybomb
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11.18.2015
09:24 am
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JJ Burnel: Stranglers bassist, karate master
10.24.2014
10:41 am
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If you find yourself in this situation, RUN.

Add this to the list of reasons to be very, very nice to Stranglers bassist and singer Jean-Jacques “JJ” Burnel, if you should ever meet him: he can kill you with his bare hands.

Burnel has, let’s say, a heavy reputation. According to the Guardian, the Stranglers’ authorized biography devotes no fewer than 20 pages to the subject “Burnel, violence.” The Stranglers’ former singer and guitarist, Hugh Cornwell, writes that he and Burnel fell out when the bassist attacked him backstage after a show in Italy, and that the incident was a factor in Cornwell’s decision to quit the band in 1990. Burnel had famously beaten up punk journalist Jon Savage in 1977 for giving No More Heroes a bad review in Sounds, and decades later, in an interview with Strangled, he was unrepentant about that encounter:

“I tracked him down one night to the Red Cow,” JJ explained. “And I punched his lights out right there in front of Jake Riviera, Andrew Lauder – our A&R guy, Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe – all these people saw what I did. So yeah, we made a lot of enemies, bless ‘em, and these people got in a lot of influential positions within the music industry and literature… Tony Parsons, Julie Burchill… But we weren’t gonna suck up to these c*nts.”

 

Has anyone heard from the magazine editor who misspelled JJ’s last name recently?
 
Burnel, now 62, started training in martial arts at the age of 19. Since 1991, he has been the branch chief and chief instructor of the Shidokan GB organization. He is a sixth dan black belt, and as a teacher he has attained the formal title of Renshi. (I am just a flabby nerd from the suburbs and I do not pretend to know what these ranks and titles mean, but they scare the shit out of me.) According to the Shidokan GB website, London residents can train with Burnel at Slim Jims in Broadgate on Tuesday evenings. There are a few clips of Burnel in competition at the 1:40 mark in the segment below, from the ITV series After They Were Famous.

When most musicians say they have “chops”... oh, never mind.
 

 

Posted by Oliver Hall
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10.24.2014
10:41 am
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Men in black: The Stranglers’ BBC documentary about the color black, 1982
07.29.2014
09:42 am
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In 1982, BBC Southwest aired a short documentary about the color black made by two members of the Stranglers. Singer/guitarist Hugh Cornwell and drummer Jet Black
“were asked to put together a piece about the colour black for an arts programme called RPM,” according to Cornwell’s autobiography.

Around this time, the Stranglers were obsessed with the sinister Meninblack (as they stylized it) legends of UFO lore. They had released their great concept album, The Gospel According to the Meninblack, and changed their names to Hughinblack, JJinblack, Daveinblack and Jetinblack; they were even thinking about changing the band’s name to the Men in Black. Ultimately, these pursuits scared the band shitless.

“We were unearthing very curious connections between UFOs and dark forces,” Cornwell writes in his autobiography, characterizing the period as “disastrous.” “It wasn’t until after we had finished on The Meninblack album and had moved on to working on La Folie, that the misfortunes stopped.”
 

 
Cornwell touches on the BBC documentary in The Stranglers: Song by Song: “Jet and I made a television programme about how the colour black has always been associated with authority. We were doing a lot of research into the Meninblack, but there were certain crucial books that we couldn’t get hold of at the National Library. It just so happened to be the books that related to the connection between the Meninblack, religion and civilisation.”
 

Posted by Oliver Hall
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07.29.2014
09:42 am
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Live in London: Hugh Cornwell’s last gig with The Stranglers
12.05.2012
03:54 am
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image
 
Hugh Cornwell’s last show with The Stranglers at Alexandra Palace, London on August 13, 1990. The band would continue without Cornwell but would never be the same. A fucking shame and a particularly big disappointment for this hardcore Stranglers fan. I’m still waiting for a re-union gig.

00:46 Toiler At The Sea
07:46 Something Better Change
11:24 96 Tears
14:30 Someone Like You
17:32 Sweet Smell Of Success
21:40 Always The Sun
26:11 Strange Little Girl
29:07 Hanging Around
33:40 Let’s Celebrate
38:36 Golden Brown
42:45 No More Heroes
46:38 Nuclear Device
50:15 Duchess
53:35 All Day And All Of The Night
56:04 Punch And Judy

Outstanding audio and visual quality. Play it loud!
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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12.05.2012
03:54 am
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Former Strangler Hugh Cornwell performs ‘Golden Brown’ with mariachi band

image
 
Hugh Cornwell and London-based Mariachi Mexteca take The Stranglers’ “Golden Brown” south of the border.

Golden brown texture like sun
Lays me down with my mind she runs
Throughout the night
No need to fight
Never a frown with golden brown”

It has been said (by Cornwell himself) that “Golden Brown” is a song about heroin (Mexican Brown). If so, this version is sort of a narcocorrido without the accordions.

I’ll take this any day over The Stranglers that are currently befouling the air.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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08.08.2012
04:26 pm
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The Stranglers, Blondie and Sex Pistols: Awesome live footage from 1977
12.15.2011
04:01 pm
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image
 
This Dutch TV documentary from 1977 captures some brilliant performances by The Stranglers, Blondie and The Sex Pistols. The bands are firing on all cylinders as they perform in Amsterdam.

In 1977, this is what was moving my world. I had just arrived in New York City and I felt like a sail in a hurricane. Slept all day and hit the clubs at night to see a rock revolution in the making.

The Stranglers at the Second Avenue Theater were particularly awe-inspiring. Unsung heroes of rock and roll, which is probably as it should be - no more heroes. Though, I have my share.

The Stranglers - No More Heroes, Something Better Change

Blondie - Detroit 442, Love at the Pier

Sex Pistols - E.M.I., Pretty Vacant, Anarchy in the UK

The video quality is pretty rough, which seems appropriate - like an underground transmission from the distant past. It’s also in Dutch without English substitles, but it hardly matters. The music speaks for itself.
 

 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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12.15.2011
04:01 pm
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‘Dare’ Producer Martin Rushent has died

image
 
It’s been a bad week for music with the passing last week of Gil Scott-Heron, and on Friday Andrew Gold. Now we have the sad news that producer Martin Rushent has died at the age of 63.

Rushent was one of the most influential producers of the late 1970s and 1980s, who created the soundscape that defined the era. If you turned on the radio back then, you were guaranteed to hear a Rushent-produced track within minutes, for Rushent was the touch of genius on some of the best work released by The Human League, Altered Images, The Stranglers, Generation X, The Associates and The Buzzcocks.

Though Rushent may be best remembered for his work producing (and performing on) the Human League’s album Dare and its hit single “Don’t You Want Me”, for which he won Best Producer at the 1982 Brit Awards, his influence was not kept to one band.

There was a trick I once heard, which claimed: if you ever travel around London, vaguely point in the direction of old churches and say Hawksmoor, you’re bound to be right, so prodigious was that architect’s work. The same can be said for Martin Rushent, hear any track from the late 1970s and especially the early 1980s, and if you can’t name the band just say, Martin Rushent and you’re bound to be right, for so prodigious, and impressive, was his output.

Dare proved “that synths and drum machines could be used to create mainstream pop.

Rushent also produced The Stranglers first three albums, which as Louder Than War states:

Rushent, born in 1948, produced the Stranglers first three albums – creating that classic sound that was clear, punchy, dark and sleazy and groundbreaking all at the same time. With The Stranglers third album, ‘Black And White’ Rushent with engineer Alan Winstanley created a soundscape that was post punk before the term was even thought of.

He had a trademark sound. Each instrument had its place. he could make the complex sound simple and harnessed The Stranglers weird imagination and pop nous into something totally original and very commercial making them the best selling band of their period with a bass sound that launched a generation of bass players.

In an interview with Uncut Rushent recalled recording The Buzzcock’ biggest hit:

“Pete [Shelley] played me ‘Ever Fallen In Love…’ for the first time and my jaw hit the floor. I felt it was the strongest song that they had written-clever, witty lyrics, great hooklines. I suggested backing vocals-to highlight the chorus and make it even more powerful. No one could hit the high part-so I did it. I’d sung in bands in my youth and I also worked as a backing singer.”

Before his career with Punk, New Wave and Electronic bands, he worked on records by T Rex, David Essex and Shirley Bassey.

Rushent was said to be working on a 30th anniversary edition of Dare at the time of his death.

A Facebook page has been set up by Martin Rushent’s family to collect memories of the great man, which you can add to here.
 

The Stranglers - ‘No More Heroes’
 

Human League - ‘Open your Heart’
 
More Rushent-produced classic tracks, after the jump…
 

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
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06.05.2011
05:45 pm
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The Stranglers and Hugh Cornwell: It’s never too late to kiss and make up
01.25.2011
06:58 pm
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image
 
Let me say right upfront that I am a huge fan of The Stranglers and their former lead singer, songwriter and guitar player Hugh Cornwell. I vividly remember the day in 1977 that I bought Rattus Norvegicus at a shop in Greenwich Village (Robert Quine was also buying a copy) and the subsequent thrill of listening to it over and over again that night and for months to follow. A big influence on the punk scene in England, The Stranglers’ guttural, malevolent and beautiful rock and roll was primitive and yet sophisticated, savage and sublime. Seeing them live a few months later at the Second Avenue Theater was among the most exciting rock shows I’ve ever experienced.

In 1990 Cornwell left the band and as far as I’m concerned that was the end of what was arguably one of the best and most underappreciated bands of the past four decades. Although The Stranglers have recorded and toured with various different lead singers, the magic has long been gone. I saw the reconstituted Stranglers with some nondescript lead vocalist in the mid-90s at The Cat Club and it was like seeing the Doors without Jim Morrison or The Sex Pistols fronted by the guy from Creed. Nothing worse than a pioneering punk band reduced to an oldies act.

It pains me that there is so much much bad blood between Hugh Cornwell and the rest of the group that they’ve never buried whatever hatchet exists between them and gone back into the studio to make more of the sound I’ll always love.

Cornwell seems to be on an eternal solo world tour. He must need the money. I can’t imagine he’s thrilled playing Stranglers’ classics with pick-up bands or by himself on electric guitar. Which brings me to this recent performance on Brazilian TV. Why, Hugh, why? It’s the money, right? From the rollergirls in bathing suits waving flags to the drummer who looks like an extra from The Young Ones, this has to be one of the lamest things I’ve seen a rock legend subject himself to in the name of keeping his career alive. I know I’m probably overreacting, but don’t we all feel a twinge of sadness when one of our heroes suddenly seems ordinary, smaller than life rather than bigger?

Hugh, if you’re reading this, give Jean-Jacque, Jet Black and Dave a call. Tell them all is forgiven. The Stranglers aren’t The Stranglers without you and you’re not the artist you were without them. It’s never too late.
 

 
Some choice videos of The Stranglers after the jump…

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Posted by Marc Campbell
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01.25.2011
06:58 pm
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