The Stranglers

THE STRANGLERS

I got to interview all four members of The Stranglers over the course of two days in 1981 on their (Gospel According to the) Meninblack tour, the follow-up album to my favourite of all their albums, The Raven, which we talked about at length.

Guitar, Lead Vocal

I WAS WORKING IN A HOSPITAL in Sweden doing research work for a Ph. D. and started playing electric guitarand formed a band with a couple of draft dodgers … American draft dodgers … and a couple of Swedish guys and we were called Johnny Sox. We did about 50 gigs there. This is relevant talking about this band because that band evolved into The Stranglers.

After about a year of playing in Sweden like that in our spare time, we all gave up our jobs and moved to London and squatted. The drummer became very despondent and wanted to be reunited with his wife and kids in Sweden. He left and went back. Enter Jet [Black], through an ad in the paper.

Jet suggested we all move down to live with him in Guildford ‘cause he had a house there and a wine business. He said we could help him run that in our spare time … which was most of the time, in fact. So, we did that. We thought, ‘Well, that’s better than starving in London,’ so we moved down there. That went on for a few months. It was in ’74.

We came back to England in Christmas 1974, and the following summer we were down living at Jet’s. the other two guys got very depressed and they thought nothing was happening. They weren’t content just sitting around and rehearse. They got tired of that very quickly and they left. Enter Jean[-Jacques Burnel, also known as JJ].

So then there were the three of us, and he gave up his job and moved in with us. Then we started rehearsing for about six months, just songs that we’d written. A guy came over from Sweden who used to be in that band, and he started playing guitar with us and keyboards. We started playing in Army camps and just anywhere anyone would let us play.

We used to have to play standard … like, Eddie Cochran numbers, stuff like this … Promised Land … standards. We had to throw them in amongst our own music because the guys who were running the gig said, ‘You gotta play stuff the people know.’ So we played, like, four of our own songs and then we brought in one old one, and then we’d play another four. That would keep the audience just about happy.

They used to dance to our stuff, but if you played too much, they’d say, ‘we never heard this before.’ We were playing things like Peaches. This was before it was recorded. It was quite funny the way it turned out.

That’s how we started playing All Come By. That was how come it got recorded, because it was one song we quite liked. We started playing that … doing our own version of that. This Swedish guy got quite pissed off because he said he couldn’t see why we had to play other people’s songs, and he preferred to work as a dishwasher in a club at night than to go out and play music. so he left in summer of 1975. We got David [Greenfield] to play keyboards, and that’s how the band got started.

We were all living outside Guildford by this time, squatting in a house, not paying the rent, playing about twice a week. We started getting gigs playing clubs in London. After about 18 months of playing everywhere in the country, we finally got a manager and a recording contract.

When out first LP came out the record company thought, ‘They’ll do quite well in London, sales-wise, because they played all over.’ But he wasn’t aware of the fact that we played these tiny little villages all over … So when it did come out, it sold just everywhere … and went gold overnight. They just couldn’t believe it. We said, ‘We’ll tell you why. It’s because we’ve been playing for two years in all of these out-of-the-way places and those kids have gone out and bought the record.’ From there you know what’s been happening since then.

We had about two million names, [including Johnny Sox, Wanderlust, and The Guildford Stranglers], and Stranglers was one that just kept cropping up. We kept laughing about it, saying it was a good joke. It sort of stuck. It was the one everyone kept laughing about.

The rat logo came from the song Down In The Sewer, which was always a very popular stage number, talking about rats and the rat race. People started coming along with rats on badges … They made their own badges [pins]. It was in the time where, if you haven’t got a record company, and you don’t do your own merchant and make your own T-shirts and stuff, which we can do now. It was great, ‘cause you’d see all these kids turning up in custom-made T-shirts and custom-made badges, and they made them themselves and it was fantastic … fascinating to see all these badges. Each one was different. They made up their own badge. They designed it themselves and it was for the band, so it was quite an insane period. It’s from Down In The Sewer, that song.

The Roman numeral ‘IV’ was put on the first LP to confuse people because most bands would put Stranglers I, Stranglers II, Stranglers III, and so forth. We said we’d put ‘IV’ on the first one and see what happens. It was just a means of confusing people.

There’s songs like Wake Up And Make Love To Me, so I can boogie down all night long. 'Goodness gracious, Great Balls Of Fire' … what were all those songs about? I think they’re much more sexist than what we’ve ever written. We’re just observing stuff we see. You walk down the street and you see a guy who’s working on a building site and a girl walks by and they start whistling, shouting out. They’re just showing they appreciate what she looks like. Who can deny that happens? It happens in every town in the world. It’s the same in any language. We’re only kidding ourselves, saying women are treated equally … they’re not.

If you think that admiring someone’s form is derogatory, then I suppose we don’t treat ‘em equally. Just the way women are treated is just different from the way men treat other males. I don’t see what’s wrong with that. I’m just fed up with seeing people pretending things don’t exist, and what we’re saying is, ‘Look, this exists.’ This is what we write about. We write about things that exist … we don’t write about things that don’t exist. All we’re doing is being truthful and honest about what’s around us.

We had a big altercation with A&M Records, because they’re a good company, we’re a good band. We could probably have done a lot of good for each other, had we stayed together, but … ‘cause they stick by their bands for a long time. They’re very loyal, which is something we respect.

They wanted to release and have control over our output in the States, without our having the final say in it. They wouldn’t cooperate with us. They wanted to determine which things were released, and they wanted to cut albums up and take bits off of albums, which we weren’t into.

So we said, ‘If that’s what you want to do, then no deal.’ So, after releasing three albums exactly like they were in England, we parted company, so we had no label in the States. Various managers we’ve been through told us that they tried to get The Raven released in America and they dialed to do it. We thought, ‘That’s a real shame, because it’s a shame not to have stuff released in America,’ ‘cause we get letters from kids there saying they want to get records from us. They’re saying, ‘Why aren’t you being released in the States?’ We say, ‘We don’t know why we’re not being released, maybe someone can tell us.’

So [I.R.S. Records president] Miles Copeland got in touch and said, ‘ The Raven is a real good album. Would you like to release it in the States?’ we said , ‘That’s great. How on Earth are we gonna do that?’ he said, ‘Well, I’ve got I.R.S. Records, and then you can go on tour with it because you’re a good band and I think people in the States should realize you’re around.’ There’s a lot of people who thought we’d split up ‘cause they hadn’t seen records in the stores.

We said, ‘Okay … Good…”Raven’s” been out, like, a year, ans we know that a lot of them have been imported in the States, so it wouldn’t be any point at the moment to release “Raven” as it was originally, because all the Stranglers fanatics wouldn’t … no one would buy it.’ So we said, ‘What else could we do? We could select half the tracks on it and also include stuff on it that’s never been released in the States … singles that have been released in Europe and England.’

In the meantime, Stranglers IV is like an update album, saying, ‘They’ve been away and this is what they’ve been up to while they’ve been away, and now you’re up-to-date … more or less.’ I’m sure that one day some company’s gonna release The Raven as it was, the original version with all the tracks on it, but at the time, it didn’t seem much point. So that’s how the album came about. At the time it seemed like it was a logical thing to do as far as a release goes.

We spent a year on [The Gospel According to the] Meninblack. Not in the studio for a year. We spent about the same amount of time in the studio as we had for the other albums. We had the three songs, listen to ‘em, reject one, keep two. For the first time all the songs have been linked into a certain concept. It holds together very well … more than any other, except the first one. It holds together as well as the first one because we had so much time to think about it.

The music has just developed … We’re getting better at what we do. it’s like when you’re a craftsman, you model things out of wood. You know your tools that you’re using, and the wood, and you just get better and netter at it. That’s what happened. Out style is becoming more and more specific … specifically us. Much more keyboards. It’s just natural development.

There’s no ‘story’ to Meninblack. It’s supposed to be factual. People who see flying saucers and get artifacts from them from crashes and things like this. You hear stories of flying objects crashing through road signs in Virginia, and a guy picked up a piece of metal he said came off this thing. The next day this guy’s visited by this guy that’s dressed in black, and they say, ‘Where’s this thing you found yesterday on the beach, we want it. If you don’t give it to us you’ll be sorry … you might end up in a very serious state of affairs if you don’t.’

They don’t say where they come from and some people claim they’ve been hypnotised by them. They just seem to be a guardian of keeping information suppressed, which is totally anti what we’re into. It’s a phenomenon and it’s not an explained phenomenon. It’s happened all over the world. People describe these guys always dressed in black, speak in a monotone, drive around in old Cadillacs … they even disappear.

We’ve met guys that’ve had dealings with them. Authors like John Keel who writes a lot of sort of science-factual books [Strange Creatures From Time and Space, The Flying Saucer Subculture, The Mothman Prophecies,] just to name a few], and he’s had dealings with them …they’ve tried to shut him up a few times. It’s a weird phenomenon, and we started reading up on it a few years ago and thought it’s a great topic for a song. Meninblack … it’s such a weird phenomenon. For us, we’re spurred on by things we don’t understand. If there’s something that doesn’t have an answer, we want to find the answer … we’re even more interested in it because we’re not being told what the answer is. Just like if you outlaw something …make a law and people want to break it.

Then we started seeing there was a link between flying saucers and men in black; and then there’s links between flying saucers and religion; and then there’s links between religion and superstition; and there are links between superstition and witchcraft and the whole occult phenomenon.

This album [Meninblack] is something we’ve been thinking about for a long time … three years or so … but not actually working on it ‘til 1980. suddenly these things became clear that there were links between these subjects, so we’re presenting our ideas, our guesses on how they’re linked, but there’s no answer. I mean, it’s a weird thing. If we knew what the answer was, we’d be visited by the men in black. We don’t know.

The album is another strange phenomenon, that the guy was there on the first album. We moved into this house to take the photos for the first album cover and the guy was there on the floor, a corpse, so we put him in the picture. Then we did the ‘Black and White’ album, and the thing is, everything on the inside sleeve of the first album cover accords to the rest of them. It’s quite strange. They’re all in logical progression.

I met Hazel O’Connor [star of the movie Breaking Glass] because she is managed by … she used to be managed by our old managers. We were going out with each other for a few months. When you have friends in the music business, the friendships are momentary … just a series of moments. It’s like you’re there and they’re there and you bump into them once in awhile. I haven’t really seen her in a long time.

I speak Swedish and English and a smattering of German. Jean speaks French and English and a little bit of German. So between us we can get through a few languages.

Bass, Vocals

I DON’T HAVE ANY MUSICAL BACKGROUND before The Stranglers. None rock. I did have a bit of classical guitar for a few years, and that’s about all.

I thought the [punk] music was cliché, dim and boring. It never was my trip. When I met Hugh I was a skinhead. I don’t mind violence, as long as it’s real, but when people pretend to be violent … I don’t condone violence, but on the other hand, I’ve seen a lot of kids and, particularly American kids, who pretend to be tough, pretend being cool.

I’ve been playing an instrument since June 10, 1974. that’s when I met Hugh and we started The Stranglers. I did classical guitar then gave it up for years. I had no intention of doing it when I met Hugh. He said let’s do something about my haircut since it was cropped so short, because nobody in those days were skinheads.

There’s no real reason the bass is brought out so near the front. There’s no particular reason the guitars should have been brought up so much in music either. There’s no reason guitar should play as much as it does. The guitar is the most dominant thing in straight rock and roll. There’s no reason why that should be the case, either.

I work real close with the bass drum, but there are times when I’m keeping pace with the rest of the drums as well. Some songs have different timings and we meet up after a few bars. Jet’s doing, like 7/8, then changing fast and doing 3/4 time, something like that.

Everyone has their own fingerprint, their own voiceprint, so it seems totally absurd to me that so many bands sound the same. It’s not such a big deal. It just demonstrates how mediocre a lot of the other bands are. It shows how poor the rest of the scene is, because they really do sound the same and, I’m sure songs are just like fingerprints and voiceprints. Anything that is created by an individual should bear some mark of uniqueness and individuality. It doesn’t seem to happen … it’s a drag.

It’s inevitable you can’t say we’re totally original. Most conventional instruments are played with 12 notes giving limitations and what one hears must inevitably influence someone else as well, so nothing is totally outside of everything else. It’s like a nitrogen cycle. All music, no matter how straight it is, still bears some resemblance to other music, however much it would be great to say New Wave is totally separate from anything else.

As much as there’s different views for the musical/social culture recreations in ’76 and ’77, it’s very pretentious to say Stranglers were totally original. They weren’t. they’re still using musical instruments. Everyone works within limits which are recognisable. It’s what you do with those limits.

The only thing which is happening is the keyboard revolution, because you can’ create new sounds with stringed instruments. Synthesisers have infinite possibilities. Infinite. It can recreate any sound known to man. It can recreate a dog shitting on your windowsill, the smack of a fist in a fight. Of course, you need a good keyboard [and] computer programmer.

We’ve got in Dave … he’s a good keyboard player. He’s also real hot in programming. Keyboards used properly … [They’re] never used to their full extent … they have an infinite possibility of sound. All the sounds we know, and even sounds which haven’t been invented yet.

No More Heroes wasn’t a concept album. A lot of ideas came from 1975, ’76, ’77. the same things happened all around us, to us, to people we knew, so it wasn’t a concept as such. The nearest thing we got to a concept on it was that all the songs are related in some kind of way.

No More Heroes was about a few people in London. It was not precisely talking about all the gangs and tribes, almost like sects, cults, around each individual band. It happened to a lot of bands … us, Pistols … It’s just a collection of ideas of ours about London Town. ‘Dagenham Dave’ is about a black guy we knew. He committed suicide after we played at the Roxy one night.

The ‘no more heroes’ thing was just that we sort of make all this bullshit around rock stars and phony hero worship and decided that we were better than anyone we could write to, so we might as well be our own heroes … ‘no more heroes.’

All this stuff on TV, all the people from your peer group had no relevance whatsoever. All this opeer group pressure, wanting to be the girl in the ad, or the guy. You gotta smoke these cigarettes. It didn’t mean anything to us.

I was playing around with synthesisers, lots of synthesiser noises, which no one had done yet. That was around 1978. squeaks, drum machines, rhythm machines and, also, it was a time I got quite heavy involved in European unification … Like the United States of Europe [we know it as the European Union]. So I put out Euroman Coming’ which was the front cover was part of the Museum of Modern Art in Paris … which looks like a factory. It came out in that year … late ’78. It was about a year later that Gary Numan went robotic. Jet wasn’t too sure at the time of European unification.

Drums, Vocals

I WOKE UP ONE MORNING and decided I hated what I was doing, so I saw this as a cue to do something else. The only other else thing I figured I wanted to do was play music, so I did.

The first time I ever played the drums was ‘round about the time I was just leaving school. Just before I left school … a long time ago, I don’t know what year it was. I fucked around, played with bands for beers and stuff, you know. It was a fun thing to do. then I just stopped playing, got interested in other things.

I spent a number of years working at different trades and industries and ended up eventually with a company … a wine company … and it was my own business. I developed it over, like, a five year period.

Like I just said, I woke up one morning thinking, ‘What the fuck am I doing this for?’ I was bored to death with it. It was a good living and all that stuff, but it was doing nothing for my soul.

I sat up one night thinking about it, and came to the conclusion I should start playing my drums again. This was after a gap of many years, so I went out and bought a drum kit and started playing music and, nine months later The Stranglers were born. That’s how it happened.

When I was very young I went to a professional session drummer for a few, you know, tutorial demo-type tuition things. Nothing really much for drumming, which I suppose in some way or other I do use these little rudiments from time to time, but I never learned any style of drumming at all.

‘[‘The] Raven’ was more technological and inspirational than … well … that was the reason it was different from the others. We just felt a need to expand upon the sounds we were using, and felt the old format of organ/electric piano, with the occasional use of a Mini MOOG … We felt we’d outlived that and wanted to expand upon it.

As we started writing songs for Raven our minds seemed to conjure up with other sounds and we went out looking for these sounds. we found them by experimenting with our instruments … mostly keyboard instruments … and found that all sorts of exciting sounds could be reproduced with the right equipment, and sounds other people don’t seem to have used, and we got excited about it. It was just discovering technology could match our own imagination.

When Shah Shah A-Go-Go came out, the reaction was just about nothing in England. There’s no media reaction to what The Stranglers do, except bad reviews … that’s all we ever get are bad reviews. The irony is, the critics always miss the point. The point was that we more or less foretold the ousting of the Shah of Iran [the Iran hostage crisis happened about eight months after the release of Shah Shah A-Go-Go], and it went completely above their heads. They just reviewed the song as another boring Stranglers song. That’s their opinion. I guess they’re entitled to it. We felt rather it conceitedly inflated our ego when the whole Iran crisis unfurled as it did.

If you’ve seen the sleeve notes on that album, you’ll see we’ve quoted from Nostradamus’s predictions about the catastrophes in Iran. It was that, really, that inspired us to write the song … it was Nostradamus’s prediction that something very much like that was about to happen.

We’ve always been very closely interested and active in the design AND artwork that goes along with our music, and The Raven album’s no exception. We dconjured up the title The Raven, inspired, of course, by the title track, The Raven, which is about the Viking warriors of old, and the raven has a particular significance in the Viking culture. So we had this very strong image of this dark, black, evil-looking bird – the raven. We looked at pictures of ravens and couldn’t get anything we felt was dramatic enough, so we suddenly said, ‘Well, what about those 3-D things everybody said, ‘Oh yeah, that sounds really good.’ We found a company that could actually produce it. There was only one company that said they could do it and that was In Japan. So, we got a sample sent through and we thought, ‘We’re gonna use it. It looks so good we’ve gotta use it.’

The record company went through the roof, because it was so expensive. They said, ‘Okay, we’ll do it, but only on a limited edition.’ So they produced, I forget how many now, with the 3-D sleeve, and the rest with just a regular picture on it.

The pictures are different because the 3-D thing had to be made up in a special way. To make it the way it is, they had to produce what, in effect, was a slightly different picture. The 3-D thing is made up of about 18 different shots, all superimposed.

Don’t Bring Harry is about heroin. It’s an anti-narcotic song – ‘Don’t bring heroin.’ The elephant is the international symbol for heroin … It used to be. If you look at the [liner] notes it’ll all fall into place. It’s all about heroin.

Dead Loss Angeles was inspired by, what on our first visit, we judged to be a dead city. The first time we went to Los Angeles we really didn’t like it, and we felt we had a terribly bad relationship with A&M Records, who we used to be with. We felt it warranted a song, so we wrote a song called Dead Loss Angeles and, if you read the lyrics, you’ll see it refers to the shit on La Brea [Avenue] … ‘You’ve never seen the shit from the La Brea Tar pit.’ A&M Records is ‘the shit.’ There’s a great deal of subtlety in that song.

Nuclear Device [The Wizard ofAus] has a long story behind it, and it’s all based on personal experience. You may or may not realise Australia is a number of states, just like the United States is, and in the northeast state of Queensland … We went there and played a couple of gigs there. We were enormously impressed. We were horrified at what we saw there. It turned out that Queensland, much to our amazement, is a fascist state … It’s run by a dictator who’s managed to sty in power for ten years with as little as 13% of the vote. He’s achieved this by gerrymandering, which is rigging electoral boundaries to your own benefit. This man is doing all kinds of crazy things, like, he’s imposed a curfew in Brisbane … as I says in the song, ‘Brisbane men don’t go out at night.’

There’s on the streets after 7.00 at night. You just don’t see anybody, and anybody who dares to walk down the streets just gets pulled up by the police. Public meetings, demonstrations, any kind of gathering by more than four people constitutes an illegal gathering. If you try and protest about anything, peacefully or otherwise, you’ll be arrested and subjected to police violence. It’s going on all the time. You have to go there to see it to believe it. This guy has got a very complex secret police network which goes around engaging itself in such activities as almost Watergate-style politics, interfering in the internal operations of all their political opponents and competitors.

The police go around … at the time we were there the police were engaged in going around to all the punk rock gigs that were happening because they could see this was a focal point for protest about the system. What all the punk rock was supposed to be standing for4 was people having a voice again.

We played one gig where [the police] appeared in plain clothes and started a riot in the gig. They were throwing bottles at the stage and starting fights, and it was a complete shambles. They were in plain clothes, but as everybody started to leave the premises, the same guys were outside arresting people, pulling out badges and saying get in this car, get in that car, and they were escorting people away.

After we’d seen all the things that were going on there, we were so impressed we felt we had to write a song about it. The reason it’s called Nuclear Device is because the song speculates this guy really wants a nuclear device because, in Queensland, Australia they are the largest exporters or producers in the world of uranium, which is the stuff of which bombs are made. We figure he’s gonna hold the world to ransom because of this immense wealth he has, in terms of nuclear energy.

I was born in London and spent most of my time in London. I’m almost a Cockney from the east side of London. I played with lots of little bands before The Stranglers, but no what you would call professional bands. I started playing drums 25 years ago, but there was a huge gap of about 10 years. It’s been about 15 years total, give or take a few years.

The Stranglers will be going essentially forward, eternally changing. We don’t want to retrace our own steps. We’ve got so many new ideas we want to explore, so it’ll be positively forward, I guess. As soon as we finish the United States and Canada, it will be the end of a three month tour … we’re going home to spend a month shaping up the new songs, most of which are all together now. We’ve been working on them at soundchecks and stuff over here. So we’ll spend July just polishing them up, August we’ll record the new album and it’ll be out in September or October.

We’re still tossing about a title for the album [it would eventually be called La Folie], but the theme of the album, you might think oddly enough, is love, but in true Stranglers tradition, not the kind of live you’re gonna expect to hear. It won’t be romantic love … it’ll be people who love shiny cars and people who love sexual perversions, and nuns that love God, and guys that love their bank balances. All the real kinds of love, you see, whereas the romantic love we suggest doesn’t exist, except in pure fantasy. Totally thematic, all about different kinds of love ,,, except romantic love.

Keyboards, Vocals

A LONG TIME AGO, at school, I picked up a guitar – my ex-roommate’s. I decided I wanted to play, so I carried on when I left. I changed around to keyboards a few years later. I’ve been working all the time … England, Germany, that sort of thing. I enjoyed doing it. I was stuck indoors during the day, and I had a guitar and a piano so, I thought, ‘Why not?’ I’ve been playing keyboards about 14 years and guitar a bit before that.

I did a few numbers with this band on guitar in the early days. This was before we had recording contracts and stuff like that. Guitars are okay, but they’re not on the scope of keyboards.

There are slight indications of the men in black on the Black and White album. We’ve had this idea in mind, the ‘men in black’ thing, for quite a time, and nothing intentional what I can remember. That’s a few year’s ago. There’s been things since the very beginning. On The Raven we had the Meninblack track itself.

[What’s That Thing] In The Shadows had the most obvious reference. I’m trying to think … yeah, it did. Certainly in the context of the actual music itself., yeah. Some of the conversations we have, some of the things we read from all different people, there’s always this central thing that there’s a strong probability. We’ve taken it to extremes on the record, obviously, just pointing out possibilities.

The lyrics are almost all Jean and Hugh, but the songs always come out as all four of us. Somebody has an idea and we all work on it. However it works, the end result is never the same as the person who injected the idea would have done it. How they come up with the lyrics, I wouldn’t know.

Well, the first album was al about London, places like that that we knew. As we travel, we write about wider things. Other places that we know. There’s no pointing really writing about something that you haven’t studied or don’t know first-hand.

The lyrics … I’m not very goo t them. I might sing one or two of them, but it depends on how they turn out. Not very many. That would limit me. I could only use certain keyboards … I couldn’t swing around to get to the others, unless I could strap a mic … I used to use one with a vocoder, but that was stolen last year and we hadn’t bothered to replace it yet. It would be possible to use a mic over each keyboard, but what happens if I was to play both? I’d have to have one in the middle as well. It could work, but …

The songs are usually of things that affect us … ‘us’ as about the writers., obviously, very strongly … like Nuclear Device, things like that. Death And Night And Blood is JJ’s one. I believe that’s after coming back from Japan. It’s something to do with he was out in Japan, or he’d been there, or he was thinking about it. It’s about Yuki Mishiba, but I haven’t studied Mishiba, so I don’t really know.

Tank is Hugh’s. It’s about armaments, warfare in general, the feeling of power one gets, but I can’t remember now. It’s funny, but I probably couldn’t even remember all the words. I sing along with them, though it’s just to have something to do. I don’t think about it really … I enjoy doing it.

It’s possible I might get into more sophisticated equipment. It’s down to money. What we can afford. Oberheim’s got a new one that I tried while I was down in LA, at the factory there. It’s very good and I’d like to get hold of one of those. The trouble is, it won’t do the things I can do with my present Oberheim unless Stuart, my keyboard guy who does modifications, contacts me to see if it would be possible, and to adjust the new one to get some of the effects. If I can, I’’ll change right away … that’d broaden the scope quite a lot.

We’re not a part of the punk movement … not really. we emerged at that time, playing high-energy music, and so we were just classified into it … you know, New Wave would be possibly accurate, but punk wouldn’t really. The punk thing in England was as much an image thing in the way of life as the music. no, we never considered ourselves to be a part of the punk thing, but I would say yes to New Wave. Lyrically we could be punk.

The press in England hate us, they always have, so I don’t know if it’s because of that or whatever. Mainly, we don’t like the journalists either. There’s one or two decent ones that we … like, we’ve known for a long time, but mostly the good people have got out of it into something else.

Strangled Magazine was originally managed by Terry Moon. One of the band members had the idea because fanzines were pretty big. We figured to use it in conjunction with us, he ran it at the time, but it’s gone through several changes. It always had articles about other bands, bands we know. If somebody writes in, if the article’s good, it goes in. it;’s not strictly us, no, it never has been. It’s part of us, but it’s general information. People can write in and say what they think.

The States seem to be behind on the New Wave thing … It seems to have only taken off in the last year or two. In ’78, when we came over, there wasn’t anybody at all. It depends, country to country, where you go. France is a very late developer which is just beginning to open up now. Italy’s becoming very good nowadays … for live concerts and things … but that’s only been in the last few years. Most of Europe is the same. GERMANY, FOR US, IS a weird market. We’ve never actually taken off there … but we haven’t played there for years, so I suppose it might be different now. We’ll be going there again, I suppose, after the new album. If it’s been planned yet I’ve no idea.

The new album [La Folie]… possibly … Well, as you know, it’s not love as love … it could bring us wider popularity. Over here there’s a cult following. All the albums have gone gold over in England. Possibly because we really haven't played much over here until late last year we had a tour. All the tours in ’78 only covered a small area because it didn’t seem to us that the market was right for us then. We’re trying to see if it is now. This tour’s done a lot better than the last one.

English radio has virtually non-existent for us. We do a thing occasionally, but it’s a different system to here. You got, like, four main stations nationwide. Then each, sort of, large town will probably have its own one radio station. Mainly it’s not appetising or anything. Local radio I get very little of. Occasionally, on tour, we do a station or something.

There’s very, very few disc jockeys on Radio One. That’s the main music station. One of them is more classical … that’s Radio Programmes. But there’s only a few journalists on Radio One wanting to play us. So, we don’t really get airplay, as such.

There’s a fair amount of new music being played far more than we will. Each disc jockey has his own programmer. But they’ve got all to answer the boss, which can be awkward depending on who’s in charge of BBC. They’re not very forward-looking as a rule. They’re very conservative.

As of the last year, I can’t tell you what the scene is like, ‘cause when I’ve been there I’ve been touring, and that doesn’t give me a chance to get out, or relaxing, which we had one period of over Christmas. I don’t listen to the radio at all ‘cause I live in a small village now and I just relax.

We’re on the road more than we’re at home. We did an English tour before coming over here, which was about a month, and then before that it was over here again. Last summer we did an English tour, but we did a European one too, so we’re out of the country than we’re in it, as a rule, at the moment.

I’m married. She’s used to it. She comes along, occasionally … She’ll come over for a week here or there. That’s alright ‘cause when we’re not together we’re both free anyway.

I don’t listen to music much … it’ll vary, but quite a lot of the time I don’t. When I do it just depends on the mood I’m in. there is no particular type or style, except classical, at times. While trapped in a traffic jam in London, trying to get anywhere in a hurry, I’ll put Tchaikovsky on, ‘cause that’ll relax me. And, again, other music depending on what mood I’m in. no specific bands or styles. There’s very little classical … not that I like, but that I’ll listen to. I should listen to more, I suppose. It’s just occasionally I listen to it.

I suppose, subconsciously, I don’t want to listen to any one type of music or one particular band, in case I subconsciously become influenced by the keyboard people and whatever band or style it is. I want everything to be my own style.

The keyboard-out-front style came from progression, I suppose. Building up more keyboards, getting different sounds … a wide variety of sounds and effects. It’s just the way it’s all come together. It’s not deliberately planned … it’s just something that happened. It sounds different. You’re limited with the sort of sounds and effects you can get with a guitar, whereas I’m not stopped by that at all. It’s a bit hectic up there, but I enjoy it … I enjoy the challenge.

Adjusting thongs at certain times, that’s half of it … it isn’t just playing. It’s getting a free second to alter sounds or get effects ready. Occasionally I’ll preprogramme the synthesisers on numbers in advance ‘ cause I know I won’t get time later on. But that’s what makes it fun for me. Just sitting up there playing a few notes here and there would be boring.

I read a fair bit in my spare time. I enjoy driving. There’s a lot to do at home at the moment. When I get time I clean the place up. Drink now and again, except that I tend to drink less when I’m off the road than when I’m on. it’s free on the road. I read, depending on the mood. Light readings, usually … sci-fi, the occults, at the moment flying.

I want to try to get the PPL … Private Pilot’s Licence … as soon as I get the time and money together … at the same time to have both to do. I’m lucky. I’ve got a friend who looks after a plane for somebody. He’s got a licence, so we can use it free, within reason, when we want. Unfortunately he’s not an instructor, so I can’t get the time there towards the hours I need for my licence.

It’ll be much easier when I go for training, though you need a minimum number of hours in the air in England, either solo or with the instructor, but under the control of the instructor, in order to be able to take your exam. I think it’s the same over here, but the hours are less.

There’s advertisements in the flight magazine in England to come over here and take the course here, ‘cause it’s much quicker … and cheaper, as well … even to fly over, stay here and fly back. Then all you have to do to get a British licence when you get back is take the law paper on aviation law in England. It’s learning about figures that you can remember. It’s a fun sport. Extremely expensive, but once you’ve got a plane you can rent it out and make money there.

Stranglers Discography