5 GREAT SINGLES FOR FRIDAY.....

Its not all far short of 1500 posts on TVV and to the best of my knowledge I've never done a feature on The Stranglers. Today, I'm going to rectify that but instead of the usual five great album tracks for Friday, I'm going to do five great singles. The simple reason for this is that other than a compilation CD released in 1989 and a couple of 7" singles that I've picked up second-hand in recent years, I don't own anything by the band.

Some of the music this lot made was great, but it wasn't easy to admire the band. In doing a wee bit of research for this post, I came across a fantastic appreciation of them, that I'm going to cut'n'paste as I could do it any better:-

The Stranglers were arrogant, humble, sexist, sexy, intellectual, boorish, violent, tender, crass, intellectual, uncompromising, compromising, punk, new wave, pop, reactionary, revolutionary, contrary and maddening. But most of all they were fucking fantastic.

The Stranglers shot from the hip and didn't hold back. While everyone was saying punk was from the street and the look etc while wandering around in expensive Seditionaries gear it was bands like The Stranglers who looked like they had just come out of the audience. Only when it came to The Raven did they start to look different and by then they were a serious rock band.

They provoked the GLC, they censored their own records to get airplay because they wanted success. But they didn't want it that bad. They hated America and said so. When licensing their first album they burnt their boats literally in front of the record company president when JJ set fire to the American flag and curtains to boot. Top Of The Pops appearances were vital to a bands success. They managed to smash a door down of another band and get banned from it and to storm off in protest at Students at Guildford on a live Rock Goes To College. They were still rock's bad boys long after punk had died causing riots in Nice and Australia and fights and petrol bombings in Sweden.

A band at a peak of artistic and commercial success with The Raven who follow it with Meninblack, a drug fuelled concept album about aliens. A band who had a no 2 hit with Golden Brown and followed it with a 5 minute song in French about a cannibal that flopped. A band who played larger and larger arenas but then went and played pubs and clubs again as the Old Codgers and Shakespearoes.

Sexism is another issue. This old chestnut was still being brought up in 1979 regarding lyrics on their first album. Nowadays the only thing that jars for me is on Princess Of The Streets and the 'piece of meat 'line. The Stranglers just continued winding people up with outrageous quotes eventually having on their Live album a shock horror story cover and going the whole hog at Battersea with multiple strippers. Meanwhile Roxy Music released albums with naked models on them, Queen released Fat Bottomed Girls and had publicity shots with hundreds of buck naked girls on bikes and the weekly music papers would castigate the Stranglers while featuring as many pictures of Debbie Harry as humanly possible.

The full article can be read here.

It really is only some 30 years later that the whole irony of it becomes clear. The majority of music journalists in the then important weekly papers hated the band and any angle that allowed an attack was explored while others were let off. Yes, the band could have made it easy for themselves, but there is something admirable about the whole 'fuck you' attitude they adopted.

Between 1977 and 1990, when original singer Hugh Cornwell left the line-up, The Stranglers managed to get more than 20 singles into the UK Top 40, and about half as many again that didn't. Some of these were fast and furious, others were more sedate and quite lovely. Here, in chronological order are my own Top 5:-

mp3 : The Stranglers - Straighten Out
mp3 : The Stranglers - No More Heroes
mp3 : The Stranglers - Nice'n'Sleazy
mp3 : The Stranglers - Duchess
mp3 : The Stranglers - European Female

From 1977, Straighten Out was part of a double-A single with the better known Something Better Change (which featured bassist Jean Jacques Burnel on lead vocal). It was the band's second successive Top 10 hit and helped make them one of the most successful of the bands to emerge from the punk scene, although the critics were already queuing up to have ago at them with accusations of them jumping on the bandwagon, with the evidence being that they had been around for tears before punk and that the late ages of some members of the band. Straighten Out is the first and possibly only punk single that features a vocal delivery that is Buddy Holly-esque....

The follow-up single, No More Heroes, also went Top 10 in 1977. One of the greatest and most enduring tracks of the era, it is very reminiscent of the sound that Magazine would try and bring to the masses over the next few years. A genuine classic record that has stood the test of time.

The next song I've featured was a #18 hit in 1978. At this point in time, the band were seemingly in dispute with just about everyone and every gig seemed to end in some sort of riot...the bass-line on Nice'n'Sleazy is what makes this single so very worthwhile. That and the weird keyboard solo that was years ahead of its time...

Moving on to 1979 and Duchess. This was the year when I really began to take a big interest in music. I went to my first live gig that year and I also, thanks to having a job over the summer months before going back for a 5th Year at secondary school, had sufficient money to indulge myself in my new passion. But I bottled out of going to see The Stranglers play live....I didn't think I'd survive any fights that might have broken out, and besides the reputation of the bouncers at the Glasgow Apollo was fearsome. I did buy the LP The Raven with a limited edition 3D cover on its release - I subsequently gave it away about 10 years later to someone who adored it when I thought vinyl was on its way out - but found it a wee bit too difficult to get into at the time. It was probably a record a little ahead of its time...but Duchess was a single I played a lot that year.

The final choice is European Female, a single from 1983 and it would prove to be, with the exception of a cover of a song by The Kinks in 1988, the band's last Top 10 hot. A memorable piece of music with a fine vocal from JJB, and acoustic guitar picking by Hugh Cornwell, this is one of the great forgotten about love-songs of the 80s.

The eagle-eyed among you will notice that tha band's biggest hit of all - Golden Brown - hasnt made the cut. It's not that I don't like it, I just got awful bored with it back in 1982 when it was never off the radio, and to be honest, it doesnt excite me as much as the songs featured today.

Oh and to show you how much things have changed over the past 30 years. This is a video banned by the BBC back in the day on the grounds that it was blasphemous. Such innocent days and hard to believe, especially with all you see in music promos these days.....



Happy Listening.