Another busy year over...

Well...here we are again…the end of another year is practically upon us , and it falls to me to sum up the last 12 months…and to look forward to the next few coming…

We started the year as we have done for a while now…rehearsing in the west country for the 40th anniversary tour…catching up with each other and generally larking about for a day or two before earnest work commenced…it’s our way of blowing the cobwebs away and connecting again…we always do it…

The UK tour of course was the highlight of the year for us, and we had an alarmingly good time…the whole tour was a sell out , and we revelled in it…It’s always lovely to play in front of our ever growing family but there seemed to be an extra element of excitement in the air for each gig…and it surprised us all…so much so that we immediately made plans to do a smaller tour in the summer to some other cities and towns which are usually (and unfairly) left out of most bands touring schedules (see my summer blog here) and we really enjoyed that too. In between we did another fairly long European tour which included 4 gigs in Spain…an unusual amount for us, but which was tremendous…must try and get back there again…

The summer festival season seemed to grow again this year for us, and we played right across Europe…including quite a strange trip where we flew to Luxembourg, had our hotel in Belgium ,and did the show in France…We did a nice little one in God’s back garden, the Lake District, and for once were treated to almost perfect weather there…there can’t be many more beautiful places in the world than the Lakes when the climate is good…

We also revisited the V Festivals and T in the Park, receiving fantastic receptions again, and marvelling at the 1000’s of kids singing along to all our songs…old and new…

We finished to season at the end of August in Ireland at the Electric Picnic which was a first for us and was one of the highlights among many during the summer…JJ and I swearing and having a lot of fun on TV there during the afternoon…which was all broadcast…I know I have a penchant for obscenities and most of the time I really don’t care what people think, but they asked me for a story, I told them it involved swearing and they said it was fine…it’d be edited out by the time it was aired…but it wasn’t and they showed it all…very cool about that the Irish…

Baz at Sub 89, Reading-photo Maria Meli

And so we went our separate ways for the rest of the year…just addressing life really, and being pretty normal…speaking to each other every week and keeping in contact…I had some knee surgery which had me out of action for 3 months, JJ went to Japan for his 7th Dan…Jet and Dave kept busy with their various projects and things…and life goes on…normal stuff I guess…

Can’t really say much about the new year yet as it’s all starting to take shape as we speak, but there is of course a tour in March which we’re all gagging to do, and a trip to Russia, which is a first for me…looking forward to Moscow…then we’ll see what the rest of the year brings…We’re all looking forward to seeing each other again and getting stuck back into what we do best… See you all soon and have a good Christmas and even better New Year…

Baz/ 21st Dec 2014

Aural Sculpture-track by track

Released in November 1984, Aural Sculpture was the band's eighth studio album. JJ talks us through each of the album's tracks although his memory is slightly sketchy of certain tracks as it was a period of some major personal issues for him:

ICE QUEEN

At the time, when we were preparing Aural Sculpture, I had a lot of studio equipment in the back room of my house in Cambridgeshire including a Linn drum. Dave was living just up the road in Cambridge. He would come around to mine, we would go to the pub and play darts for a couple of hours, have a few pints and then we would work through the night, sometimes until two or three in the morning. I was getting riffs together and Ice Queen was my riff with Hugh's lyrics. The lyrics were about his girlfriend in New York who was a model. For me personally, the brass section's finest moment was when they came in on Ice Queen. It was the best manifestation of the brass...

SKIN DEEP

That was originally a little blues riff of mine, Hugh took it away and wrote the lyrics to go with it. It was a little blues thing which I've since played on some of my acoustic dates. Between the ages of 14 and 17, my parents had a restaurant in Godalming, Surrey and there was a pub in the village which had a blues club every Sunday night. I saw lots of bands before they released their first albums there, Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac were the most notable, although there were loads of other bands. I kind of played about with blues riffs as I liked the blues. I still like good blues musicians.

LET ME DOWN EASY

This was my music again and Hugh wrote the lyrics about my Dad (who was gravelly ill at the time) and I was very grateful that he did that. Hugh knew my Dad and came down to see me in the south of France when I was looking after him. I had spent the last month with my Dad who was in awful pain. Doctors and nurses were coming every day to give him injections to alleviate the pain. I used to carry him out onto the patio so he could get a bit of daylight. My Dad had died by the time that the album was released. It was very sympathetic of Hugh...

NO MERCY

Definitely Hugh's lyrics. Epic were putting quite a lot of money behind the record and we were starting to do quite well in various places. No Mercy was deemed a worthwhile single so we did a video for it. It wasn't a bad video actually as I recall. We were dressed up as doctors and also appeared as ghostly sax players.

NORTH WINDS

That was mine, just a JJ 'where things are now' song. It was one of my melancholy songs about the very strong images that had occurred during my life, while I was growing up. The 'Orange road burning' was about the self immolation of Buddhist priests during the Vietnam war, setting themselves on fire. The 'Youth on fire' referred to Jan Palak, who I'd talked about before on Euroman. The 'Metal machines...' line was about the Prague spring in '68, when the Czechs tried to be much more liberal and the Russian tanks just rolled in. 'Two generations' referred to the two world wars, 'Birth pains' was about the birth of Israel and what I remembered about the Yom Kippur war. 'Freedom in the shape of disease' was about AIDS, suddenly this new word AIDS had arisen when we were writing Sculpture. It was an unknown disease then. 'Kids whose bellies' was about the west and the rest of the world having so much food while there were images of kids with huge distended bellies starving on television. The title North Winds referred to where I was living in East Anglia which was subjected to winds from the North Sea and it gave a melancholy feel to living there...

UPTOWN

Originally Uptown started off as a more RandB track but it changed once we were in the studio with Laurie. Hugh's lyrics referred to taking Cocaine rather than anything related to horse racing.

PUNCH AND JUDY

No fucking idea!!! I don't know how that got on the album, I must've been asleep... Aural Sculpture was a labour of love between Laurie and Hugh to be honest. Dave and I were almost secondary and we weren't seeing so much of the others, apart from crossing paths in the studio.

SPAIN

I used the Kinkade acoustic bass on that. Hugh was going to Spain more and more often and he had read a book written by Franco's daughter. We used a recording of her voice on that song. The lyrics were inspired by the Spanish Civil War.

LAUGHING

It's an entirely Hugh song. The lyrics are about Marvin Gaye who had just been shot by his father before we started recording the album. We used an unprogrammable drum machine on this track, like I had used on the Euroman album, which was a Laurie Latham idea.

SOULS

Quite a nice track with Hugh's lyrics about the ancient Mayan culture in Mexico. Hugh had a big contribution on this album, a lot more than mine, and I can't recall much more about some of these tracks. It's a long time ago and it wasn't the best time for me with my Dad's illness... I wasn't too complicit in the recording and was a bit detached at the time.

MAD HATTER

Mad Hatter was another Hugh track. It was about his little clique in Bath. He had these sycophants, all posh Bath boys who laughed at all his jokes. They weren't healthy for Hugh I think.

JJ Burnel/9th December 2014

Norfolk Coast-track by track

Released in February 2004, Norfolk Coast was seen by many as a real return to form for the band who had been fired up by the arrival of Baz on guitar. Baz talks us through each of the album's tracks:

NORFOLK COAST

This was the track that kick started the idea of the album returning to a rockier and more song led record I think…and its roots lay in unrest and a yearning for validity again… There’d been a lot of turbulence in the band prior to my joining with one thing and another and JJ in particular was very troubled by it I know…Apart from the obligatory live album and a compilation here and there, the last studio album proper had been the universally panned and disappointing Coup de Grace and that really niggled him…hurt him very much…Admitted by all as an incoherent body of work and not really recorded by a band at all…things were seriously unravelling and he’s on record as saying it was his attempt to seize back some power after being ‘ bullied and cajoled’ over the recording of Written in Red, and although his intentions were 100% honest and with the bigger band picture in mind, it just didn’t come off…and you can hear it on Coup…assuming you want to listen to it at all that is…leaving him even more at sea and directionless…something most definitely had to change… So he went away to ‘find himself’ as he puts it, in a rented house on the Norfolk Coast…walking, contemplating and writing…and came up with a gem…and in my opinion Mark 3’s best recorded highlight by some margin…although it changed direction a couple of times and needed quite a bit of TLC before we found it… I first heard it as a pretty downbeat but interesting acoustic track…I’m told it was played on an acoustic tour JJ had done just as I joined the band, although I didn’t see it live…and it wasn’t really considered a contender immediately…Jet I remember not being particularly keen on it at first…but as we worked on it we realised the best way to deal with it was to kick it heftily up the arse…and when JJ almost angrily played the bass intro one day saying “why can’t we just fucking do it like this”?!...we knew we had something…I tweaked the guitar chords a bit…adding some dissonance to the end of the vocal passages, worked a solo out, and cranked the gain levels right up, and Dave came up with some great filtered sequences which open the track…We went to a little studio outside of Bath with a producer with a view to recording it as an experiment really, to see if we could work with him and him with us…turned everything up so loud the walls and windows literally shook, and really went for it…recording it in 2 days…They then took it back to London, mixed it, and sent us copies. When it dropped on my mat at home and I put it on for the first time I remember being completely blown away…that fucking bass was back and it sounded like the Stranglers again…a new, sleek and somehow more modern sounding Stranglers…but undoubtedly us… There were a lot of excited phone calls that day I remember and we realised that we had a direction for the album to take…still one of my favourite tracks…new or old…

BIG THING COMING
I think the nucleus of this was from JJ’s Norfolk trip too…Among other things they’d discovered Sea Henge near where he was staying, which historians had said was going to explain a lot of unanswered questions about Bronze Age Britain and our ancestry and heritage…a big thing coming…Also he may or may not have been thinking about a new start to the bands’ fortunes…being in the frame of mind he’s told me he was at the time… Either way this song started with me finding a snippet of this he’d recorded during one of our late night sessions at the farm in Somerset…literally about 30 seconds of an idea he just wanted to get down with a great hook and catchy vibe…and because I was living at the farm during a lot of this time and the others were commuting at weekends, I often sifted through stuff when I was alone trying to find ideas to expand…I called him to tell him about it and he suggested I knock it about for a couple of days until they all came back, and that’s when I hit on the idea of the intro being a kind of T.Rex guitar riff…and the whole song turned out to hang on that rhythm…it’s a very simple song this , with not a lot to it and we had to arrange it carefully to keep it interesting, which we did well I think…I like this one too and my one abiding memory of recording it was seeing Dave’s face when he heard the arpeggio keys coming back at him through the studio monitors for the first time…he turned to me beaming and said “I’m back”! This was a single and scraped its way into what was the old top 30…our last hit to date…and the BBC still use it from time to time…

LONG BLACK VEIL
I was going through a bit of personal strife by this time and this song reflects that… I was still married but things were sliding and I was at a loss as to what to do…there was someone else on the scene and that’s mixed up in here too…I felt like I was dying at times…just withering on the vine…I probably was aware of another song with the title Long Black Veil, I can’t quite remember, but I wouldn’t have cared anyway knowing the mood I was in at the time…The lyrics are quite dark but I think I wanted to offset that with an upbeat woah oh oh no brainer sing along type chorus to try and lighten the mood a bit…we worked on the music very hard because there are a lot of chord changes in this and twisting turning verses…with the call and response guitar…and Dave came up with the great piano part he plays…Jet decided to keep the verses on the side stick before powering into the chorus’ and JJ found a lovely bass line that weaves through the intro and chorus’ moving the song along nicely but not interfering with the vocal melody…a great band effort this one… We chose this as a single too which I was very pleased with on a personal level, and played it live both acoustically and electrically for quite a few years afterwards…

I’VE BEEN WILD
Just sitting at home one day I came up with the riff for this…and I can’t remember why but I just thought about writing a song specifically about JJ…in the first person and from his point of view…he had his doubts when I mentioned it to him one day but once we started to work on it he sort of warmed to the idea… It was initially faster than the version we ended up with…I can’t remember who’s idea it was to slow it down a bit, maybe the producer, but when we did it seemed to give things more weight and it drives along better… People love fast songs but if they’re not treated right it can just blend into a dirge…the riffs and power come out more if the tempo is right and not steaming away… I think a lot of Stranglers songs have suffered from this… particularly live when the blood’s up and we’re charging into the fray…the riffs suffer…and this band is big on riffs… Paul Roberts’ vocal is really solid on this too…he liked the song and gave it his all…

DUTCH MOON
This song had a strange genesis. It’s widely known now that this was the first time I chanced my arm and wrote a song for the bands perusal…I’d been with them for 10 weeks and thought I better try something…All I had was the title…I remember looking out of a tour bus window somewhere in Holland with Smalltown Heroes at the most perfect huge yellow moon I’d ever seen, it was absolutely massive, and thinking it would make a great title for a song…and there it stayed…in the memory banks for about 5 years…until it became a sort of skewed love song…Sometimes you hear people saying that a song wrote itself, and that’s the case with this one…the lyrics came in about 15 minutes…I think the band expected some punky thrash thing and Jet in particular was very complimentary with my first fledgling effort…but it didn’t make the first batch of songs recorded and so we just forgot about it really…At the time I was working on a little limited edition EP thing with a mate of mine in the north east…a thing I’d actually started to record before I joined the band…and as it seemed they didn’t want it I recorded it myself for that, albeit very stripped down, and then just left it alone…That happens with songs sometimes…they just get left behind and you move onto something else. A few weeks later it was mentioned again, I can’t remember by who, and we looked at it again with the benefit of hindsight and thought it might have legs…I’d made a little demo of it which was pretty close to the way it ended up, but as soon as JJ started working out the walking bass line and Dave and Jet brought the key lines and brush work it came to life and we did it pretty much live in one take at the farm one afternoon, left it for the weekend, and on revisiting it when we came back, decided it was fine as it was… and that’s the version you hear now…It’s a lovely song this…no fat and great individual playing from everyone. It’s a fan favourite too when we play it…mostly when we do the acoustic shows…lends itself very well to that side of things…and I’ve heard it’s been used on more than one occasion as a couples’ wedding dance too…

LOST CONTROL
This was one of JJ’s pretty much completed ideas. He had all the lyrics and the meter pretty much worked out but I seem to remember this being one of the songs we had the most trouble nailing. There’s a lot of London in this song…a lot of what was going on around him and his unease with the urban decay and the living breathing cauldron of a city that was unfolding right in front of him…his thoughts are not quite as pure as they once were…he’s bordering on some kind of revenge…The lyrics were biting and immediate and we needed some power from somewhere to go with them…I know there are quite a few demos of this song in existence, I have a few at home, and they’re all different…the rant in the middle where it goes off on a tangent is particularly inspired with a grinding heavy bass riff and squealing car brakes which were all done on guitar…and when we play it live we get the sub bass really cooking in an attempt to make people crap themselves…hasn’t happened yet but we live in hope… Another great live number…

INTO THE FIRE
All I really remember about this one was that I wanted to celebrate party culture and write a song about being as hedonistic as possible…the opening line “I need a woman like a stag needs a hat rack” was particularly intended to get peoples backs up, and it did…one writer calling us misinformed sexist pigs…mission accomplished then. This one suffered from a little too much in the overdubbed guitar department, and although the licks were intrinsic to the recording it couldn’t be replicated live and so is the only track on this entire album we’ve never done in concert…At one point we had as many as 6 of these songs in the set, such was our belief in the record…We were very gung ho around this time…

TUCKERS GRAVE
Somewhere between the villages of Norton St Philip and Faulkland in north east Somerset is the cider house known as Tuckers Grave. I won’t waste much time here trying to describe it to you because no words can do it justice unless you’ve been there…There isn’t a bar, no music, and 9 times out of 10 your mobile won’t get a signal…up until 25 years ago if you wanted a piss you went outside and did it up against the wall…and that included the women too…It’s a celebration in the dying art of spontaneous conversation…and if you haven’t got any, stay at home…the place is alive with character, and characters, the cider is lethal and the landlady’s tongue is as sharp as a cut throat razor…the locals play skittles in an alley at the back and are brought big plates of homemade cheddar, bread and pickles after the game…I was carried out once after ‘accidentally’ drinking 7 pints…I was in bed for 2 days…In other words it’s fucking fantastic… We spent many a happy hour there during this time. Getting to know each other and just relaxing into what we were doing…and JJ and myself developed an interest in the history of the place. Edward Tucker was tied to a tree stump on the crossroads outside the pub after hanging himself at the very farm we now call home…sometime in the latter half of the 18th century…he couldn’t be given a Christian burial because he’d taken his own life…against the law…so they just trussed him up and left him to rot…the local wildlife having a field day and the locals using his corpse as target practice…nice… His story is actually in a booklet on the mantle in the pubs living room for all to see, and after reading it one night we decided to write about it. I remember JJ calling me on his way home one weekend and asking me to “write this down”…he had quite a lot of the lyrics in his head and between us, down the phone we came up with the rest…I’d been messing around with open tunings on the guitar and after putting it into DADGAD came up with the rolling chord sequence…I’ve had a lot of people over the years asking me how it was done because they can’t play it…and you can’t in regular tuning… We wanted to make it trancy and atmospheric and Dave’s keys really gave it that slant…also Jet syncopated the snare drum…building it very slowly up into a spooky march of the dead…Paul absolutely sang the shit out of it and to my mind this is one of his best ever recorded performances…I love this track…

I DON’T AGREE
Looking at the lyrics to this they seem very personal to JJ and I really can’t remember who or what he said it was about when I asked him…I know I would have asked him at the time...it’s important to know what stuff’s about…but for my sins I can’t remember…if he even told me at all that is… I think the idea started with his bass riff at the beginning, which he was playing over and over one afternoon… I remember pretty much playing the opening guitar riff straight away and we just went into it…some great fast runs from Dave in the bridges and building up to the chorus’…We played this live all through the summer and it really went down well…I remember taking inspiration from The Byrds for the jangly guitar at the fade…I think I maybe even tried it on a 12 string…there’s a picture of me in Louie’s studio sporting a Rickenbacker which I can only assume we rented to try this…and again another great vocal from Paul…he sang very well on the whole album…It came really quickly this song…we had it all in one afternoon…

SANFTE KUSS
This is the first thing JJ and I ever wrote together and it dates back to mid 2000 when I drove down to his then place outside Cambridge to see if we could write songs together. He’d had the bass parts for a while, essentially a tune just on bass, and all the lyrics, and it was the first thing he played me when I arrived. I loved it and picked up on the hot club vibe straight away, finding the chords and pretty soon, I’d say a couple of hours, we had most of it…It came together really fast and I remember him calling a mate in Germany for an accurate translation of the lyrics he’d written…Sanfte Kuss being German for ‘A Gentle Kiss’…There are 3 verses all sung in different languages…German, French and finally English, where we discover that all he really wants is to fuck…surprise surprise…I worked on the guitar solo at home and when we finally came to record it proper we got Jon Sevink from The Levellers to come and play violin on it…When we play this live Dave comes to the front to play rhythm guitar as there’s no keys on this at all…just guitar , bass, brushes and a voice…

MINE ALL MINE
Pauls sole contribution to the album writing wise, but one of the best songs on it…we re-visited this for the convention in London in 2011 and had a lot of fun playing it again. In retrospect this suffers from a bit of overproduction I think…lots of sound effects, bleeps and noises, but it’s a very strong chorus and we played this live a great deal around that time. I seem to remember the arrangement being kicked about a bit and PR not being too happy about that, wanting it the way he’d written it…Paul all over really…JJ and Dave working on the middle eight for quite a while to get it super tight…and me and Paul working closely to get the vocal harmonies right…I think this one was the first tune we recorded too, or one of the first, and it just seemed to fit really well as the albums closing song…I was never really sure what it was about though…none of us were…but it was a really strong number…

In the summer of 2003 we all went to Hunstanton in Norfolk for the weekend to take the shots that ended up on the cover…driving down directly one afternoon after a performance on the main stage at that years’ Guilfest…Us being us we had to actually go to the Norfolk Coast…nowhere else would do… Those rocks are actually there…The tour manager we had at the time brought his young son along and I remember JJ, Paul and myself playing football with him on the beach between takes…and also the portly American photographer we were using eating every last sandwich that was brought in for us for lunch…as a lot of portly Americans are wont to do… This was my first album with the band…there was a great vibe around us at the time and it felt like a new beginning for everyone…we were all mates and had spent the last year very closely together working on this and getting to know each other…and the great music notwithstanding, that alone holds very good memories for me…

BAZ W/6th OCT 2014

The Raven-track by track

35 years after the release of The Raven, the band's fourth studio album, JJ recalls the inspiration behind each of the tracks that make up one of The Stranglers most loved releases:

LONGSHIPS

An instrumental setting the scene for the album and another 6/8 fast waltz time. By the time we had started to prepare The Raven, The Stranglers were getting invited to play abroad, we had started to travel and we had foreign experiences. As a result, we were starting to take in what was happening all around us. With our traditions as British people, and as a Norman person as well, the longship seemed to be an appropriate thing, the Vikings, the Raven, it all gelled…

THE RAVEN

The symbolism of the track was about Huginn and Muninn who were the two ravens that sat on either side of Odin’s shoulders and whispered in his ears. They went around the world telling him what was happening, the gossip and the news. It seems crazy as, if he is king of the gods, then he should know, he should be omniscient. They reported back to him and we felt like we were experiencing things first hand in different countries and we were reporting back too. It’s an album of reportage on what was happening in the world at the time. We thought that it was a tremendously strong symbol to represent the album. It was quite a brave new world in some respects because we were moving away from our sound as there were quite a few polyphonic synthesisers in it like the Oberheim. We were getting out of our comfort zone. The line ‘My friend you’re black…’ was partly about Dagenham Dave and racism because the Raven is a black animal.  I tried combining a lot of imagery and a lot of other things that were on our mind together. You can take the meaning at face value, but it also means different things on other levels. That’s what I was trying to achieve. It has a melody, it builds into it, it has a theme and it’s quite a complete piece.   

DEAD LOSS ANGELES

It was about our first impressions of LA and what we felt about it. We initially thought that there was some kind of superficiality about the place. It’s lots of towns stuck together, it’s like Milton Keynes in a way. People who live in LA just dream of success in cinema or in music. Initially it was cinema then the American music industry based itself there too. It just so happened that they had dug up a massive mastodon at the time that we were there so we just stuck that in. Using the two basses was quite an experiment, I’m not sure who’s idea that was, but we were experimenting quite a lot with that album.

ICE

Lyrically it was about when the Samurai in Japan committed Seppuku (ritual suicide), they made themselves up and put rouge on before they got beheaded by their chosen beheader.  The keyboard is really difficult as it’s not sequenced but it’s actually played. I remember Dave taking 2 or 3 days at Jet’s learning to play the sequence manually. Live, it’s really fucking difficult to get right and it takes the whole track out of sync. The drums and bass kept it together but, because the keyboard was used percussively on the track, if it’s not right then it’s completely out. We had fun recording the breaks in it as we had bottles in the studio which Jet smashed and you can hear him grunting.  

BAROQUE BORDELLO

Baroque Bordello was the result of a week in Umbria and it was a fantastic time out of our comfort zone. We came out of it with Baroque Bordello which I think is one of the most beautiful songs we have ever written. It’s also one of the most complicated songs to play because the guitar is the most complex thing that Hugh ever did. I think that the guitar and bass meet up every eight bars or something like that. It’s a guitar sequence that doesn’t fit into a bar. I think Hugh’s singing in it is superlative, it’s one of his best vocals. I think Dave’s keyboard solo in it reaches for the sky. Everything is good in it, it’s a perfect song as far as I’m concerned. A masterpiece…

NUCLEAR DEVICE

Nuclear Device is about Joh Bjelke-Petersen who we experienced when we went to Australia earlier in 1979. We got arrested by his thugs in Queensland, we experienced the brutality first hand in Brisbane. We got attacked onstage, I didn’t know that the bloke who was attacking me was a cop, I just hit him! He was being really aggressive and I was trying to defend myself. We had to escape over the state line. A group of three people or more constituted an illegal gathering. It was like a police state, like the early sixties in Alabama or something. His party was the Country Party and ranchers voted for him.In Australia, 90% of the people live in cities on the coast. He gerrymandered and changed the voting and made the votes of the ranchers who voted for him worth three times more or something. There’s a place called the Gold Coast and it was meant to be a beautiful area and he gave planning permission to the Japanese to build hi-rise buildings there. He also sold off traditional Aboriginal lands for the Uranium. He was corrupt and not democratic and we were subject to his bullying tactics.

SHAH SHAH A GO GO

The Ayatollah at the time had been living in France and he’d just moved back to Iran. We weren’t experiencing it but it was in the news and in our faces. Everything was happening and, for us, it was fantastic. It was more reportage on the world.

DON’T BRING HARRY

We were indulging (with Heroin) at the time, Hugh was the first one. We all decided that we would try it. We were experimenting with ourselves and it provided us with some inspiration. Jet and Dave were sensible and decided that they wouldn’t go far with it. It culminated in The Meninblack album but that’s another story. The line ‘With a friend like him, who needs enemies’ says it all really. I don’t want to glorify or glamourise it. It has relevance to a lot of people in the world because of the subject matter but it’s something I feel awkward about now. I’ve seen so many people die through it and I think that some fucking arseholes glamourise it because they think they’re being risky and on the edge. They don’t know what they’re talking about. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great song, I think it’s beautiful personally, it’s just a bit awkward. It was on Top Of The Pops but they didn’t know what it was about!

DUCHESS

I found a riff for that at Jet’s. Hugh had been dating some posh bird, as he did. We put the two together and it was an instant pop song. We had great fun doing the video and the unsubstantiated paedophile C**** R****** objected to it and the BBC pulled our vid. The vicar was more than pleased for us to film the video there.  

THE MENINBLACK

The Meninblack was the reason that Martin Rushent didn’t produce The Raven. It was the first track that we started doing and we slowed down Two Sunspots which we had at the time. He just walked out of the studio, he didn’t think that we should be experimenting with stuff and we were on it, we wanted to. It was something that we were interested in, the subject matter was esoteric. We just got the Vocoder which we were experimenting with too.   

GENETIX

Obviously Hugh’s lyrics, because he knew about those things being a scientist & a bio-chemist. It was quite a precursor to the modern age because DNA had been mapped out then.  I thought that it was a tour de force and it was wonderful to play. It’s a musical challenge to play, definitely muscle flexing. Basically it’s four solos going on through the whole song until we rock it out at the end. We developed it over weeks if not months and Hugh and I worked on it late into the night. It starts to develop its own shape and personality. It gave us all a chance to shine and show our virtuosity at that time. Dave’s voice has a certain quality that makes it a bit scary and we thought that it would lend itself to the subject matter perfectly.  

FOOLS RUSH OUT-b side of Duchess single

It was written about our management at the time. They wanted us to split up and reform in three years’ time and make a fortune. We said ‘Fuck off!’ We looked at each other and knew that it was the end of the relationship with them…

 YELLOWCAKE UF6-b side of Nuclear Device single

A reworked instrumental given a title to fit with Nuclear Device.

 BEAR CAGE

It’s about GMBH, the German equivalent of Limited Company. It’s another sort of travelogue written about Berlin. We spent a lot of money on a video for that which was crap! It did fuck all as a single…

JJB/20^th September 2014

That Was The Week That Was...

A very varied week this one… 2 festivals, 4 club dates, and a live television appearance…

First off was a trip up to the wilds of Cumbria for a show at Whitehaven, way up on the northwest coast of England. I personally haven’t been here for many years, having last played here in another life nearly 20 years ago with Smalltown Heroes…and suffice it to say, it hasn’t changed one bit in that time as far as I can see. The people are still as hardy and friendly as ever, and the landscape is eye boggling in its beauty. We happen to drive into the festival site on as clear an English summers’ day as ever there was…the sun glinting off the sea, highlighting the contours of the rugged coastline in an otherworldly glow…blindingly blue sky with little wisps of cloud settling around the tops of the distant mountains…quite a nice setting for a gig then…

We take to the stage at 7.30, to the 5,000 capacity crowd in the little arena going absolutely nuts from the start…and after the first few bars of the first song, it’s apparent I’m in trouble. I’ve started using some new amps and one of the ones they send me decides it’s time to play funny buggers and fries an output valve…I know immediately that something’s not right and it takes nigh on the whole show to identify the problem properly in the heat of a noisy and sweaty show…the crowd don’t seem to mind though, and the signal going out front from me is still healthy enough in the P.A…despite sounding like George Formby to me in my ear monitors…and we pull it off…a tight punchy hour…the crowd absolutely roaring their approval as we leave the stage…and despite me feeling let down by the new gear, we’re all smiles as we pull away and head to Leeds and the nights’ hotel…

We’re playing live on French TV the following morning and taking part in the opening weekend celebrations for the Tour de France which is happening at York Racecourse this year. This particular engagement being relatively short notice it’s impossible to get a hotel anywhere in York, so we stay in Leeds and drive in at 7.00 the next morning for rehearsals…a bit bleary eyed I have to say, but in good spirits. As we approach York the traffic for this time on a Sunday morning is beginning to thicken very quickly, and we wonder if we’ll make the venue at all, despite leaving with time enough to spare…but once we actually get there its painless enough and we get to the crew bus where everyone is waiting just about dead on time. The boys have been on the go since 6 loading our gear and sound checking and as usual make it easy for us to just wander up and start some run throughs for camera angles and recording…

The whole thing goes as smoothly as live TV can and once we’re finished the 2 songs they want, JJ goes across to a small stage for a live interview to the folks tuning in across France, having their breakfasts and laughing at the English weather. Even as he’s doing it our crew are breaking the gear down, packing, loading, and are just about ready to go when he winds it up. They’re fucking marvellous our crew…no other way to say it… And of course they also know we’ve got a club show in Preston tonight…

The 53 Degrees is a great little place and there’s 1,000 people rammed into it as we go on at 9.00pm… We’ve rested up as much as we can during the day and after a good sound check, during which my amp troubles are sorted and are sounding crisp, we turn in what can only be described as a blinder…the crowd are right there with us from the off and we respond and play very well…it’s loud, hot and sweaty, and we’re dripping as we leave the stage…great show…
A big thanks to the scores of fans who waited around before and after the show too…there was some good craic there…and everybody enjoys that don’t they…

The next day we rise in decent time and make for St Albans. Dave and JJ are uncertain as to whether the band have ever played here before…we certainly haven’t in my time…and as we drive up to sound check I decide I’ll ask the crowd personally tonight…sometimes it’s the only way…they know everything… So ask them I do, and apparently we haven’t…although Dave’s still not 100% certain…

This is a great gig too…1,200 people have packed into it on a Monday night…and after 2 shows we’re tightening up nicely and play well again. Someone decides to throw beer at JJ and he halts proceedings by taking his bass off, getting down on his hands and knees, and wiping the stage himself with a towel…slowing the gig right down…fair play…he then decides to go wandering down to the front in a bid to seek out the culprit…me, Dave and Jim laugh at the thought of the berk cowering in the crowd with little streams of wee running down his black trouser legs and all over his D.M’s, as a glowering JJ tries to find him and administer a clip round the ear hole…very funny…


A bit of advice…don’t throw beer at this band/any band…but especially not this one…none of us take kindly to it and some of us can get punchy about it…one drop of beer into any of the equipment in the wrong place and the whole gig ends and everybody goes home…and you’re responsible you prick…

The mood lightens though when we get a lady out of the crowd who’d written asking for a picture with us to send her son out in New Zealand who’s a massive fan…”he says I’m not cool and I thought if I had a photo of myself with you lot he’d sharp change his mind” she’d said…I don’t think she bargained for us getting her onstage, facing the drums with her in the middle, all 4 of us, and with the crowd all waving behind us, getting the shot…courtesy of Big Al…She was lovely though, and clearly moved by the whole thing…nice…

Again there were lots of people waiting outside in the cold which was heartening, and after a good natter with as many as we can we depart…happy again…

It’s a relatively easy drive across to Reading the next day to play the Sub 89 club…a tiny venue of around 650 people which sold out very quickly so we’re told. It’s great to do gigs like this one every once in a while…the crowd are right in your face, the condensation runs down the walls, and we have puddles in our boots by the end…Around halfway through someone hands a piece of paper up to JJ which has the unbelievable legend Germany 5 Brazil 0 written on it…he shows it to the crowd and the looks of disbelief are very amusing…I can’t believe it and ask one of our boys who says it’s true…as the gig progresses we get updates and the final score unfolds just as we encore…

Oh and the gig was great too…there was some high spirits with a bit of crowd surfing and some poor girl at the front having her mouth smashed into the barrier a couple of times, she steadfastly refused to move…good for her…(I saw her later and there was no damage done)and some mile wide grins from people not used to being so close to a full throttle band really going for it…and it all adds to the atmosphere…a good old fashioned sweaty punk gig…

After a fairly routine day off in Hull, during which we had a meal in a place that was so unselfconsciously 70’s it almost defied belief, we sound checked at the City Hall the following afternoon. This isn’t a club but a lovely quirky old municipal building in the heart of the city that seems to be on the verge of crumbling at every turn. It’s got an amazing atrium at its heart which is bathed in bright sunlight with a huge glass dome looking down on marble pillars and floors…quite something…we do some photos there and gawp up at the sky and the surroundings. The hall is as you’d expect…high, wide and handsome, with huge reflective surfaces everywhere, and a massive balcony right the way around the top…


Thankfully though the PA is really good and Louie our front of house man isn’t anticipating too many problems…especially with just over 1,000 people coming out to see us on a gloomy grey Thursday night…the sound tightens up with so many bodies there to soften it and it’s a great show…a massive noise coming from the crowd in the echoing confines of the room…There are a lot of teenagers here too…and they know all the words, old and new…

After a lengthy drive up the east coast from Hull to Edinburgh we arrive at one of favourite haunts in Leith. When we’ve played T in the Park in the past we’ve always stayed here and as the gigs not until tomorrow lunchtime we take the time to relax after a busy week, have a nice meal, and a relatively early night. We leave the next day around 11 for the hours’ drive to Kinross and as has happened every time we’ve played here, it’s raining and already beginning to look muddy and broken up. We go on at 1.10 for an hour and have a great time…probably my favourite show in a week of corkers…

The first thing that strikes me is how young almost all of the crowd is…really young…there’s thousands of them all looking up with varying expressions, ranging from “wow” to ”I know most of the songs…was this them?” It’s great to see them warming to us song by song, until there’s a good 20,000 people there, drawn in by the sound and atmosphere…and when I go to thank them at the end the roar is deafening and we walk away smiling again…surprisingly sweaty for an outdoor gig…

A really satisfying end to a lovely week…and it puts us in great stead for the half dozen remaining festivals we’re doing before the season ends… A great week…too short, but great all the same…

Thanks to everyone who came and saw…we appreciate it…

Baz/ July 2014

TITP photo-Corinne Laver