The Stranglers Were Go

Former Stranglers frontman Hugh Cornwell recently arrived in Ireland to launch the JD Set, a competition for Irish unsigned bands run by Jack Daniel’s. Cornwell – who will be joining the judging panel for the JD Set final, which will be held next April – officially kicked off the competition with a gig in Crawdaddy, where he performed tracks from his recent solo album, Hooverdam, released earlier this year. Interestingly, Hooverdam was made available as a free download on Cornwell’s website. How has that approach worked out for the singer?

“Very well, actually,” says Cornwell, sitting in a quiet corner of the Fitzwilliam Hotel. “It was a record company suggestion. He’s a young Australian guy who’s crazy about music, and he said, ‘This is such a great album, I’m not satisfied with just reaching the core fans. How about we give it away for free?’ I said, ‘How are you going to make anything back?’ He said, ‘We’ll make it free, but we’ll also release it as a lovely digipack. We’ve got to find a way to make it so desirable that people will want that, even though they’ve got it for free.’
“So, as soon we finished the album, we filmed ourselves doing a live performance of the material. It was a big six-camera shoot, and there were no overdubs or anything. We shot it as it happened, warts and all.”
The film is called Blueprint, which has been described as “Sympathy For The Devil meets The Thomas Crowne Affair.” Where does the Thomas Crowne aspect come in?
“Well, there are splitscreen effects in Blueprint, which are also used a lot in The Thomas Crowne Affair,” explains Cornwell. “I directed the editing, which took me a month. That’s quite a long time to spend editing a DVD, but I just got fed up with these token DVDs that you get with albums, which are crap. You watch two numbers and you think, ‘Well I’ve seen it all now.’ Unless you’re a real avid fan, what’s the point? I wanted something that maybe you could watch more than once.”
Cornwell actually recorded Hooverdam in London’s Toe Rag studios with Liam Watson, the engineer renowned for his work on The White Stripes’ Elephant. Indeed, Cornwell says he was a fan of the stripped-back sound Watson achieved on that album.
“Liam’s got a very unusual way of working,” he observes. “It’s all analogue and there’s no computer in sight. He records on eight-track, which is the old way of doing things. Funnily enough, he took longer to mix this record than I’ve ever spent mixing an album. I wasn’t there; he wouldn’t let me go. He said, ‘I’ll tell you when it’s finished.’ And he spent three months doing it. Not every day, but because there are only eight tracks, it’s like a mix is a performance.
“He’d work it on it for a few hours, then he’d take it home and listen to it, and he’d go, ‘No, that’s not quite right.’ So he’d go back the next week and do it again. He’d maybe do two or three mixes in a day. Then after two or three months, he had all these mixes, and he picked out the best ones of each track that he liked. He put them together and sent to me, and I said, ‘Yeah, that’s great.’”
Hugh’s previous album was produced by Tony Visconti, who is famed for his work with David Bowie in the ’70s. Was Visconti someone he sought out to work with?
“Well, Tony mixed a couple of Stranglers albums, so I’d worked with him before,” explains Cornwell. “I always thought he was very good with voices, because of the work he’d done with David Bowie. I thought he did very good work with my voice on The Stranglers stuff, and I’ve always been in touch with him since then, so we thought it was a good idea to do something together.”
Has Cornwell himself met Bowie?
“Yeah, I’ve met him once or twice,” he replies. “One time was when I re-established contact with Tony. He’s a very, lovely disarming man, and he does a great Norman Wisdom impersonation. I just hope he gets out and about and active again if he can, ‘cos he hasn’t done anything for a while.”
Hugh has also been keeping busy outside music, having completed his first novel, Window To The World (“that was the original name for Panorama,” he says of the title), and commenced work on a second. He has previous form as a writer, having written The Stranglers – Song by Song, a guide to his old band’s catalogue, and Inside Information, an account of the time he spent in Pentonville Prison for drug possession.
“Inside Information was a tiny little pamphlet,” recalls Cornwell. “But then I edited it and put it into my autobiography, A Multitude Of Sins. I read it again and I thought it was very entertaining, and rather than write all about prison again, I incorporated it into the book.”
How did you find the experience of being in prison? Tough, presumably.
“Yeah, it’s an eye-opener,” says Cornwell. “Everybody who sends someone to prison should go and check it our before. Always try it yourself first. But I’ve got a brilliant new idea for prisoners. They spend 23 hours a day locked up and bored shitless. I know this, ‘cos I was a prisoner. They want to do something. My idea is take all the illicit funds that are confiscated from drug dealers and anyone doing dodgy deals, and put them to good use.
“The way they should be put to good use is by paying for chain-gangs to be made up of all these people sitting in jail with nothing to do. They should go out picking up all the litter in the streets, and they should also put plants in the middle of motorways, so that you don’t get blinded by the cars going the other way. This is what they do in France, Spain and Germany. Not with the prisoners, but they’ve got plants growing down the middle of the motorways. It means you don’t get blinded by the cars travelling in the other direction.”
Any plans to approach the Home Secretary with the initiative? Or to run for public office yourself?
“No, I wouldn’t do that,” responds Hugh. “But I can offer some good advice, rather like Mandelson does. But if people like your good self take the plunge and print ideas such as this, then your never know who could start talking about it.”
We certainly await Jacqui Smith’s views with interest. Moving back to musical matters, in the book U2 by U2 (“they should have called it U2 by Us Four,” suggests Cornwell), Bono and The Edge recall the occasion U2 supported The Stranglers in Dublin. Apparently, at the time, the nascent Dublin band were none too happy with the dressing room arrangements, leading Bono to square up to Stranglers bassist Jean Jacques Bernel – a brave move considering Bernel’s karate expert status.
“I don’t think they got enough drinks or something in their dressing room, but I think it got sorted out,” recalls Hugh. “We’ve talked about this, many years ago. It was funny, we all laughed about it.”
Speaking of punk-era gigs, The Stranglers themselves supported some iconic artists, including The Ramones and Patti Smith. What are Cornwell’s memories of those shows?
“I always had heard that Patti Smith was a very liberated woman, anti-sexist and all this,” he says. “Then when I saw her performance, she was writhing on the stage with the guitar in a very sexual way. It didn’t quite make sense to me; it seemed a bit of a dichotomy. So I was a bit confused about that. But I did love The Ramones; I loved the brevity and the simplicity. Just great.
“Those shows were all in London, although I think we did one in Birmingham with Patti Smith. But one of those London shows stands out in particular. What about this for a line-up – it was The Ramones, Talking Heads, The Stranglers and the Flaming Groovies. Talking Heads’ first album had just come out. It was sort of arty and a bit different. I was introduced to The Ramones briefly, but I didn’t really get the chance to meet anyone properly.”
I actually interviewed Johnny Ramone once, although it wasn’t until I saw the documentary End Of The Century that I became aware of his right-wing politics.
“But they were all kids of quite well-to-do families from Long Island, weren’t they? So, you know, you shouldn’t really be surprised with roots like that.”
Well, I suppose it jarred a bit because punk was more of a left-wing movement.
“But was it? Joe Strummer was the son of a diplomat who lived all over the world. You had to start off somewhere.”
And John Lydon, of course, is currently starring in a butter commercial.
“And he’s a huge property owner in California.”
Cornwell himself has no property mogul ambitions, being content to continue working on music. And as long as he keeps producing strong albums like Hooverdam and performing great live shows, he’s in no danger of having to chuck in the day job.