Hits And Heroes

GEORGE BYRNE may be a wise and noble man but he’s wrong to assert that a good record’s never been made by a man, or woman, who’s got a moustache.

Exhibit ‘A’ for the defence is the luxuriant lip growth which Dave Greenfield has sported for most of The Stranglers’ career.

Greenfield’s other notable possession is his Hammond – that rumbling organ sound separated Guildford’s finest from the rest of the punk pack, and ensured there was an escape route for them when the ‘76 revolution floundered.

Doing exactly what it says it does on the cover, Hits And Heroes rounds up The Stranglers’ finest moments prior to Hugh Cornwell jumping ship, and his colleagues settling for the security of the nostalgia circuit.

While generating the prerequisite amount of moral outrage – hands up who remembers the Battersea Park strippers? – the quartet were always too fond of The Doors to be true punks. Indeed, the thing which strikes you about early tracks like ‘Get A Grip (On Yourself)’ and ‘Hanging Around’ is just how musical they were beneath the bluster.

It may have been a shock to the system at the time, but viewed retrospectively The Stranglers always had a ‘Golden Brown’ in them – Cornwell turning his heroin habit into the most perverse of top 5 hits. 17 years on, it still sounds as fresh and essential as ‘Peaches’ does tired and clumsy. Whatever about them being a good idea at the time, one suspects that their former lead singer has come to deeply regret lines such as “Is she trying to get out of that clitoris?”

The band make far better use of their testosterone on ‘Something Better Change’ – J.J. Burnel’s threat to “stick my fingers right up your nose!” as gloriously dumb as hooligan rock gets.

The dawn of The Stranglers’ sophisticated period is heralded by their menacing cover of Dionne Warwick’s ‘Walk On By’, and the mournful ‘Duchess’ which arguably rates as their finest four minutes.

With the double-CD boasting a suitably well-endowed 37 tracks, there’s room for an assortment of radio edits, alternate mixes and the two singles they recorded as Celia & The Mutations. Partial as they were to cunning linguism, there’s also a French version of their other smack song, ‘Don’t Bring Harry’. Interesting rather than essential, they demonstrate that The Stranglers were game for pretty much everything that came their way.

Overall, an impressive collection.