Back in the day there was no one quite like Stranglers . The sheer brilliance and unfiltered genius of the songs left everyone in the shade. For ten albums with Hugh Cornwell at the helm the band produced some of the finest and most diverse music ever recorded. And the best thing about the band was that they spoke to everyone, if you liked Hard Rock, Punk, or any other genre it didn’t matter: the music brought us all together. Now ten albums into his solo career Hugh Cornwell has to be one of music’s great overachievers: but it’s not just music, there’s his books, his acting and his podcasts too. Best of all he’s heading down under to teach us all a Rock and Roll lesson in a few short weeks.
Hugh: Hello, is that Mark! How are you?
Mark: I’m good thanks Hugh. It’s great to talk to you. We’re very much looking forward to seeing you over in a few weeks. One of my great memories of my childhood, is delving into my best mate’s older brother’s record collection. Every Saturday as he headed out of the house down to the pub, we’d be straight in there, It was almost completely full of Hard Rock but every album by Stranglers was there too. You were the band that everyone loved.
Hugh: Interesting.
Mark: Those records really got me hooked and opened up a few new horizons.
Hugh: I guess there were elements of Hard Rock in there.
Mark: I think the fact that the band was so eclectic was the key. There was no neat genre label for Stranglers. It was interesting going back and listening to a lot of your solo material over teh last few weeks that you’re now at that point where there are ten solo records and ten Strangler records with you at the helm.
Hugh: Or even more, I did the one with John Cooper Clarke as well. And a few other bits and pieces over the years. So I’m well into my second set of solo releases now I’m starting on a new one later this year too.
Mark: That’s sounds great, is it just you, any concepts at this stage?
Hugh: Oh yeah, I’ve already commissioned an artist to do the cover for me, I’ve got the ideas and the concept. I’ve just got to go into the studio and come up with it, but that’s OK. There are loads of ideas so that’s fine.
Mark: How finished are the songs that you take into the studio for a new project?
Hugh: They’re deliberately unfinished. And I only work on the bare minimum that I need: ten or twelve songs. And there’s hardly anything left over. There used to be but these days its very cut and dried in the sense that it’s very tailor made. I work on as many songs as it takes to fill up and album and then I stop writing, you know. I’m very capable of turning the tap on and off.
Mark: So even though they’re unfinished you know that they are good enough to make it?
Hugh: Yeah, if a song gets to that stage and gets finished I know I’m going to use it. Though occasionally my manager is brutally honest and says “That’s awful” and then I have to go and do another one (Laughs) to take its place! But that hasn’t happened for a while. Though I must say when I first started making ‘Moments of Madness’ (Hugh’s latest album) one of teh songs on that I gave it to him, it was one of the first songs I’d finished. and he said “That’s the worst song I’ve ever heard you play to me. You can’t possibly think of putting that on the album, this is awful.” So I went back to the drawing board, but I took the bits I liked out of it: and it became ‘Moments of Madness’ the Reggae title track. So all power to him.
Mark: I think along with ‘Red Rose’ that’s probably my favourite on there.
Hugh: That’s great, excellent.
Mark: And hopefully you’ll be playing a few from that record when you come over.
Hugh: I hope so, probably about four I think.
Mark: I always like to look at a few anniversaries when I get to talk to someone with such a distinguished career as yours. It’s been an incredible 40 years since one of my favourite albums ‘Aural Sculpture’ was released.
Hugh: Is it forty this year?
Mark: It is.
Hugh: Yeah, I have fond memories of that. We made that with Laurie Latham in Brussels, very nice.
Mark: That was the first album you did with him wasn’t it.
Hugh: That’s right. We were going to do another one, ‘Dreamtime’ was the next one, but we turned up at the studio in Brussels and we started recording, and he pulled the plug on it. He said “Listen guys, you ain’t ready. This isn’t cutting the quick. This isn’t cutting the ice” And he sent us home. That had never happened to us before. So we reconvened and worked a bit more on the songs and by the time we were ready he’d taken on another project so that’s why we ended up doing it ourselves.
Mark: I always wondered about that. It’s also 45 years since ‘The Raven’.
Hugh: Only 5 years between ‘The Raven’ and ‘Aural Sculpture’ that’s remarkable.
Mark: It’s crazy, and both such great and so different albums. So many great songs. I was playing a Stranglers greatest hits the other day and saying to myself ‘Where are all my favorites’.
Hugh: Where’s all your favourites, is that what you were saying! (laughs) How funny!
Mark: Well there are so many great songs outside of the singles.
Hugh: Are you familiar with my album ‘Nosferatu’? That has to be ’79. Maybe 45 as well? The same year as Raven, so 45 as well, that’s crazy.
Mark: And it’s all aged so well. I guess production aside, which has changed so much over the years. It all still sounds so fresh and edgy.
Hugh: Yeah, yeah.
Mark: I think my favourite album of yours, that I hope we shall hear some from is ‘Totem and Taboo’ and that must be at least a dozen years old now? (It was indeed 12 years, released in 2012)
Hugh: ‘Totem and Taboo’ the Steve Albini touch! In a funny sort of way that was the start of the triptych – ‘Totem and Taboo’, ‘Monster’ and ‘Moments of Madness’ – now I’m looking at it and talking to people about it, it’s almost like that is a triptych. Those three albums are linked in some sort of way. That first album was Steve was the last time I worked with a ‘producer’ if you will, though Steve doesn’t like being called that. Let’s just say with ‘outside help’ in the way that it sounded. Then the two after that have been done without any outside help. So that was an interesting moment in time.
Mark: I shall do and revisit those three this evening, with maybe a glass of wine.
Hugh: (Laughs)
Mark: You have an interesting way into music, there are plenty of stories out there in internet land, you played in another band before the explosion of Stranglers, you were there at the end of the 60’s when so much wonderful music was being made. I imagine you saw and heard a lot of wonderful music, what were you listening to in those years that led to Stranglers?
Hugh: Well I was in a band at band at school when i was 14 with Richard Thompson (later of Fairport Convention) who taught me how to play bass. That was my first dose of being in a band. Then I wasn’t in a band for ten years until I was in Sweden doing my PhD and I formed a band called Johnny Sox with two American draft dodgers and two Swedes. And then that band without one of the Swedes came to England and transformed into the Stranglers as one by one the members of Johnny Sox decided to throw the towel in. First the drummer went: he got an amnesty: Gerald Ford gave them an amnesty where they could do community service if they went back to America, as penance for their refusing to fight. So he decided to do that as his wife and kid were back in Chicago. So he left and Jet came in. The singer decided to go back as his wife and kid were in Washington State, so he went back under the Ford conditions. And the bass-player went back to Sweden and I drafted in Jean Burnel to play bass. So that band metamorphosed into Stranglers, so I wasn’t a job musician going from band to band, that was it. So we came back from Sweden and walked into this strange social set up with ‘3 day weeks’ and power cuts and rubbish on the streets. Society teetering on the brink of chaos, which is the atmosphere in which this whole explosion came about. And understandably it was very unique – there was taste of chaos, a lot of anger, it all reflected the situation it was brought up in.
Mark: Where does the variety come from? To me as a musician you must be incredibly confident to find a groove and largely stick to it. Stranglers never did that, and you’ve never done that.
Hugh: No, I mean that’s boring isn’t it? You’ve got to… I like taking chances in life and in what I do and I like to try and widen the envelope whenever I get involved in something involving creativity. I want to try and widen the envelope and try and make or do things that haven’t been done before. That’s an understandable ambition I think. Some people want to cross the Amazon jungle , in a boat, blindfolded. And why do you want to do that? Because nobody’s done it before. And I think people are driven to do things that haven’t been done before. So my mission with music is to create commercial music that is different. And the way you can do that is by the way you compose songs. And every album I do I’m learning more about the process and refining what I’m doing but also taking chances. And I can afford to do that because of the position I’m in: because I was in a successful band who created some great music. Some songs that were very successful and are successful still. Still being used in film soundtracks and stuff, which generates income. So I’m in a privileged position in that I can still afford to take chances and I don’t have to worry about being commercially successful. And in a way that’s what people like about what I do. So I’m winning really. It’s a niche market.
Mark: It is, but it’s not even confined to music. There’s the books, the occasional acting and the podcasts?
Hugh: Wel I haven’t done the acting for a while but I still love films, and the podcast reflects that. Writing – I love writing books. I get very antsy. If I’m sitting around and I donlt have anything to do I get very antsy. Very bored. And then I get anxious, and then I start worrying, and then I get depressed. So the best thing for me to do is to be constantly active and the I don’t have time to go into that sort of mood. So it’s of paramount importance to me to be totally occupied. I’m like a kid, like an overactive kid! “Keep him occupied! Quick! Because f you don’t, you don’t know what’s going to happen!”
Mark: Gotta keep moving: that’s the thing!
Hugh: Yeah.
Mark: If you could have been a ‘fly on the wall’ for the creation of any great album, what would you like to have been there for, just to peek into the process?
Hugh: What album would it be? Well it would be one you’ve probably never heard of. It’s a solo album by a guy called Nat Adderley , a cornet player, and the brother of Cannonball Adderley. He made this astounding album called ‘Autobiography’ (Atlantic, 1965), It has Josef Zawinul playing on it (piano) from Weather report. The line-up is amazing, it has the most amazing players on it. It’s not a vocal album, it’s instrumental, sort of Bebop, Jazzy, but with some great rhythms. It’s really Melodic too, and I’d love to have been a ‘Fly on the wall’ there. I wouldn’t have stayed on the wall very long I’ll tell you. (laughs)
Mark: And we’ll leave with an easy one: what is the meaning of life?
Hugh: What is the meaning of life? That’s interesting. There is no meaning and that’s the problem that people have issues digesting. (laughs)
Mark: Just make use of the time that you have, and as you said before – keep busy!
Hugh: Right!
Mark: You’ll be with us in a few short weeks. The tour starts out on August 1st and finishes here in Perth on the 10th at the Rosemount.
Hugh: Yes it’s the final show Perth, I like that on these tours, that’s what we did last time. So I hope we shall be well and truly firing by then!
Mark: I’m looking forward to something special!
Hugh: Me too Mark.
Whilst waiting for the next interview we had a few extra minutes to chat and got to ask about Hugh’s relationship with the guitar, his first song and working with Punk Poet John Cooper Clarke…
Mark: Did you have an instant connection with the guitar when you first picked it up?
Hugh: Well I got this interesting take on that. I started off as I said playing bass in this band at school when I was 14 , being taught by Richard Thompson. At the same time I had and still have two elder brothers and an elder sister, so I was the baby. One of my elder brothers had this beautiful Sanish guitar that he had painstakingly renovated and set up, it was a beautiful instrument. And he kept it under lock and key in his bedroom. And then he decided to go off and become a croupier in the Caribbean, And the first thing I did when he left was to rush upstairs and he’d left his guitar there and it wasn’t locked. So for a year I loved playing it, and I taught myself to play guitar on this lovely little Spanish guitar. Then when he got back a year later, I said “What are you going to do with the guitar?” and he just said “You can have it” and so I was over the moon. How’s that?
Mark: A great story. So was it that it was there and you took to the bass and the guitar was a natural progression?
Hugh: Yeah, but also you see I started off as a singer. I always saw myself as a singer, I never saw myself as a guitarist. I wanted to be a singer. So playing the guitar to me was my means of accompanying myself, just incase there was no musician around, then I could accompany myself! So it was a means to an end for me, you know. It was another way to help myself become a singer.
Mark: Can you remember the first song you ever wrote Hugh?
Hugh: Yeah, the first song I ever wrote I think was called ‘Rosemary Alley’ which is a street in Guildford, this little alleyway down by the river near where the Stranglers were holed up writing and preparing to go out and play. So I wrote this song called ‘Rosemary Alley’ all about this street. It was a pretty good song, but it never got recorded. Never got played really.
Mark: You also mentioned earlier that you only take what you need into the studio these days. Was that always the case?
Hugh: No, with the Stranglers we used to prepare about 15 songs just in case the Record Label or the Producer didn’t like one of the songs, we could pull another out and say “How about this one?” In those days you’d prepare a few extra but these days I just do the bare minimum, if I’m working on a song and it’s not going the right way I stop, I just dump it, I don’t finish it and then decide it’s no good I know early on. So the ones that get finished get used. And fortunately I haven’t had to reject many recently, so for me from studio sessions there’s never any left over.
Mark: You also mentioned earlier about working with John Cooper Clarke on the ‘This Time It’s Personal’ album back in 2016. I love that album, to me it was just one of those albums that was meant to be.?
Hugh: Well he’s got a great voice, a great baritone voice. I was mightily impressed and blown over when I found out how good a voice he had.
Mark: I still remember hearing MacArthur Park from that album for the first time and thinking “This is brilliant!”
Hugh: He does a great job on that.
Mark: He was over a year or two ago and mentioned recording them album and got a huge round of applause. I’m sure you will be welcomed with as much love.
Hugh: That’s great to hear. Hopefully! Thanks Mark!
Mark: Thanks Hugh. See you soon!
Ticket link AU: https://metropolistouring.com/hugh-cornwell-2024/
Ticket link NZ: https://metropolistouring.com/newzealand/hugh-cornwell-2024/