In the grip of a Strangler – By Alec Smart

January 15, 2020

The Stranglers, the musically-diverse and often controversial British rock band, are returning to Australia in February. Alec Smart exchanged banter with bassist-founder Jean-Jacques ‘JJ’ Burnel.

The first question Burnel asks, after he’s established where I’m calling from in Australia (Sydney), is: “Are you still breathing okay?”

In France, where he now lives (he relocated five years ago), he’s been following news coverage of Australia’s Apocalyptic bushfires and reveals the French offered to send firefighters to help combat them.

It’s been a scorching hot summer and, bushfire talk aside, I ask Burnel to confirm a tale of a hot and sweaty gig Stranglers played to a rowdy crowd in Sydney decades ago, which was recalled by former Stranglers’ singer-guitarist Hugh Cornwell in Sydney last year.

On this occasion, humidity and cigarette smoke contributed to stifling conditions at the venue (likely the Narrabeen Royal Antler), so the band suggested someone open a window, and in response, a number of chairs were rapidly moved to facilitate entry of a cool sea breeze.

“I remember that!” Burnel laughs. “That was just outside Sydney. All the windows were smashed! It was too hot!”

The chairs were thrown through the windows!

Embraced by the burgeoning mid-70s punk rock scene they soon transcended, The Stranglers are renowned for beautiful pop melodies like Golden Brown, Always the Sun and Strange Little Girl, along with earlier punchy pub-rock numbers Peaches (a top 40 hit in Australia despite being banned in Britain), No More Heroes and (Get a) Grip (on Yourself), featuring Burnel’s distinctive distorted bass riffs.

The band initially launched in Sept 1974 in Guildford, a city in rural Surrey, south of London, as The Guildford Stranglers – although there is no record of them playing under that name. The band retain an affinity with the city, and they often return to play at the city’s annual music festival, Guilfest.

One year I recall they headlined Guilfest on Saturday night and on Sunday former singer Hugh Cornwell performed. It was a delight for the band’s fans to hear two versions of their songs over consecutive days, but I ask Burnel whether this was a cock-up on behalf of the promoters.

“Maybe just provocative,” he replies drily. The band and Cornwell have long been estranged since he departed in 1990 claiming they had run out of creative drive and were a spent force artistically.

On 31 Jan 2019 The Stranglers performed a benefit at The Star Inn in Guildford – the venue where they played their first gig – to lend support to a petition of over 17,300 signatures to save the premises after the developer of a neighbouring block of flats issued a noise complaint. A plaque was unveiled dedicated to the band and the pub’s performance license was subsequently saved.

As well as the plaque honouring his band in Guildford, luthier John Shuker made a signature bass guitar in honour of Burnel. “We’re still working on it,” he reveals. “John Shuker is a guitar maker and we’ve got a few prototypes we’re still developing that I use live.”

Ashdown also designed an amplifier named the JJ500 in tribute to Burnel.

Any streets in Surrey or Triumph Motorcycles, from which Burnel has long been associated, named in his honour?

“No,” he chuckles, “although there are special Doctor Martens’ boots which are unique to The Stranglers! Other bands have requested them but the boot company have only made a pair for us, with a Stranglers’ logo on the boot.

“Three of us ride Triumph motorcycles. I’m down to two bikes at the moment [he reportedly used to own several], as you can only ride one at a time…

“One of my most memorable rides was after an Australian tour. Three of us stayed on in Perth and Triumph loaned us three motorcycles and we rode down to Margaret River, which was fantastic, although we had a lot of rain. About 500km, it was great fun!”

The son of French immigrants, Burnel was born in London in the same hospital where Jimi Hendrix was declared dead. “That’s my major claim to fame!” he chuckles. His family moved south to Surrey when he was 12 and he attended Guildford Grammar School.

“When I was a kid growing up in Surrey – I lived with my parents in Godalming – I was really privileged. There was a pub there and as a 14-15-year-old I used to see bands like Peter Greenwood’s Fleetwood Mac, before they’d recorded their first album, in front of 40-50 people. The older guys would smuggle me in because I wasn’t allowed to be in the pub!

“I saw loads of bands from that era: Free, before they were called Free. In fact the top guitarists of the era – Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Peter Green, Jeff Beck – they all came from Surrey!”

Must have been something in the water, because Burnel is also a talented guitarist, classically-trained. “I started when I was a schoolkid at the age of 11. My dad forced me to learn classical guitar, for which I’m grateful.”

So how did he graduate to the bass?

“By accident. When I gave a hitch-hiker a lift, which led to The Stranglers being formed.”

To complete the story, Burnel was driving a van for a living and he gave a lift to a Swedish hitchhiker, whom, as it turned out, was a bassist that had just stormed out of a rehearsal with an unsuccessful blues band fronted by Hugh Cornwell. Burnel contacted Cornwell, who introduced him to drummer Jet Black, and the rest, as they say, is history.

The band began rehearsing in the storeroom of a liquor store known as The Jackpot in Guildford, moving on to a shared terrace house in Chiddingfold after it was knocked down.

The Jackpot was run by successful entrepreneur and jazz drummer Jet Black (real name Brian Duffy), who also managed a fleet of ice cream trucks but was keen to return to playing music. Black recruited Hugh Cornwell (who had briefly played with folk icon Richard Thompson) on guitar and vocals, young Burnel on bass, and Hans Wärmling on keyboards, although the latter was replaced within the year by Dave Greenfield, who remains with the band 45 years later.

Although Black is still nominally listed as a member of the band, his health is deteriorating rapidly and he no longer appears in group photo-calls.

“Throughout the years Jet always had health problems, “ Burnel reveals, “and it came to a climax a few years back. Fortunately he had his eye on a drummer whom he wanted to take over, so he sort-of nurtured and groomed Jim and he’s been in the band now seven or eight years.”

“Jet can hardly lift a drumstick these days,” Burnel continues. “He had two strokes in November and when he was in hospital they told us he developed sepsis that would lead to complete organ failure followed by cardiac arrest. Yet he’s managed to pull through.”

In 1977, when punk rock was a new and shocking musical genre, The Stranglers were revered among its leaders, bolstered when they gained the main support for both The Ramones’ and Patti Smith’s first tours of Britain.

In Stranded, the 2015 ABC documentary on Brisbane punk pioneers The Saints, who, in 1976, independently-released what is arguably the first punk rock single, (I’m) Stranded, before relocating to England, Burnel recalled the early days of the musical youth movement.

“Everyone thought you could do what you wanted; it was a real moment of freedom. And then, of course, it got straitjacketed and became a new kind of fundamentalism… The scene at the time started off quite friendly, but then it became what I call ‘gunslinger syndrome’ – people would challenge us every night and they’d come just to smash up a gig.”

The Stranglers’ subsequently trekked to Australia in 1979, where they were banned from TV pop show Countdown by host Molly Meldrum after he watched an interview with Channel 7 TV reporter Howard Gipps from Mike Willesee’s Willesee at Seven program, to whom they provided mischievous answers to insulting questions.

Gipps provocatively asked them, “Isn’t [being a Strangler] just a cheap gimmick?” followed by: “Do you like the things punk rockers do, like the animal acts?”, whereupon the band replied, “well, f***ing isn’t legalized here yet, is it?”

Gipps then asked them if they liked drugs, and a band member responded, “They’re great,” which prompted an angry Willesee in the studio to halt the interview and apologise to Gipps, saying “if they want publicity they’ll have to try a little harder with their answers…”

Later that tour, in Melbourne, during a photo session with a newspaper, one of the group dropped his trousers in the middle of Bourke Street in the city and the angry photographer announced he intended to make a formal complaint with the Australian Journalists Association and try to get their visas revoked.

In Queensland, then effectively a Police State where gatherings of more than three people were outlawed and punk gigs were trashed by police, they received a reception they didn’t expect.

Their Brisbane concerts sold out, but they encountered hostility from a sector of the crowd, enduring threats and a constant shower of spit when they performed.

Eventually Burnel snapped.

“This guy comes up on stage so I just kicked the shit out of him!” Burnel recalls in the Stranded documentary. Peter McGrath, long-time stalwart of the east coast Australian punk scene and singer with Brisbane band V2 and Melbourne band Death Sentence, confesses he was on the receiving end of the 7th dan black belt karate expert’s punishment.

“People [were] spitting; I probably was, I have no idea,” McGrath confirms. “He clocked me straight across the scone with his bass and smashed my head right in.”

Burnel continues: “It turned out that some of the people in the audience were Special Police or something, and they’d set it up just to break up the gig.”

“We didn’t know anything about the politics of Australia at that time,” drummer Jet Black adds. “We were amazed by what we found there, a strange, not very free society. The authorities didn’t seem to like us. They seemed to be monitoring everything we did.” The footage flashes back to a young Black explaining they’d appeared in five different TV interviews but none of them had been broadcast due to a suspected ‘sinister campaign’.

“We had to get the hell out of there,” Burnel reveals, “so it gave us an awful lot of fuel for a subsequent song, which we called Nuclear Device, about the Wizard of Oz, Joh Bjelke Petersen, who sold off Aboriginal lands for uranium… The political situation in Queensland was completely different to our experience of the rest of Australia.”

It was another decade before The FItzgerald Inquiry into corruption brought down Queensland Premier Bjelke Petersen’s banana republic who gerrymandered elections and ran the state as a personal fiefdom from Aug 1968 – Dec 1987, when he resigned in disgrace. Three former ministers and the Police Commissioner were jailed for corruption and abuse of power, ending the National Party’s 32-year reign as the governing party of Queensland.

The group have since played Australia numerous times through several line-up changes, Burnel a constant presence.

Eight years have passed since The Stranglers released new material. Their last studio albums, the critically-acclaimed Norfolk Coast, Suite XVI (a pun on ‘sweet 16’ and their 16th studio album) and Giants, were released in 2004, 2006 and 2012, respectively. In between, in 2005, Burnel co-wrote the soundtrack and composed the opening and closing theme songs to a popular Japanese science fiction animé series called Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo.

Burnel reveals, however, that the band are currently working on new album material as we speak.

“Actually, after I put this phone down on you I’ll be back in the studio. You’re calling me to where our studio is. We’re recording.”

Any working title yet?

“No, that’s something we haven’t got together yet, although we’ve got about seven pieces we’re working on…

At the moment it’s sounding all over the f***ing shop! I think the correct word would be ‘eclectic’!”

The Stranglers were arguably the most interesting, experimental and versatile of the early punk scene, who brought sixties’ psychedelia and The Doors influences via lilting keyboards to a genre that was becoming defined and limited by heavy guitar-based three-chord riffs.

Johnny ‘Rotten’ Lydon, atonal front-man with Sex Pistols, whom many see as the archetypical sneering cliché that captures the visual essence of punk sensibilities, famously mocked The Stranglers at this time. Burnel has previously suggested this animosity probably came about after a fist fight between him and The Clash’s Paul Simonon after a London gig in 1976.

Nevertheless, The Stranglers infamously declared on a 2012 Australian tour that “Sex Pistols are a boy band who’ve managed to master one record in 35 years and are a bit of a comedy act..”

Do they still see themselves as punks?

“It’s a label we fell out of love with a long time ago,” Burnel replies. “But I now consider myself to be an old punk, heh heh! For me it remains a broad church that encompasses so much of a certain spirit, but it doesn’t really mean anything.”

For John Lydon he now expresses pity rather than contempt.

“I think he’s just a caricature and the poor bloke has had to live up to his image.”

Living in France might prove problematic for Burnel when the Brexit is finalised (Britain’s withdrawal from Europe) hindering his commutes back and forth between France and Britain for work and family commitments. Does he predict problems?

“No one really knows how much it’s going to complicate things. I don’t think it will go back to how it was before when we all had to get visas stamped to get to France and back, but it is an odd situation.”

The Stranglers play Enmore Theatre, Enmore Rd, Newtown, Sydney, on Saturday 8 Feb 2020 as part of their Australian tour.

Tickets for all shows HERE

Connect with The Stranglers

FACEBOOK | TWITTER | YOUTUBE | SPOTIFY

Listen to ‘Skin Deep’