mercredi 28 Mar 2012, 7h21m
Sat 24 Mar – The Stranglers, The Popes
The pretty cool girl from Burnage invites you back to her house. The living
room has a mottled copper-topped coffee table with oversized plastic ashtrays
stolen from the local. Her parents smoke filterless cigarettes which protrude
from between knuckles on hands muddied with homemade tattoos which,
gripping Swiss Army Knife & Promotional Corkscrew-blade respectively, peel
potatoes onto old tabloids between their feet on the living room floor. There's
a half-eaten Jaffa Cake bobbing in the Fish Tank, providing a late-thrust in the
algae-battle one of those endlessly entertaining glass-cleaning magnets has
clearly surrendered, having fallen-off the inside pane and cowered behind the
Deep Sea Diver.
A mongrel-dog lies on its side, panting on the rug in a shaft of sunlight and
waltzing dust, its bubblegum-coloured bell-end foaming a greenish semen
from it's ill-advisedly left-intact knackers. The dog is probably named after a
60s City player, and often rears-up on his haunches trying to hug their eleven
year old son in what is mistaken for play, rather than attempted rape.
“CALLUM, STICK ‘EM IN THE FRYER FOR HALF AN HOUR,
US LOT ARE OFF T’ STRANGLERS!”
(Research has discovered this is the most popular avenue of inadvertently
finding yourself at a 21st Century Stranglers concert.)
Prior to tonight, the most exposure I’d had to the band was dicing tofu
at ‘Diamond Dogs’, an ill-fated Lesbitarian Café on Beech Road, Chorlton.
Their ‘Best Of’ CD boasted an impressive tracklisting, and my ex-radical,
Sapphic managers were incongruously fond of ‘Peaches’. Prior to that, one of
my very earliest memories is of gazing into the VU meter of my Dad’s Teleton
T660 Tuner as the needle lolled along to the peaks and troughs of the cosy
brown snow of the enchanting and exotic ‘Golden Brown’.
Manchester Academy looks like Fiorina 'Fury' 161 from ‘Alien 3’: all shaven
heads and middle-aged spreads. Black-clad 'Ram Man' Stranglers fans
with red, rat-emblazoned plastic bags schmooze enthusiastically. There’s a
surprising smattering of women too: a few bewildered-looking Ripleys crash-
landed into this stubborn cult with an unyielding fealty to brand/band, around
which they’ve built this intimidating religion. What nowadays passes for The
Stranglers is three quarters of the personnel that made their illustrious name
- founder Hugh Cornwell having condemned them as creatively bankrupt and absconded over 20 years ago. He’d declared there were ‘No More Heroes’ in 1977, but in 2012, Stranglers fans still put a lot of stock in whoever was in his proximity when he barked the lyrics…and someone who at the time was in Sunderland, and 13 years old…
Baz Warne has the dubious honour of insinuating himself into the legend
and, it has to be said, does an admirable and competent job of stepping
into Cornwell’s right-hand flank opposite Jean Jaques Burnel, while Dave Greenfield’s Manzarek-inflected keys lend their chugging punk the oddball
quality that originally distinguished them from the rest of 1977’s anarchitects.
73 year old drummer ‘Jet Black’, having succumbed to one of the chest
infections he’s become increasingly susceptible-to is tonight replaced by an
understudy, Drum Tech Ian Barnard. So, it turns out we in fact have 50% of
the classic line-up. None of which seems to matter in Stranglers-land.
They take the stage to the familiar strains of trademark
instrumental ‘waltzinblack’, the woozy oompah organ sounds of a perverted circus, before lurching into new album track ‘Lowlands’. Alternating between old and new material like this, they manage to maintain the interest of both fervent and casual onlooker, while also highlighting the former’s lack of ideas. The musicianship that managed to transmogrify the band from nose-thumbing punks to the unclassifiable outfit that put out innovative and amorphous albums like ‘Black & White’, ‘(The Gospel According To) The Meninblack’ and ‘La Folie’, is still basically in evidence but played safe behind amplification and attitude.
When this incarnation trundle out ‘No More Heroes’, it’s an unintentionally
ironic and unexpectedly deflating experience. Never has such an increasingly
fucked world, with all the tools at its peoples’ fingertips been doubly
hamstrung by dispassionate and apathetic gapless generations. The
Stranglers in 2012 is a moderately depressing prospect, but no worse than
Michael Cera & Zooey Deschanel forced to copulate at shotgun-point by the
masturbating cast of ‘The Big Bang Theory’ in furtherance of the supreme
geek-being. While I went-in skeptical, I abandoned the Academy before the
encore with ambitions of becoming a fan. I’ll no doubt be taking my daughter
and her boyfriend to Hugh Cornwell’s Octogenarian Stranglers-anecdote/
rheumatistic-fingered acoustic tour in 20 years time.
Originally 'published' here: http://www.manchesterscenewipe.co.uk/reviews/the-stranglers-live-review/