JJ BURNEL of THE STRANGLERS: The Right To Opinion
An interview by Tim Gruar.
Don’t call them punk – not anymore. They’ve finally grown up. Known for their hi-jinx and media stunts, embarking on strange musical directions and the occasional fight with abusive audience members (though not now) UK rockers The Stranglers are returning to Aotearoa three shows this month. The band will also be supported by Shihad frontman Jon Toogood.
Formed in 1975, they were originally named the Guildford Stranglers. Even though only one of them came from the town. The name was once registered a business by founding band member Brian Duffy (aka drummer Jet Black) who owned ice cream trucks. The other original personnel included bassist Jean-Jacques (JJ) Burnel, guitarist/vocalist Hugh Cornwell and keyboardist/guitarist Hans Wärmling, who was replaced by keyboardist Dave Greenfield within a year.
From 1976 the Stranglers got in on the burgeoning punk rock movement, partly because they’d opened for Ramones and Patti Smith. Their band’s early albums, ‘Rattus Norvegicus’, ‘No More Heroes’ and ‘Black and White’, were all released within a period of 13 months and were top sellers with singles such as “Peaches”, “Something Better Change” and “No More Heroes”. Following that came a change of direction, from punk and new wave to synth pop and even more experimental explorations in to alien territory such as 1981’s ‘The Gospel According to The Meninblack’.
Over their 49-year career they’ve released 18 albums, with 24 top 40 singles and 19 top 40 albums. Their latest, ‘Dark Matters’ (2021) was released as a tribute to keyboard player Dave Greenfield, who died in 2020. Greenfield’s final show with The Stranglers was at Auckland’s Town Hall on 15th February 2020 – less than three months before his death.
On a fine spring morning, I had the opportunity for a cosy Zoomside chat with the band’s only remaining founding member JJ Burnel about Rugby, mental health, keyboards in punk bands and crashing onto Blondie’s stage dressed in full drag.
We’ve only got a short time, so I’ll crack into it. First of all, are you watching the World Cup?
No, not yet really. I’m not a huge Soccer fan. I hope France or England win it. I’m more the rugby fan, actually.
Oh, in that case I’m really sorry about New Zealand beating you (England) in the (Women’s Rugby) World Cup. We only scraped through at the last minute. It was it was a seat of the pants stuff both of those games, it was such a fantastic spectacle.
Ha! Great. Fantastic. I think France and Ireland are going to be really good next time. But the whole world is catching up with New Zealand. There’s a change of guard in New Zealand at the moment. We are learning how to play from New Zealand, from your players and coaches. It’ll be good. That’s what we want. So, watch out next time. (laughs)
It’s good to see the world waking up again. Sport and festivals, gigs. Everything is nearly back to normal on the music and festival scene. Is that true for the Stranglers?
Yes. We’ve played a number of places, at the end of last year and the beginning of this year. We did the whole series of festivals during the summer. And we just finished a few weeks ago in Northern Europe, you know, Holland, Denmark, Germany, Luxembourg, etc.
And speaking of touring, I looked on your Instagram page and I see in 2012 the Stranglers did a gig here and in Australia, there’s a great photo of you guys in drag, having just come off stage where Blondie was playing. Please explain.
We like to tease and bands we play with. They weren’t expecting it. It was our last show with them, in Brisbane. We’d been friends, up to then (laughs) Old Stein wasn’t pleased stealing his thunder. (laughs) It was great fun. Debbie thought it was hilarious – she even stopped singing.
(Burnell is referring to the band’s surprise flash mob moment when, dressed in sparkling Dame Edna dresses, they burst onto the stage during ‘The Tide Is High’ to do an impromptu conga line.)
And you guys have always done something a bit naughty haven’t you? I mean, like you once gaffa taped up a journo 40 metres up, upside down to the Eiffel Tower – I read. And you’ve been kicked out of Sweden a couple of times – at gun point – for misbehaving. Looking back at it, that was kind of kicking against the pricks, fighting the establishment by any means necessary. Do you think bands are capable of that these days?
No. I don’t think so. And if they do, they are not caught (laughs) It’s all too commercialised these days. You know, if you’re gonna be caught smoking a joint, there’ll be photographer. There will be a few photographers there waiting. And there will be a contract condition broken. A law suit. All that. Bands can’t wriggle about like we did. Their weight. Yeah. So, it’s a bit… A lot of the paparazzi, when it happens is fabricated. It’s the commercial imperative has taken over again.
Your music and songs have covered so much ground. I mean, the early ones were, you know, poignant, challenging. Like ‘Peaches’, which is kind of this cheeky ironic thing. Then you’ve got the demise of Trotsky and Lenin and various other icons on ‘Whatever Happened to Heroes?’ And then you’ve got the dad advice sort of stuff, which is the backbone of ‘Always The Sun’. I mean, you cover so much ground. Where do you go now?
Well, we’re not famous for writing love songs. We haven’t written too many love songs. And the main reason is because, I think, love has been devalued. So used, overused. And I mean, I wish we had written lots of love songs, it would mean that it was actually real for us. But, you know we don’t have too many loves in our life – well not proper lives ‘n’ that.
So. So what do you write about? You write about hosting the world’s interaction with other people, interaction between others. So that’s what’s always such a rich seam. You never run out of stuff to write about.
So, for instance, on ‘Dark Matters’, our last album, the opening track (‘Water’), we wrote 8 or 9 years ago. It’s about the Arab Spring. This idea of water coming to the desert, is like the freedom and the and the expression of. That’s it, the water is a metaphor for democracy and freedom. At the end, the lines: ‘They never had rainfall before/ Water has come/ The desert’s so thirsty / It seemed an impossible dream / So it seems.’ Like we are not sure where this will go.
And yes, it’s happening again in Iran at the moment – it’s all cyclic, isn’t it?
And now look at the Iranian football team who wouldn’t sing the National anthem…
These are things that stimulate me. We’re told that we shouldn’t have an opinion. Everyone should have an opinion. I might sound like my local cab driver, who’s got an opinion on everything. We all should have opinions. In some countries you’re not allowed to have an opinion. Russia now don’t have an opinion. If you do, you get locked up. As writers, we work on opinions and if people don’t agree with my opinion, that’s fine. And like Voltaire said, you know – I might disagree with what you say, but I’ll defend the right to say it.
And what about the other songs on the album. Like ‘No Man’s Land’ – Where’s that one coming from?
That’s about commercialisation and those people who just jump on bandwagons, false causes, disingenuous supporters of causes, that kind of thing. Because they are looking at where they can make money out of the hope and despair for others. Like doomed political causes. Which is something we (the band) rail against all the time.
The band has experimented with all kinds of ideas and genres.
Yeah, we’ve fallen on our faces (musically) a few times. We’ve wanted to see how far we can go – artistically. What our fans, listeners and that were prepared to support or accept.
Like 1981’s ‘The Gospel According To The Meninblack’? That was a pretty far departure, artistically from your previous works.
The album, the band’s fifth, is based on an esoteric concepts and conspiratorial ideas surrounding alien visitations to Earth, the supposed league of sinister governmental men in black, and intertwining of well-known biblical narratives.
These are some pretty heavy, imaginative ideas. A departure from your previous ‘manifesto’?
It certainly was. But why not try? I mean, you don’t know when it’s going to end. So, for me, playing safe and you know, especially if you’ve had success, with a record, there’s so much pressure on you to repeat that success in the same way. Yeah. Well, I find that that is the tail wagging the dog. I prefer to use a dog right at the tail.
Yeah, it’s funny because I read quite a lot of criticism about that ‘…Meninblack’ album. Maybe it’s finally come of age. Compare that to Kanye, or Kamasi Washington, this esoteric, synth heavy style is totally in vogue right now. Many of our local acts use keys and synths in their rock sound, too. Back then your audience just wasn’t ready for it?
Yeah, People didn’t get it at the time. They are discovering it now because, I mean, I think it’s completely ‘out there’. Like ‘far out there’, with it’s space and science themes. It still poses a big question, actually. And they still haven’t found the missing link (the connection to alien visitors). And we do know now that our little planet, our galaxy is very young. And there are other galaxies that have been around millions and millions of years more than ours. And mathematically, we can’t be the only planet in the in the universe. So, what we were trying to do with ‘…Meninblack’ was just to post a question. “Are we really the only life force out here?’
Wow.
And that question, that idea, questions what religion is. Like, what is ‘religion’. It’s an act to coerce people, get them into line. When you have over, say, 250 people, you need to create a belief, to keep them together, to discipline them, give them rules which will work in your favour.
It begs the question – who benefits from religion? If you ask that, some might think that is sacrilegious, punishable by death. Even if you question a small detail of that religious culture, like why you should wear a hajib. That’s a kind of extremely cruel cancel culture. You know, disagree and its heresy. I mean, it’s just forms of power control. Jesus would be turning in his grave if you saw the wealth of the church, collected in his name.
I really did want to talk about Dave because you know, he’s so much part of the story of The Stranglers.
Long-time keyboardist Dave Greenfield, who had been with the band since their formation in 1975, died after contracting COVID-19 while receiving treatment for a heart ailment. The band’s 18th album, ‘Dark Matters’, released posthumously, features Greenfield on 8 of the 11 tracks. It’s also the first studio album recorded without founding drummer Jet Black, who retired in 2015.
You pay tribute to him on the track “And If You Should See Dave…” He was so much of the band’s sound, wasn’t he? I know at the time you got a lot of ‘stick’ for having a keyboard player in a ‘punk’ band.
Initially, all the bands, we used to hang out, playing the same venues, were all part of a ‘scene’. The way you should play. You had to look a certain way and everything. And then suddenly the revolution (bringing synths and keyboards to the band’s sound) becomes a new orthodoxy.
True, because the age of synth bands started in the early 80’s, yes.
Yeah. Dave’s style of playing was originally compared to Ray (Manzarek) from the Doors. I’d not heard of the Doors back then. I think he was more in to Yes and Wakeman back then – big swirly, new age stuff.
(In fact, Greenfield’s noted for his trademark style of playing rapid arpeggios on a Hohner Cembalet, a Hammond L-100 electric organ, and a Minimoog synthesizer).
We were considered heretics because we had a keyboard player! But not only a keyboard but ‘a synnnnnnnnnthercissssser!” (laughs) These rules appeared. We thought fuck it. Our friends, so-called friends turned their backs on us. We decided that we’d carry on, you know. Which, in a way would have been creatively more liberating, and really useful because instead of following any trends or trying to toe the party line we towed our own fucking party line. And that seems to have served as well. Yeah.
Dave was, at heart, an eccentric soul, a perfectionist and a really musical explorer wasn’t he?
Certainly. I mean who else would choose to come up with a piece of waltz-time harpsichord music, like he did on the ‘…Meninblack’. We thought it was nuts. But then it appeared on our biggest hit “Golden Brown”. Who knew that would be so big!
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There was a high profile piece in the Guardian about Dave, in which you acknowledge that Dave was a high-functioning autistic. Before his diagnosis in recent years you, the band and everyone around him had dismissed his ways as eccentricities, part of his uniqueness that supported his virtuosity musical skills.
Yes, he had high functioning Asperger’s. He was really high on the spectrum.
Mental health awareness is in our media quite a lot and people are really paying attention to it now. Is it like that in the music industry over in the UK and in Europe?
I don’t know, but I think people are starting to be aware that autism covers so many different areas. Back then, we dismissed them as eccentric and that, because we didn’t know. Wish we had. But, actually autistic people are just like you and me and can contribute so much. If you just point them in the right direction or allow them to do things their way. They’re some of the brightest, single minded people in the world. Finally, people have realised that autistic people are smarter than all of us. That ‘eccentricity’ is actually a skill to be thorough and really hone-in on the work, make it better than perfect. Not following the dictates of anyone else, completely individualistic. At least that’s What Dave was like.
So how do you honour Dave on stage, I just can’t use the word ‘replace’, because he can never be replaced…
Well, we made the experiment last year and it worked.
That’s bringing in Toby Hounsham (of UK band Rialto)?
Yeah, what we didn’t realise that was that Dave had a few disciples. One of them had been studying damaged, every single note, for 35 years. And we just happened to have briefly worked with him. Suddenly this guy does a tribute album to Dave, his hero. So, we bring him into rehearsal. He just plays everything that Dave could play! And he’s another one – a keyboard, electronica ‘geek’. It couldn’t have fallen better in place if we’d somehow created it in our minds!
He played on our UK tour and some UK dates and just finished a European tour, which has gone really well. People are blown away by how good Toby is.
We are really looking forward to you coming. When you do, bring your shorts. Summer will still be on. The last time was just before Dave passed, in 2020.
Yeah. That was a great show. We need to get back. Brilliant. Looking forward to it!
The Stranglers are here this week to perform shows in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. Tickets to all shows are still available from Plus1.co.nz, but get in quick as they are selling fast!
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