As I believe I may have mentioned back in this post from late last year, it's not just a little ridiculous to get all bent out of shape about who is and who isn't credibly "Punk Rock" in 2006, a good three decades after the fact. This never managed to stop me, however, from trolling around the I Love Music discussion boards like a self-appointed arbiter of Punk, clubbing hapless posters with a figurative truncheon of righteous indignation for daring to suggest that bands like, say, Good Charlotte were legitimately "Punk" in any discernibly credible way.
Under normal circumstances, I wouldn't *really* take these things all so dreafully seriously. And being that I have albums in my collection by names like Cat Stevens and Marillion, who am I to really be lobbing stones at pretend punks anyway? That said, now that I'm working for an organization that caters to the musical tastes of 18-24 year olds, I can't help but silently seethe everytime a band like Fall Out Boy, Yellowcard or New Found Glory gets described as "punk" (which, suffice to say, is often). As far as my ears can tell, Fall Out Boy are just Night Ranger with more tattoos and some hair gel. It's after a full day of helping publish stories about such dimwitted tykes as these that I dial up Live (X-Cert) by the Stranglers on my long-suffering iPod and regain my composure.
The Stranglers were no strangers to accusations of punk illegtimacy themselves. Having already been playing the same pub rock circuit as bands like Dr.Feelgood well before the formation of the Sex Pistols, the Clash and the Damned, etc., the Stranglers were initially lambasted as being bandwagon-jumpers once Punk began to spread. Adding insult to injury were the band's reliance on Dave Greenfield's decidedly Doors-esque keyboards, their unapologetically accomplished musicianship (the same brush the Police were tarred with) and the pointedly unfashionable facial hair of Greenfield and aged drummer Jet Black (already into his 40's when the band was making a name for itself). Flying in the face of UK Punk convention, the Stranglers did not always play at maximum velocity and rarely relied on workaday power chords, let alone use the guitar as the primary weapon in their arsenal (despite vocalist/guitarist Hugh Cornwell's ample grasp of the instrument). The argument could well be made that the Stranglers' dogged resistance to adhere to the increasingly narrow mores of the British Punk orthodoxy made them even Punker than the artists who dutifully adhered to Punk uniformity, but these sorts of debates just go in circles.
Where Hugh Cornwell's terse-yet-lyrical guitar solos may have lacked the fat, chunky chug of, say, players like `Pistol Steve Jones or Johnny Ramone, I cannot imagine a "punker" sound than the signature tone of the Stranglers' bass player and resident volatile thug, J.J.Burnell. Perfecting a style that is as much the band's trademark as Greenfield's keyboards, Burnell was not at all content to simply anchor each song like a conventional player, but rather pushed his deep, distored punch right up to the front of the mix. Burnell's aggressively played bass adds a weighty amount of oomph to every song, as if he's constantly goading his band mates to play harder. With the possible exception of Peter Hook from Joy Division (later, of course, of New Order), I can't think of a bass player of that era with as distinctive a style as Burnell's.
Live (X Cert) isn't ranked very highly among the Stranglers catalog, and was probably released out of contractual obligation. Fabled rock journo, Nick Kent, decried it as relatively needless in the wake of their studio records. Stranglers biographer David Buckley rightly assesses the album as the end of an era for the band. After the warts'n'all incarnation captured on Live (X Cert), the Stranglers became a wholly more experimental outfit, only to later morph into a perfectly respectable, albeit slightly edgeless pop act along the lines of a more scowly Roxy Music. But circa Live (X Cert), the band was a more feral beast. Featuring tracks culled in `77 and `78 from a performance at the Roundhouse and from their notorious outdoor gig at London's Battersea Park (wherein a phalanx of strippers joined the band onstage during an epic rendering of "Nice'n'Sleazy," sadly not featured here), this live album finds the Stranglers in suitably rude and provocative form. In between rollickingly unpolished renditions of `Glers classics like "(Get A) Grip (On Yourself)", "Burning Up Time" and the truly visceral "Straighten Out," Hugh takes ample opportunity to chastise the crowd for spitting and famously cuts short the intro to "Dead Ringer" to call out a heckler ("Did Someone say 'Wanker'?") and then mock him for not owning up. It should be noted that at this point that the Stranglers were never a particularly nice group of fellas. They played a show here in NYC at the New Ritz in the late 80's that I sadly missed (their last with the classic line-up) and at one point, someone lobbed a full cup of beer at the stage, soaking Dave Greenfield's keyboards. The band stopped playing, and had the hurler routed from the crowd and onto the stage where -- after a few moments of insincere jesting and pleasantries -- he was promptly de-pantsed, violated with a banana (!!) and thrown out the back door onto 53rd street. I have a great bootleg recording of it. The moral of the story: Don't mess with the Stranglers. Hugh's between song banter/abuse on Live (X Cert) might not be the pinacle of off-the-cuff provocation (Lou Reed's Take No Prisoners, Fear in The Decline of Western Civilization and the Stooges' unrelenting Metallic K.O. trump it), but it's still damn entertaining.
The album is far from flawless. As Buckley pointed out in his biography of the band, No Mercy, Live (X Cert) does partially fail to full represent the Stranglers at "full throttle" (their handling of "Five Minutes," inarguably my favorite track by the band, is sadly luke-warm), and the absence of a couple of key tracks (notably anthems like "Peaches," "No More Heroes" and "Something Better Change") is somewhat inexplicable. But in terms of capturing the Stranglers at a point in their career rife with needless antagonism, bile and amphetamine-fueled spite, Live (X Cert) acts as a bracing reminder of a bygone era of Punk Rock that has long since shuffled the down the path of the wooly mammoth, replaced by safe, anaemic piffle that dares to claim a lineage with the definite article. So, instead of buying your nephew that new album he's pining for by squeaky clean pop-punksters, Simple Plan, give him a smack across the ears with a copy of Live (X Cert). He'll thank you later.
I was sad to learn this morning that yet another seemingly untouchable Manhattan institution is falling prey to the wrecking ball. As 
Recent Comments