THE STANGLERS
The Stranglers were formed in 1974 in the Guildford area,hence the original name "The Guildford Stranglers" which was later changed.Two musicians, Jet Black (drums) and Hugh Cornwell(guitar) were joined by a bass player, Jean Jaques Burnell, and a sax and keyboard player, Hans Warmling.
Warmling soon left though for organist/keyboard player Dave Greenfield to join the band. They started gigging locally, and by their own admission were rubbish.
Time went on and they started crafting their own songs and started playing further away in London, sometimes twice in a day.As the punk scene took off around 1976, with the rise of The Sex Pistols, they started to get labelled as punks themselves. The punk tag stuck, and got them further work, and a record deal, with UA Records. All members of the band were in their twenties, and so a few years older than most punks.
Their first record was called "Grip", and charted fairly successfully for a new band. The second single was withdrawn by the band because of the sleeve. It was a newspaper cutting style sleeve, with the title "Peaches" It was later reissued with a different sleeve, and is the most expensive Stranglers record to date.
The first album was then released, it was called Rattus Norvegicus (the common rat),which has been part of the Stranglers symbol ever since.
The biggest selling record by the Stranglers is "Golden Brown" which got to number 2 in the UK top 40 chart.
Quite soon after, the Stranglers left UA/EMI to join Epic records. There they stayed until the early 90's, when after the 10th studio album "10" Hugh decided to leave the band. He made his decision after a big concert at Alexandra Palace in north London. The album "Saturday night Sunday morning" was named after the concert.
To fill Hugh's shoes, they got ex Vibrators guitarist John Ellis,who had already been playing second guitar in The Stranglers for a while. The Vibrators' first ever gig was supporting The Stranglers at Hornsey in the late seventies.
As lead vocalist, they auditioned a young singer and fan called Paul Roberts. To date, The Stranglers mark 2 have produced 4 studio albums, and continue to gig as well as the original line up.
My favorite story of The Stranglers is of when they once appeared on Top Of The Pops. As they had a reputation for practical jokes, the crew thought they would do something, but instead of trashing the dresssing room as expected they cleaned it from top to bottom.