WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HEROES?
“The Stranglers isn’t really about personalities any more. It’s just about a certain musical imprint that has been around for quite a while now.”
JJ Burnel
There have been times recently when it’s seemed as if the whole world of music had gone into slow motion – if not suspended animation. Shows and festivals cancelled en masse, albums and tours postponed and then postponed again… But the gestation of The Stranglers’ new album, Dark Matters, has made those timelines look like mere blips by comparison. If we point out that opening track Water was written as a contemporary response to the 2011 Arab Spring (when anti-government protests and uprisings took place in much of the Arab world) that gives you an idea of when the songs began to take shape. Some other ideas have even earlier origins. “We’ve got a hard and fast rule,” frontman Baz Warne says, “whereby nothing ever gets thrown away.”
Hence ideas that first emerged even before The Stranglers’ last studio album, 2012’s , have slowly been firmed up into a spiky, eclectic set that shows how the grouchy rumble of the classic Stranglers sound has long-since diversified. Maybe that was inevitable, given that two cornerstones of that sound are now no longer, the band’s eighteenth and latest studio album. Thankfully, keyboard player Dave Greenfield did contribute, putting his distinctive sound on eight of the album’s 11 tracks. Then the band were dealt another, more heartbreaking blow when Greenfield passed away in April 2020, after he caught covid-19 while in hospital with heart problems. With the band’s Final Full UK Tour already postponed due to the pandemic, the question inevitably arose: is this the end for The Stranglers?
