The Stranglers and spaceships: The album that allowed synth to enter punk
There was always a streak of eccentricity to The Stranglers.
Formed in Guilford in 1974, the band’s combined background of classical guitar, jazz drumming, and collaborations with folk-rocker Richard Thompson brought a leftfield sensibility to their unique interpretation of punk’s explosive revolution, triggering suspicion from the press as to the authenticity of their punk credentials. Such atypical roots didn’t stop them from cementing themselves among the likes of the Sex Pistols or Buzzcocks in the era’s core punk canon, releasing their first three albums within 13 months and immortalised from classic cuts like ‘No More Heroes’ and ‘Something Better Change’.
Dave Greenfield’s keys were an essential part of their sound from day one, possessing a superhuman ability to dextrously glide across the keyboard and produce complex melodies with effortless ease, but by ’79s The Raven, the synths that would define the following decade’s output started to shimmer, be it the angular electro coursing through ‘Nuclear Device (The Wizard of Aus)’ or ‘Shah Shah a Go Go’s chilly tones produced by the newly acquired Oberheim synthesizer.
Lyrically, too, they were straying into peculiar paths, exploring such disparate topics as Norse mythology, heroin (a theme they’d revisit to greater commercial success a few years later), genetic engineering, and the Ayatollah’s overthrow of the Shah.
It was 1981’s The Gospel According to the Meninblack that truly triggered an almost proto-techno flourish to their increasingly idiosyncratic post-punk and delivered their most bizarre conceptual obsession yet. First explored on The Raven’s ‘Meninback’ and stand-alone single ‘Who Wants the World’, …Meninblack deals with alien visitations, the titular shadowy government agents so prevalent in ufology, and supposed biblical texts documenting extraterrestrial beings. So committed to the ‘bit’, guitarist Hugh Cornwell even donned a dipped, black fedora covering his eyes like a ‘man in black’ for their Top of the Pops performance for ‘Thrown Away’.
In an interview with Denzil Watson, Cornwell made clear the Stranglers album he’s most proud of: “Oh, ‘Men in Black’. Just artistically. I don’t care about how many records got sold,” he said. “That’s all rubbish. It’s down to what do you feel, what you’re most comfortable with and what you feel you achieved. I think that we were all at the top of our game when we made …Meninblack and it comes through. Burnell was top of his game. Greenfield was flying high. Jet was amazingly receptive to new ideas and really invented with my help, the first electronic drum kit. And I was feeling pretty good.”
…Meninblack is certainly the record that best marries their pub rock confrontation with the growing fascination of electronic music. The album’s eerie opener ‘Waltzinblack’ (most recognised later as the theme to TV chef Keith Floyd’s BBC show) wastes no time in establishing the otherworldly paranoia and alien synths that fuel their millenarian concept, a surreal slice of carnival waltz that swells into a disorientating trip of metronomic electronics, haunting vocal choirs, and high-pitched laughter from the cosmos. ‘Just Like Nothing on Earth’ follows, a hissing descent of white noise amid burbling machinery like the arrival of some covert spaceship introduces the cut, Cornwell detailing hapless Earthlings’ encounter with the celestial ‘visitors’ via a strangle lyrical mantra and semi-coherent vocal delivery. ‘Peaches’ this ain’t!
Cornwell bestowed further praise, stating: “It was a great concept, very inspiring, and I think there are some moments on that record which are sheer poetry. And I don’t think we surpassed it. I don’t care how many people bought copies of it. It’s not the point. The point is the vibe that was created and the moments on that, which are just fabulous. A lot of people were involved in making it, we had about eight engineers because we were recording all over the place.”
Despite its mixed critical reception and lacklustre chart performance, …Meninblack still stands as arguably their most inspired and ambitious in their voluminous discography, a record which documents the band unconcerned with expectation or commercial validation. Bassist Jean-Jaques Burnel was so attached to the project he even hinted at a potential thematic return in a 2014 interview: “I think the most complete one is …Meninblack because it’s a story and it’s a concept album. It was a bit of a low point when …Meninblack came out and it wasn’t regarded as the masterpiece that I thought it was. We were the only ones who thought it was a masterpiece! I haven’t finished with …Meninblack yet and I want to take it further…to elucidate it a bit more…”
