Out now - the release of the Stranglers’ nicely-priced Definitive Collection – which features their first 7 albums in their entirety – and the Aus/NZ leg of their The Definitive Tour, ILYOS looks back at the band’s first ever Australian tour, in early ’79, when Australian media and politicians took exception to their so-called ‘punk’ style, and the band bit back.
The Stranglers were prolific once they got started. Two albums in ’77, a studio album and a live album in ’78. They were one of the most popular of the so-called punk bands (and ended up with a phenomenal 23 UK top 40 singles and 17 UK top 40 albums), even though they had formed in ’74 and drummer Jet Black was old enough to be a Buzzcock’s dad. They cultivated a reputation for sleaze and violence, and with comparisons to the Doors rife, stood apart from the pack. They were also the first of the punk bands to score a Top 40 hit in Australia – something our homegrown heroes the Saints and Radio Birdman had never done – with “Peaches”, a song that had been banned by the BBC at home.
So when the Stranglers hit Australia in Feb ’79 – the first of the punk bands to do so - they had a reputation and a profile. Profile enough that the media would target them for a good story, and police and security – especially in the most conservative of Australian states – Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s Queensland – wanted to make an example.
The band was interviewed early in the tour – in Brisbane – by a reporter for Mike Willesee’s massively influential current affairs show. Unfortunately no footage of the interview is in circulation, but a transcript in Adelaide's Roadrunner magazine reveals the interviewer out to provoke a response (“Do you like the things punk rockers do, like the animal acts?” – whatever that is meant to mean?), and Willesee clearly out to cause maximum fuss by the premeditated pulling the interview – which was pre-recorded, not live – after only a couple of minutes, with the lame explanation, “We usually let our stories run through but if they want publicity they’ll have to try a little harder with their answers. Punk was punk and they’re worse…and let’s forget it … they, oh … oh, let’s forget it’.
Watching the program was Molly Meldrum who called in to say he was cancelling the Stranglers’ forthcoming Countdown appearance, so Willisee got what we wanted.
The controversy also ended in the New Zealand leg of the band’s tour being cancelled, and a few other local shows likewise canned. The cancelling of a Melbourne club show, at the legendary Crystal Ballroom, proved beneficial to at least one local group: Models bass player Mark Ferrie recently told us that his band ended up headlining the show that night, and won over the biggest crowd they’d ever played to up to that point.
As mentioned, the band also had problems with the law, and as frontman Hugh Cornwell explained in the book The Stranglers: Song by Song (written by Cornwell and Jim Drury), their experience with the corrupt and conservative forces in Qld provide grist for the band’s songwriting mill; the song “Nuclear Device (The Wizard of Aus)" on their ’79 album The Raven was inspired explicitly by corrupt premier Bjelke-Petersen.
“We’d been to Australia and come into contact with Joh Bjelke-Petersen... we went to play in Brisbane where he had installed very draconian laws... We played the gig after being told by the local promoter that Petersen had sent in his own people undercover so he could close the place down. I was hit on the head during the gig by a beer can. Then a fight broke out in front of us. It was obvious that some people had started it deliberately and the gig was stopped. Most of the song (“Nuclear Device”) is about Petersen, who had his own nuclear agenda in Queensland, which was at odds with the rest of the federation. He was power-crazed and wanted to set up his own republic and take over the rest of Australia…”
Check out the video for the song below, and then some other great Stranglers tracks from the early years, including the breakthrough hit “Golden Brown”.
The Stranglers will be touring Australia in February 2018:
6 February, Forum, Melbourne
7 February, Tivoli, Brisbane
8 February, Enmore Theatre, Sydney
10 February, Thebarton Theatre, Adelaide
12 February, Astor Theatre, Perth
2017 marks the 40th anniversary of The Stranglers’ debut IV, Rattus Norvegicus and second album No More Heroes. These 7 CDs contain the original tracklisting and several bonus tracks; Live (X Cert) even includes 8 previously unreleased recordings. Among the songs included on these albums, Rattus features the punk hits "Peaches" and "Get A Grip (On Yourself)", No More Heroes' title track remains a staple of their setlist, Black And White includes the hit "Nice N Sleazy" and La Folie is home to the classic "Golden Brown".
-DL
