Saturday, August 10, 2013

Well, Chap and I became career Navy officers ....

Their musical proficiency and advanced age marked out The Stranglers, who formed in 1974, as outsiders when the punk movement exploded.

Burnel’s melodic basslines powered hits including "No More Heroes", "Peaches" and "Golden Brown", believed to be about heroin addiction.

Notorious for their black-clad belligerence, Burnel, a karate black belt who once engaged The Clash and The Sex Pistols in a street brawl, would incite riots at gigs by striking audience members with the head of his bass. He once disrobed a French journalist, who had displeased the band and gaffer taped him to the Eiffel Tower - “I only took him up to the first floor, though,” Burnel said.


Well ... every age has its season;

He’s the snarling bassist in The Stranglers, punk’s most malevolent survivors, famed for beating up rival bands, fans and each other. But Jean-Jacques Burnel has revealed that he is now a Daily Telegraph-reading advocate for Britain’s constitutional monarchy.

Ahead of the band’s surprise debut at the Proms next week, Burnel, 61, who was once jailed for affray in Nice and spent a year experimenting with heroin, now regrets his anti-establishment past.

Burnel disowned "Garden of Eden", a song he wrote in the 80s about the Queen and her “useless children”.

“Now I argue the case for constitutional monarchy, which I never thought I’d do,” the musician, who owns properties in the South of France and Chiswick, west London, told Radio Times.

He added: “Take the p***s out of me as much as you like. It’s no longer the Stranglers against the world. It’s the Stranglers with a few friends.”
Good for him.

Hard to believe where angry young men can wind up. Just don't medicate them, and give them a chance to get things out of their system their own way.

Oh, the first video my sound familiar to some in actuality, if not the general theme of the genre of the time.

For a little taste of the broader musical talent of The Stranglers, check out "Golden Brown."

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