Hugh Cornwell: 'I like music to be exciting and dynamic and dangerous'

Now 74, he’s well accustomed to the vagaries of the music industry during a career that’s lasted half a century. Despite a few age-related creaks – “I’ve just had my third bug within six weeks, and none of us are getting any younger,” he says. “Amidst all this we’re trying to get on with making music and putting things together, it’s tough and it’s getting tougher” – Cornwell is enthused by the prospect of UK gigs in January. “When you get in the mood for it, you think, right, it’s there. So I will be spending the next few weeks tapping my fingers looking at the clock counting down,” he says.

On Moments of Madness Cornwell again played virtually all of the instruments himself, as he did on its 2018 predecessor, Monster. “There’s one slight difference from Monster in the sense that I played live bass on this one,” he says. “Some of the songs started out as bass pieces – and in fact it shouldn’t be that much of a surprise because I started off as a bass player when I was at school. I was in a band with Richard Thompson, (later) of Fairport Convention, and basically he needed a bass player. I bought a homemade bass from somebody for £5 and he taught to play on this terrible bass.”

The album’s stripped back feel shows Cornwell’s penchant for sparse arrangements. “One thing I learnt in The Stranglers is that the keyboards is like getting a pot of glue,” he says. “However nice they might sound, on a record you just pour the glue all over it and it fills in all the gaps, and some people just say, ‘Well, that’s the oil that oils the cogs of the guitar, bass and drums’, which is fair enough but enough is enough. There wasn’t much space on many Stranglers records a lot of the time, it was ‘pour another pot of keyboards over it’ and I think what happened was the danger, the excitement element got a bit lost. I like music to be exciting and dynamic and dangerous.

“One of the attractions of rock ’n’ roll was that it was – and should be – dangerous. If it’s too squidy and too comfortable then you’re removing some of the danger unless you’re very careful, so I strip down stuff and what’s wrong with a bit of silence? Silence is deafening if it’s coming after something that’s really strong…

“Basically, me making records now is an experiment to create as much silence as possible.”

There’s a reflection on aging in the song When I was a Young Man; today, Cornwell can see little attraction in youthfulness. “It must be a nightmare being a young bloke these days,” he says. In his mid seventies, he feels relatively contented. “There’s a few things missing but you get used to life,” he says. “Health-wise it ends up becoming a management situation. You’re never going to get rid of the ailments you’ve got but you’ve just got to manage them properly and a lot of that’s down to living your life in moderation. The body can tolerate most things, but only in moderation. It’s always excesses of stuff that do you in.”

Cornwell’s first foray into music came at the age of 15 when he was at school in Highgate with Richard Thompson. He recalls: “Richard was just a hoover for sheet music. I’d go round to visit him and he’d have Charlie Christian music sitting on his stand – he’s one of the most genius guitar players that ever lived – and Richard could read music so he was reading and playing it without any problem at all from these sheets. He was a master musician but he wasn’t writing and I definitely wasn’t writing, so we were just playing stuff we loved, like Smokestack Lightning and Howlin’ Wolf and Tobacco Road by the Nashville Teens, rhythm and blues, stuff we really enjoyed listening to. We emulated it by playing it ourselves – however badly we played it.”

Although Thompson has lived in the US for several years, the pair have stayed in touch. “I just did a collaboration with him, which will be out (this) year. I can’t really go into it, but we collaborated on something which will be out in the spring,” Cornwell says, adding: “He’s a lovely guy and we’ve always got on, so we keep in touch.”

Cornwell formed his own band, Johnny Sox, in the early 1970s while working as a university researcher in Sweden. The first song he wrote, he recalls, was called Nyhamn Sandwich. “Nyhamn is a street in Copenhagen down by the port, it means New Street or New Harbour. I used to go over there to busk one or two times a week in the evening. There were so many bars in Copenhagen, I used to take my guitar over there with a pretty nurse to take the hat round and I’d split the money with her. There’d be different nurses that I ran into where I was studying.

“I was coming back to Nyhamn to get the boat back, we’d had a great night, made about 50 quid each plus all the costs of getting over, and feeling pretty good and then there was this guy lying on this street with blood on him, he wasn’t dead but he was in a bad way and of course the nurse immediately jumped into action. It was a drunked Swede. What they used to do because booze was and still is so expensive in Sweden, they used to get on the ferry and go across to Copenhagen, get blind drunk and then go back again. The Danish didn’t like it so they used to beat them up occasionally if they got out of hand, and this was one of those victims.

“The nurse gave him the kiss of life and was making sure of breath and pulse and everything and asked me to phone an ambulance, which I did, and then I left her there. I said, ‘What do I do now?’ She said, ‘I’ve got to wait her until the ambulance arrives but you might as well go because there’s nothing you can do’. The experience made me write this song called Nyhamn Sandwich. It was awful but at least it made me think this is an experience worth writing about, and that’s how I started.”

Johnny Sox morphed into The Stranglers when Cornwell returned to England. He remembers: “There were two American draft dodgers, me and a Swede and we started getting gigs in pubs, but the American singer had a habit of picking fights with the pub landlords, which didn’t really help, so we ended up running out of gigs. ​​​

“Then President Carter got into office in America and reprieved all the draft dodgers, they could go back to America without facing prosecution for dodging the draft in Vietnam, so the drummer wanted to go back to Chicago to be with his wife and child, so he left and we needed a drummer. Jet (Black) applied to the ad I put in the paper, we met him and he thought it was great, so we moved down to his off-licence in Guildford, then factions took place.

“The American singer and the Swedish bass player Jan Knutsson got pally-wally and it formed a rift between me and Jet, who I didn’t really know, and them. Then they decided they wanted to go back to Sweden or possibly for the American singer, to America – he was thinking about his wife and child. So that left me with Jet, someone I’d only known a few weeks, in this off-licence in Guilford. He said, ‘I’d understand if you wanted to knock it on the head now your two mates have gone’ and I said, ‘No, you’re more committed than they ever were​​​​​​​, so I’d rather stick it out and see what happens’, so he said, ‘Great, you can stay as long as you like’.”

The Stranglers became a trio after Cornwell met bass player Jean Jacques Burnel. “A lot of those songs on the first two albums (Rattus Norvegicus and No More Heroes) were conceived as power trio songs​​​​​​​,” he says. “The keyboards were added on when we got a keyboard player (Dave Greenfield). So a lot of those early songs translate very well to my present line-up as a trio because that’s how they started​​​​​​​.”

By 1976, The Stranglers found themselves part of London’s burgeoning punk rock scene. Cornwell says he saw it as “an opportunity”.

“We were going prior to that and raising a few eyebrows doing a mixture of our own songs and some cover versions and then slowly the punk thing happened. Six months earlier we were latecomers to the pub rock scene, but suddenly we were the first people on the block for the punk rock scene because we’d been there six months already.

“The pub rock people, Dr Feelgood and Roogalator, they could really play and they looked upon us as upstarts who couldn’t really play, but then the punk bands who came after us looked at us as people who could play because we could play better than them, so we were in between two stools and we realised it was a huge opportunity, so we didn’t deny anything and we filled in all the boxes correctly and benefitted.

“A lot of bands were like that – Blondie wasn’t a punk band and Graham Parker and The Rumour wasn’t a punk band either but they weren’t going to deny it because it was a great opportunity for them as well. And Dire Straits – you couldn’t get further away from a punk band – but we were all lumped into this thing and nobody complained, we just kept quiet about it, because it meant attention, it meant we were selling out shows and we got a record contract, so what was wrong with that?”

While Cornwell was in The Stranglers, they notched up 20 top 40 hits – far more than any other British band associated with punk. Cornwell believes they resonated so well because “we were good writers”.

“We wrote a great load of songs. Jean Burnel and I wrote very well together. Like Lennon and McCartney or Jagger and Richards, we really could write some tunes​​​​​​​ together, and it was either me coming up with the music or Jean coming up with a bass riff​​​​​​​. Most of the time when I came up with the music, Jean would write the lyrics​​​​​​​ and vice versa​​​​​​​, and it worked. I was more of a singer than he was​​​​​​​, so the balance ended up being I was singing more of them ​​​​​​​because that was my gig​​​​​​​, I’ve always wanted to be a singer​​​​​​​, so it ended up with the accent ​​​​​​​being on me ​​​​​​​as the lead singer​​​​​​​.

“The testament to how good that catalogue still is, is that The Stranglers can still go out with one original member and sell out the Royal Albert Hall, which is amazing. I’m actually more bona fide Stranglers than they are because 33 per cent of my line-up is original, but only 25 per cent of theirs is. The logic is that the songs are so good that people want to hear them.

“I don’t play keyboards and I don’t particularly want to spend the whole evening playing Stranglers’ songs, which would’ve been my destiny had I have remained with the band. I’m happy to play some of them – I’m playing about 30 to 35 per cent Stranglers songs and that’s fine, I’ll do my take on them and the three of us enjoy playing the Stranglers’ songs, but the meat is my solo stuff because that’s where I’m going.”

Back in 1990 when Cornwell walked out of the band he felt he’d gone as far as he could with them creatively. “We were repeating ourselves and we weren’t really friends any more, we were just meeting up like going to the office,” he says. “We’d meet up and rehearse then we’d get back in our cars and go off to different parts of the compass, that’s not really the band any more.

“It wasn’t because I was ostracised or anything, it’s just a feeling I got that it had become a boring old office job, and also we couldn’t even get a record released in America. Our last record (10), which we brought in a Queen producer (Roy Thomas Baker) to produce, we couldn’t get a release for it in America, so I felt what’s the point in going on with this? I wasn’t being disloyal, I just felt this had run its course and I’ll rely upon myself.”

Although “a bit of a jump in the dark” at the time, the gamble paid off, with Cornwell going on to forge a solo career that has so far yielded 10 albums – plus collaborations with John Cooper Clarke, CCW and Sons of Shiva – over the course of 34 years. “I’ve got longevity, I’ve made a lot of records, luckily a lot of people have stayed with me, but it’s more who I am now, really,” he reflects.

Hugh Cornwell plays at Holmfirth Picturedrome on January 20. http://www.hughcornwell.com/