THE STRANGLERS
The strangest chapter in the tale of punk’s lone wolves. UFOs, hard drugs, bad luck and weird music combine in The Gospel According To The Meninblack.
March 10, 1982. anyone in Bristol, Gloucestershire, Wiltshire or somerset switching on 15 minutes early for BBc1’s Wednesday Film would have seen a programme that, even by the standards of British regional television, was very odd indeed. screened by BBc West’s arts magazine rPM, the Black Documentary featured shots of two black-clad figures driving a vintage black cadillac, interspersed with various musings on the cultural significance of the colour black. contributors included Bristol university neuropsychologist Professor r.l. Gregory, an anglican vicar, and a young girl who, when asked, “Why do you think bad men in films always wear black?”, replied: “so that they’re not seen in the dark.” later, over footage of a us presidential motorcade, the programme’s narrator wondered if the colour black indicated “symbolic reverence to supernatural forces which are secretly pulling the real strings of power?” soundtracked by a sinister synthesized waltz, the cadillac arrived at an isolated farmhouse while the narrator spoke of the “meninblack”, a phenomenon first reported in the 1950s where uFo witnesses were “visited and intimidated into silence by visitors dressed in black”.
“there can be no easy answer to these questions,” our guide concluded, as the waltzing melody drowned in waves of maniacal high-pitched laughter and the two meninblack drove away, “as long as black remains an enigma to mankind.” the Black Documentary was the work of an unusual pair of film-makers: Jet Black and hugh cornwell of the rock band the stranglers. Black wrote the script and delivered the perfectly deadpan voiceover, while Bristol biochemistry graduate cornwell interviewed Professor Gregory. the pair also donned suits and homburg hats to play the meninblack – roles for which they were eminently qualified. a year earlier, the stranglers had released The Gospel According To The Meninblack, the source of the
Black Documentary’s soundtrack, an album built upon the band’s collective obsession with a then-obscure strand of UFOlogy and crypto-religious conspiracy theory.
Under the influence of the meninblack, The Stranglers’ stock plummeted. On August 18, 1979, the most commercially successful band of the punk era were worthy of the main support slot to The Who at Wembley Stadium (above AC/DC and Nils Lofgren). They greeted 80,000 Who fans with an intro tape of a song from their new album The Raven: amid warped sci-fi soundscapes, a hideous high-pitched voice proclaimed, “Healthy livestock, so we can eat/Human flesh is porky meat – heeheeeheeheeeheeee… We are the meninblack.”
The new album’s first single, Duchess, got to Number 14, but it would be The Stranglers’ last Top 20 entry for over two years, a period during which the band and their associates were overwhelmed by misfortune: a drugs bust; a riot; two spells in prison; the theft of the band’s equipment; financial ruin; even death. The meninblack drove The Stranglers’ music to a strange, forbidding place – and seemingly exacted a heavy price.
“It affected our lives,” says Jet Black today. “Along the journey of making that record, some very serious things happened. Our tour manager died. Hugh got so paranoid he wouldn’t talk about it. We could all see there was something very dangerous here.”
Today, the term ‘meninblack’ is widely recognised, thanks to the successful Hollywood film series. At the time of The Stranglers’ odyssey, however, the MiB were, in every sense, operating under the radar. The topic was the preserve of hardcore UFO enthusiasts, like the readers of Flying Saucer Review – a British journal founded in 1955 to counter the “news suppression” of UFO contacts.
“I suppose you had to be brave, publishing something like FSR,” says Jet Black, now almost 81, in a pub near his current home in Powys. “People really did think you were crackers. I’d take the magazine everywhere I went. Everyone in the band would read it. They could see there was a record there – they could see a story.”
Inspired by their drummer’s advocacy, The Stranglers’ investigations began in the winter of 1978 at Bear Shank Lodge, near Oundle in Northamptonshire, where they were writing Black And White, the band’s third album. While 1977’s Rattus Norvegicus and No More Heroes established the lascivious meld of psychedelia and amphetamined pub rock so popular with punk-curious audiences, Black And White positioned The Stranglers in less conventional territory. Keyboardist Dave Greenfield augmented his hallmark Hammond organ runs with a Minimoog synthesizer, while songs like Hey! (Rise Of The Robots) and the improvised In The Shadows were sardonic jabs at the dehumanising encroachment of technology. Album closer Enough Time, a précis of nuclear apocalypse, driven by JeanJacques Burnel’s infernal bass, featured Greenfield tapping out a Morse code message: “SOS. This is Planet Earth. We are fucked. Please advise.” As the backing track slowed down, the lyric “Have you got enough time?” was sped up by an Eventide Harmonizer.
This was strange stuff, admits Jet Black today – perhaps too strange: “We were going into occult territories.”
WALKING FROM NOTTING HILL GATE station to an Italian restaurant for lunch with Hugh Cornwell, MOJO spots a 52 bus advertising the week’s big film release – Men In Black: International.
Cornwell laughs off the coincidence, and instead recommends the spaghetti alle vongole. He also breezily dismisses the idea of malign forces behind The Stranglers’ calamitous 18 months – what Jet Black terms “the crescendo of disaster”, a period that began with Cornwell’s arrest for possession of heroin and other illegal substances at a police roadblock in west London in the early hours of November 1, 1979, and ended only once The Stranglers had left the meninblack’s orbit. “Just circumstantial. But when you’re in that situation, you interpret anything in your favour. The conspiracy fed what we wanted to believe. Everyone has a different definition of ‘truth’, dependent on who you are, and what you want.”
The term ‘meninblack’ was coined by John Keel, an American UFO researcher, whose work Jet Black read in Flying Saucer Review. By 1967, Keel had repudiated the extraterrestrial visitation hypothesis for UFOs, suggesting that such occurrences were in fact psychic phenomena. “The objects and apparitions do not necessarily originate on another planet and may not even exist as permanent constructions of matter,” he wrote.
Keel’s 1975 book The Mothman Prophecies, an account of his experiences during the 1966-67 UFO ‘flap’ in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, quoted a woman describing two men who visited her from a cylindrical flying machine. “Their voices were singsongy and highpitched… like listening to a phonograph record played at the wrong speed. And they kept asking me for the time: ‘What is your time?’”
In the world of The Stranglers from late 1978 onwards, time became a malleable concept. It began with a fateful slowdown: an initial recording session for The Raven dragged as the band became fixated on a gnomically urgent song called Two Sunspots, much to the frustration of their producer Martin Rushent. One morning, engineer Alan Winstanley accidentally began playing the backing track at half speed.
“I said, Alan, what the fuck is that?!” Cornwell remembers. “‘Oh sorry, wrong speed, it’s Two Sunspots.’ I said, No! Keep it
on!” In the song’s new manifestation, Black’s drums clanked mechanically, and Greenfield’s manic synthesized sequencer pattern resembled sickly emissions from a sulphurous lake. “I said, I can hear a big Dick Dale guitar thing on this,” says Cornwell. “The others got very excited.”
With his voice pitched helium-high by the Harmonizer, Burnel sang a sinister lyric – “We’re not here to destroy/We are here to employ” – hypothesising an origin of the species that was neither wholly Biblical or Dar winian: humans as the result of genetic experiments. Homo sapiens became homo aliens. Thus was the song Meninblack born.
It was all a bit too weird for Martin Rushent, who walked out of the session, never to return. The Stranglers went on to co-produce The Raven with Alan Winstanley, who had recorded the then-Guildford Stranglers’ first demos at TW Studios in Fulham, and engineered the first three albums alongside Rushent. “I suppose Martin was a bit dictatorial,” says Winstanley today. “He could be bossy. The Stranglers definitely didn’t take well to people telling them what to do! Especially Jean-Jacques. There was a row with Martin at TW while we were recording Black And White, and on the control room wall was a payphone. JJ karate-kicked the payphone. I remember it hanging by one screw for the rest of the album.”
AMELLOWED BUT STILL FORMIDABLY FIT 67, JEANJacques Burnel is all smiles as he buys MOJO a pint of ale in a quiet central London pub. Like Cornwell, he regards the band’s MiB phase fondly, despite its turbulence. “It was really exciting. We began collecting UFOlogy and conspiracy theories. We became obsessed. There were no rules, no limits.”
In March 1980, with Cornwell on bail pending an appeal against his jail sentence, The Stranglers released Bear Cage, a bleak parable sung from the perspective of an East German, imprisoned both by the Russian bear and the drudgery of his working life. Although not overtly MiB-inspired, musically its paranoiac synth patterns and mechanistic groove foreshadowed their grand concept, as did the single label’s illustration of a maninblack. Who Wants The World?, another standalone 45, recorded shortly before Cornwell’s appeal was rejected – and released in May, shortly after prisoner F48444 emerged from HMP Pentonville – revealed the extent to which The Stranglers’ selfidentification was becoming blurred. Its sleeve featured a MiB, as did the video, and the instrumental B-side was titled The Meninblack (Waiting For ’Em). The lyric, however, spoke of Cornwell’s fearful state of mind. “Came down on a Monday/ Somewhere in the Midlands/Tasted man, tasted flea/Couldn’t tell the difference.”
Feckless behaviour had seen them ostracised by punk; now The Stranglers were explicitly adopting the personae of aliens to sing about their own alienation.
“I was at the end of my tether, waiting for this fucking appeal to happen, to know whether I was going down or not,” says Cornwell. “So it’s like, who wants the world?! If you knew what I was going through you wouldn’t want anything to do with it.”
As album sessions got underway, and stretched over six months in studios across Europe, a complicating factor was Burnel and
Cornwell’s continuing heroin use. At Pathé Marconi in Paris the group split into pairs so they could work around the clock in 12-hour shifts in separate studios with two engineers, an arrangement that suited their different drug schedules.
“I didn’t want any part of heroin,” says Jet Black, who favoured cocaine. “They became impossible to deal with, because of their addiction. It almost killed us as a band. But Hugh and JJ were determined to get the thing that people get from it.”
Whatever else it did, heroin did not impinge upon the band’s creativity. The hypnotic Manna Machine, for instance, based on a book written by George Sassoon (son of WW1 poet Siegfried) postulating the Ark of The Covenant as a nuclear-powered food source buried beneath the Golan Heights, had a five-minute drum loop, requiring Cornwell and Black to stand at opposite ends of Ringo Starr’s Startling Studios holding pencils for the tape to pass around.
“Maybe heroin impinged upon our commercial sensibilities!” Burnel laughs. “We just believed in this project and wanted to see how far we could go. We were fucking ourselves up, physically and mentally. It’s like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: you inject yourself with this pathogen to find out what happens. But I think heroin intensifies negativity. You inhabit a more claustrophobic world. The more we did it, the more bad luck befell us.”
After Cornwell’s release from prison, the first Meninblack album session was at Giorgio Moroder’s Musicland studios in Munich. “There was a constant quest for new sounds and experiences,” says engineer Steve Churchyard. “The reason for going to Munich was to get the Eurodisco sound made popular by Donna Summer. Jet Black was our chef. He made great Indian curries and steak Diane.”
One Sunday morning, a technician arrived as the band recorded the song Thrown Away. “He picks up the telephone, grabs the cord and follows it around the control room,” says Churchyard. “He disappears behind a rack of equipment, which he promptly tries to move. In doing so, there is a loud bang and a horrible smell. He has just blown up the power supply to the console.” The Musicland desk was a state-of-the-art Harrison, one of only two in Europe. With no replacement, the session was over. “Now that was weird,” says Cornwell. “Who was this guy? Where did he come from?”
THE MOST NOTORIOUS MISHAP OCCURRED AT A gig at Nice University on June 20, when The Stranglers’ set ended in a riot and the band were later arrested at the chic Hotel Negresco. The incident led to a 10-day incarceration for all
but Greenfield, who was released after two days (he’d said nothing on-stage, and could not therefore be charged with incitement) and joined Churchyard at RCA Studios in Rome. “I can honestly say I’ve seen the best and the worst accommodation in Nice,” he says.
The experience was especially depressing for Cornwell, back in prison just 57 days after his previous spell inside. It also further strained business relationships: in September, manager Ian Grant quit, declaring The Stranglers “unmanageable”, while EMI postponed the album’s release until after the Nice appeal verdict was delivered in December (Burnel, who had addressed the audience in French, received a suspended sentence of a year and a day).
Arguably more significant, however, inasmuch as it strengthened the group’s collective resolve, was the theft of all of their equipment in October, early into a six-week US tour. After a show at New York’s Ritz Club, two crew members drove the packed truck to a friend’s apartment in the East Village to shower before driving to Washington DC. They emerged to discover the truck had gone. “Obviously a set up,” reckons Greenfield, who suffered most as the band elected to continue with hired equipment. “The biggest blow was losing the Hammond – it was a German L100, with so many modifications nobody else would ever have got it working. Oh, I loved that one.”
The definitive annus horribilis, 1980 ended with the death from cancer of tour manager Charlie Pile. Yet as 1981 dawned, there was a force, supernatural or otherwise, with The Stranglers. The Gospel According To The Meninblack was finally released in early February, in a sleeve designed by John Pasche as a tablet of ecclesiastical script, with tracklist and credits on the front and a gatefold parody of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Last Supper featuring Philip The Apostle replaced by a maninblack. The accompanying UK tour presented the group as a taut, austere, utterly formidable unit.
“We had faced enormous adversity, which we had to be strong to survive,” reflects Jet. “We were fearless. Because, at this point, we were so tight. We worked. When we got on that stage, we were stunning, and we knew it.”
Yet the new album presented one of the world’s most visceral rock bands cryogenically frozen, their sinewy power drained by the effort of sustaining a dense technological veneer – like machines programmed to sound human, or vice versa. Fans were perplexed. When one of them, a certain Baz Warne, heard it, he thought: “Nah. It’s harsh, it’s clattery. It’s a bit weird.”
The one song that most resembled the more familiar Stranglers was the relic Two Sunspots: deliberately included, as Cornwell later noted, so the meninblack themselves would be present in palimpsest form. If allowing the source of their paranormal infection onto the finished album was an attempt to break the hex, it failed: after entering the UK chart at Number 8, the Meninblack album quickly disappeared. Both its singles flopped: Thrown Away, The Stranglers’ idea of Eurodisco (Burnel: “We always get things wrong!”), stalled at Number 42, while Just Like Nothing On Earth failed even to break the Top 75. EMI didn’t bother making videos for either song. By the time they had completed their high art folly, The Stranglers were broke.
“After the last session in Paris, we had to borrow money from the hotel to get back to London,” says Burnel. “By then, we didn’t have managers. So we didn’t manage anything. All we wanted to do was make this masterpiece. Unfortunately, no one else considered it a masterpiece.”
APRIL 1981. AT AN INTERVIEW WITH HIGH TIMES magazine in New York, Jet Black and Jean-Jacques Burnel meet John Keel. The sage of ‘beyond the known’ gives them a book inscribed with a dedication: “THE STRANGLERS KNOW THE SECRET AND WILL SUFFER.”
But suffer they already had. After three years in the darkness, The Stranglers turned towards the light – or at least, Jet Black’s house in Gloucestershire, where in the summer of 1981 they quickly wrote La Folie, an album of songs loosely themed around the subject of love. “We’d really messed up with The Meninblack,” says Cornwell. “EMI said, ‘Enough. You owe us so much money, if you don’t come up with something that sells, we’re gonna drop you.’”
Released in November 1981, La Folie’s modus operandi was deliberately straightforward. Modest initial sales suggested the strategy had failed, until Jet Black browbeat EMI into releasing as a single a track buried midway through side two, called Golden Brown…
By March 1982 Golden Brown had been in the UK Top 10 for a month, peaking at Number 2. Just six months earlier, EMI was sharpening the axe. Now the band had their biggest ever hit. Yet with its lyric an ode to heroin and its musical origins a keyboard motif Dave Greenfield wrote during the Meninblack sessions, the song that saved The Stranglers had roots in darker times.
“It was a postscript,” agrees Hugh Cornwell. “I’ve got nothing but good feelings when I think about The Meninblack. It was a highwater mark in our creativity, a real work of art – more than anything else I ever did with The Stranglers.”
Hugh Cornwell left the band for a solo career in 1990. The Meninblack song Second Coming has been a highlight of his recent live sets. After initially floundering in his absence, The Stranglers’ fortunes revived in 2006 when an erstwhile fan from Sunderland took over Cornwell’s role. Baz Warne has learned to love The Gospel According To The Meninblack, The Stranglers’ weird, psychedelic trip to inner space.
“Talking with the boys, you hear a lot about those times – because they were very strange times,” he says. “They were so proud of The Raven, they were ready for the world to acknowledge that, and when it didn’t, they rolled themselves into a ball. It brought home that they were outsiders, and always would be. They embraced this dark aura.”
Ill health forced Jet Black to retire from active Stranglers duty in 2015, but the band remain moulded in his image: stubborn, eccentric, often wilful, always indomitable. “That whole period was strange,” he reflects. “It was so essential that we really lived the story. That intensity isn’t sustainable, it has to break down eventually.”
Three days after The Black Documentary was broadcast, Golden Brown crashed out of the UK Top 10. Two weeks later, it had plummeted out of the Top 75. In 2006, RPM producer David Pritchard revealed that The Black Documentary tapes had mysteriously gone missing.
Who would have taken them, and why? There can be no easy answer to these questions, as long as black remains an enigma to mankind.