The Stranglers were probably the least respected band to come out of punk. Not just because they had a drummer in his 40s and a bass player with a silly martial arts fetish, but their songs were laced with sexism and violent misogyny (“Sometimes I’m gonna smack your face” was the opening line of their debut album) which didn’t quite fit in with the revolutionary, empowering spirit of punk. They probably thought they were being provocative when they just came across like dirty old men. Still, I liked them quite a bit (though the friends I had who really liked them were also into Heavy Metal – ’nuff said), listening to their early records gave you the same kick you got from “Derek and Clive (Live)” or the sick jokes that used to go around school the minute someone famous died (“What was Marc Bolan’s last hit?” “A tree”) — they were nasty bastards but made some great records, and at that age you thought dirty words were funny.

By their standards their third album “Black and White” (1978) was quite an artistic and mature affair. It’s their most inventive musically and the first one where the “humour” didn’t involve ugly women and prostitutes. Not coincidentally I think it’s their best album. The opening song “Tank” is a classic parody of the rock and roll car song, instead of the freedom of a Little Deuce Coupe it’s about the thrill of driving a tank and shooting people. Quite a change for The Stranglers to be taking the piss out of military machismo, how very liberal of them. “Hey! (Rise of The Robots)” is a funny song about robots taking over the world (“They’re gonna want a union soon/Oil break that’s dead on noon”) driven along by some great skronky sax playing by Laura Logic. Silly stuff, but a vast improvement on what they used to find amusing. The way these two motor along shows what a seriously good group they could be aside from all the macho shithead stupidity.

Despite the departure of lead singer Hugh Cornwell in 1990 they’re still around today, gigging and making new records. Some belligerent old bastards just refuse to go away.

Download: Tank – The Stranglers (mp3)
Download: Hey! (Rise of The Robots) – The Stranglers (mp3)
Buy: “Black and White” (album)

Funny story: My Gran used to buy me and my sister an LP each every Christmas and in 1977 my sister asked for a copy of The Stranglers’”No More Heroes” album. On Christmas Day the whole family — aunties and uncles, cousins and grandparents — is gathered together and my sister decides to play her new record. If you know the album you can probably guess the rest of this story. Halfway through side one there’s this track on it called “Bring On The Nubiles” and the chorus…um, goes “Let me, let me, fuck ya, fuck ya, let me lick your little puss.” As you can imagine there were red faces all around, apart from us kids who thought it was hysterical. I still have a wry smile whenever I think of my Gran going into her local Woolworth’s and buying the album in the first place.

Apparently my first celebrity crush was on 1960s Irish pop singer Clodagh Rodgers. I say “apparently” because I have no recollection of actually fancying her, but I do remember my mother winding me up whenever she came on the telly, saying things like “ooh look Lee, it’s your girlfriend Clodagh Rodgers!” (or Clodey Rotgut as she called her) so maybe I did. I know I always turned beet red with embarrassment whenever she did this, but any mention of girls was enough to fluster me at that age so that doesn’t really mean anything.

I don’t have any “Clodey” records but here she is singing her 1971 Eurovision Song Contest entry “Jack In The Box” and I have to say she does have rather nice legs (good choice of hot pants) but she isn’t really my type, and with that very blond hair and black eye make-up she looks worryingly like my mother did back then (though I always considered Dusty Springfield to be my mum’s pop doppleganger). Paging Dr. Freud…

As far as I’m concerned my first celebrity crush was on Raquel Welch and I can trace that back to seeing her 1970 television special — brilliantly called “Raquel!” — which had a profound effect on my 8-year-old mind. Have a look at this exceedingly groovy clip from the show and you’ll see why.

I come from Fulham in south west London which is a fairly decent part of town, not as swanky as neighbouring Chelsea but it’s not exactly Deptford either. We have our posh parts but we also have plenty of council housing and working families — or we used to. Like most of London it was gentrified in the 1980s and the estate agents and wine bars which had previously been concentrated in the richer neighborhoods started spreading out into working class areas, devouring houses like BMW-driving locusts, driving prices up and the previous tenants out. It all happened very fast. The empty streets where I used to play football became crammed with parked cars and on summer nights the air was full of the loud, braying voices of stripe-shirted City traders hosting dinner parties in their back gardens, boasting about how much they paid for their terraced house and how the area is so much more civilized now that new wine shop has opened up the road. What used to make me really angry was the property pages of magazines talking about areas of London being “discovered” as if no one had ever lived there before.

Like a lot of bad things that have happened to London (and England generally) in the past 25 years you can blame a lot of it on Maggie Thatcher. Her policy of selling off council houses to private buyers started a property gold rush and local authorities were only too keen to offload their housing stock and take the huge profits that were to be had. The Faith Brothers’ 1985 recording “Fulham Court” is about an estate our Tory council were trying to sell off and force out the original tenants. If Bruce Springsteen had grown up on a council estate he’d have written a song like this, full of passion for social justice and romanticism for the lives of ordinary working people. Though I must admit it’s hard for me to feel the romance about a council estate in Fulham — not exactly the Asbury Park boardwalk is it? It’s still a beautiful record.

In the song, singer Billy Franks calls the estate “the dumping ground of the borough” where they placed their “trouble” tenants and I remember it having something of a bad reputation. Unfortunately this caused the council a bit of a problem when they wanted to sell it, a lot of the residents refused to leave so they resorted to heavy-handed policing and bureaucratic bullying in an effort to force them out. The council won of course, Maggie’s side won every battle back then.

There aren’t that many good bands from Fulham, while surrounding areas gave the world The Who, The Clash, and The Sex Pistols, far as I know we’ve only managed the punk bands Eater and The Lurkers (though I’m not 100% sure about those two actually being from Fulham) and the Faith Brothers who didn’t exactly set the world on fire, despite making some fine records. “Fulham Court” was the b-side of their second (and best) single “A Stranger On Home Ground.” Billy Franks is still gigging around town and I wonder if he still lives in Fulham Court. Like a good socialist he’s offering free downloads of much of the Faith Brothers back catalogue on his web site, including all of their terrific debut album “Eventide.”

Download: Fulham Court- Faith Brothers (mp3)

The 1972 hit “Lady Eleanor” by Geordie folk-rockers Lindisfarne used to give me the willies when I was a kid. It wasn’t the sinister mandolin (yes, a mandolin can sound sinister) or menacing atmosphere that did it, but the lyrics that spooked me because I hadn’t a clue what it was all about and the imagery put all sorts of funny ideas into my innocent, 10-year-old head. Even reading the lyrics in a copy of Disco 45 was no help, what was I supposed make of this at that age?

Bashee playing magician sitting lotus on the floor
Belly dancing beauty with a power driven saw
Had my share of nightmares, didn’t think there could be much more
Then in walked Roderick Usher with the Lady Eleanor

She tied my eyes with ribbon of a silken ghostly thread
I gazed with trouble vision on an old four poster bed
Where Eleanor had risen to kiss the neck below my head
And bid me come along with her to the land of the dancing dead

I knew that it was probably a bit naughty, but that was one the many unexplained and murky things about the adult world beyond my experience, something to do with what was on BBC2 late at night when my sister and I were in bed. Kids these days are so terribly worldly and sophisticated, what with their wireless computers and stereophonic telephones. They spend their evenings ripping out other people’s spinal cords in video games and have a whole world of sexual perversion at their fingertips on the internet, so they’d find it highly amusing that my generation was so innocent something as cheesy as The Daleks could make us leap behind the couch in terror or that I’d be perturbed by the imagery in a pop song.

Over 30 years later I know that Roderick Usher is a character in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of The House of Usher.” There are several, real life Lady Eleanor’s, the best known being the 12th century Eleanor of Aquitaine, wife of both King Louis VII of France and Henry II of England, and quite an interesting woman who went on Crusades and was a believer in Courtly Love. Then there’s the half-gypsy aristocrat Lady Eleanor Smith, one of the so-called Bright Young Things who inspired Evelyn Waugh’s 1930 novel “Vile Bodies” and led an eventful, bohemian life which involved running off to the circus and writing supernatural novels about gypsies and flamenco dancers. None of these people are connected in any way and the “secret” of the song I was looking for doesn’t really exist. It’s just surreal, all-a-dream nonsense, a Gothic-novel sex and horror fantasy. Basically, this is what you get when folk singers take drugs — it’s all Bob Dylan’s fault.

Download: Lady Eleanor – Lindisfarne (mp3)
Buy: “Nicely Out of Tune” (album)
Photo: “Mrs. Edward Mayer as Medusa” by Madame Yevonde

“They are the first band not to shrug off their political stance as soon as they walk out of the recording studio. The first band with sufficient pure, undiluted unrepentant bottle to keep their crooning necks firmly on the uncompromising line of commitment when life would be infinitely easier — and no less of a commercial success — if they made their excuses and left before the riot.”
Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons
“The Boy Looked At Johnny” (1978)

It’s hard to overstate what a ballsy move it was for Tom Robinson to follow his catchy, radio-friendly Top 5 pop hit “2-4-6-8 Motorway” in 1977 with the strident anthem “Glad To Be Gay” but that was a time when lines were being drawn all across Britain and a lot of people felt they had to declare which side of the barricades they were on. These days it’s almost hip and trendy to be gay (an exaggeration I know) but it certainly wasn’t back then, being gay meant you were either a perverted kiddie fiddler or John Inman. My best mate at the time told me he threw away his copy of “Motorway” in disgust when he found out Robinson was “a bloody shirtlifter” — but he joined the Young Conservatives when he left school so I guess he had issues.

Their third single “Up Against The Wall” is one of the most blistering records to come out of punk, a riot of guitars and pulverizing drumming (the terrific Danny Kustow and Dolphin Taylor) that hits you like a boot in the groin — or a truncheon over the head. This led off their classic 1978 debut album “Power In The Darkness” which, along with the first Clash album, is the best snapshot of the tense, angry atmosphere in England at the time. Some of it seems like naive sloganeering now but back then it felt like life and death, you were either on Tom’s side or you were with the National Front and the SPG.

Download: Glad To Be Gay – Tom Robinson Band (mp3)
Download: Up Against The Wall – Tom Robinson Band (mp3)
Buy: “Power In The Darkness” (album)

(Posting has been a bit light this week as I’m recovering from a rather nasty stomach bug)

Download: I Like Birds – Terry Scott (mp3)