The Stranglers, it is truthful to say, had a fame for being a bit… tasty, even earlier than punk rock compelled its means into the mainstream.
There was that point that the Guilford quartet confronted off towards members of the Intercourse Pistols, Ramones and The Conflict exterior Dingwalls in 1976 after bassist JJ Burnel punched Paul Simenon within the face. And when the group first toured the UK there was “violence each night time,” Burnel informed MOJO journal in 2002, admitting, “we gave nearly as good as we bought.”
“What do you do when somebody’s bottling you?” the bassist mused. “In case you’re not going to run away you combat again.”
Not that Burnel was shy about getting his retaliation in first. When Sounds journalist Jon Savage [later the author of essential punk rock history text England’s Dreaming] penned a dismissive overview of the group’s second album, 1977’s No Extra Heroes, he “bought his face crunched” by the bassist. “I do not like being patronised by individuals with smaller brains than ourselves,” the bassist informed Melody Maker the next 12 months. “It is the regulation of the jungle.”
Maybe the band’s most notorious encounter with a journalist, nonetheless, occurred in Paris in 1978, when influential music author Philippe Manœuvre discovered himself gaffer-taped to the Eiffel Tower, 400 toes off the bottom, after “bugging” Burnel.
“He was an annoying little oik,” the unrepentant bassist informed The West Australian web site in 2016. “He was pestering me for an interview, so I agreed to do one up the Eiffel Tower with him after which in some way managed to get his trousers off and gaffer-taped him to one of many girders. It was a fairly straight-forward operation, actually.”
“He wasn’t finest happy,“ drummer Jet Black recalled in The Guardian.
“We left him there to be photographed by Japanese vacationers,“ Burnel added. “It was solely the primary flooring. Admittedly, that’s 400ft off the bottom.“
“About seven or eight years in the past, he lastly bought the joke.“
“I used to be rescued by vacationers,“ Philippe Manœuvre, now a TV presenter, recalled in a 2020 interview. “Leaping in a taxi, I went again to the studio the place they have been recording Black And White, an album that I really like, and for the file, I arrived earlier than them. It was humorous and with out violence.“
Frankly, the person bought off frivolously… all issues thought-about.