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But their musicianship and menace transcended the genre, creating a sound unique to themselves. With their first three albums (Rattus Norvegicus, No More Heroes and Black and White) being released within an astonishing 13 months of each other, scoring hit singles with ‘Peaches’, ‘No More Heroes’ and ‘Walk On By’. Further success was to follow with ‘Always The Sun’, ‘Strange Little Girl’ and the mercurial ‘Golden Brown’, amongst many others, earning the group 24 Top 40 singles and 19 Top 40 albums in a career spanning six different decades.
With this unique Stranglers sound, combining a brilliant melodic touch with a dark aggression and effortless cool, The Stranglers are now recognised as one of the most credible and influential bands to have emerged from the punk era. In 2024, the Stranglers celebrate their 50th anniversary with a sell-out tour of the UK including the prestigious Royal Albert Hall and headline slots at festivals worldwide.
The band’s 2021 UK top 5 album Dark Matters was their highest charting album for 38 years showing The Stranglers are still a creative force to be reckoned with. Dark Matters achieved wide critical acclaim and was described by many music mags as ‘their best album for forty years’.
Dark Matters also became the swansong of Dave Greenfield, Stranglers’ keyboard player of 45 years who performed extensively on the record before his sudden passing in 2020 due to CoVid-19. Dave was a highly acclaimed keyboardist whose unique approach and instantly identifiable playing style massively contributed to the group’s inimitable sound.
It’s widely agreed that 1977 was the year that marked the birth of punk as we know it, and even if that’s primarily because it’s the year that saw the release of Never Mind the Bollocks, it’s no coincidence that another seminal album of the era, No More Heroes by The Stranglers, was also released around that time. That was already the Guilford four-piece’s second album, and they’ve gone on to show scant regard for what the Sex Pistols did, where record releases are concerned; their most recent full-length, 2012’s Giants, was their seventeenth. Celebrating their fortieth anniversary as a band this year, two of the original members remain, and Dave Greenfield’s been involved for thirty-nine of those years himself; you have to admit, though, that the departure of Hugh Cornwell in 1990 means that this isn’t quite the real Stranglers. Try telling that to the crowd that continue to pack rooms across the UK, with the band touring pretty much annually; after replacing Paul Roberts in 2006, Baz Warne is doing a fine job of handling classics like ‘No More Heroes’ and ‘Golden Brown’, and you get the impression that there’d be no shortage of job applications should he ever step down - The Stranglers are just one of those bands with a fanbase that refuses to let them go.
Joeg_67
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