The Stranglers Present The Colour Black And Other Worlds, 1982

In 1982, BBC Southwest broadcast The Colour Black, a documentary about the colour black (natch.) made by The Stranglers’ Hugh Cornwell and Jet Black. Cornwell says they “were asked to put together a piece about the colour black for an arts programme called RPM“. Presented by Andy Batten-Foster, RPM was short for Rectangular Picture Machine.

In 2010, Batten-Foster recalled the show being “about local bands, real ale, architecture, theatre, cinema” in and around Bristol, England, and the journalist Auberon Waugh (17 November 1939 – 16 January 2001) doing funny pieces about that week’s news. Why that unusual combination? “Because they were the things that the producer David Pritchard was most interested in, and this was going to be his show,” says Batten-Foster. And because Pritchard had an “unreasonable fondness” for The Stranglers, the band were sure to feature, which they did.

 

 

Primal Therapy with Tears For Fears

Starting in 1979, the show about culture in the West of England ran for six years. “The audience took us to their hearts,” says Batten-Foster. “Auberon Waugh (or Bron as we got to know him) became increasingly edgy despite an almost total inability to read autocue. His scripts were so contentious that they all had to be cleared by lawyers at the very last minute.”

Many local bands wanted to appear in the hope that TV exposure would get them a record deal. Batten-Foster spent most nights down at venues like the Bristol Bridge, The Granary, Trinity Hall and the Bier Kellar at The Hawthorns Hotel watching the likes of Automatic Dlamini, Talisman, The Electric Guitars, The Cortinas, Juan Foot ‘n’ The Grave and The Crazy Trains.

And there was a band from Bath called Graduate, “all done up neat and tidy in suits”, says Batten-Foster. “The two singers were called Curt [Smith] and Roland [Orzabal] who later ditched the others in the band and changed their name to Tears for Fears, named after Roland’s obsession with Primal Therapy that he and I discussed during the recording.”

 

The Stranglers at The Granary

One gig stands out.

Opened as a jazz club in 1968, The Granary in Bristol, England, is famous for being the venue where The Stranglers first played their hit Golden Brown in public. The club was located in a former Bristol Byzantine-style granary building that was converted into apartments after its closure in 1988.

To give you a sense of how close fans got to the bands, the picture below shows Bristol-based band Jaguar playing The Granary in 1980.

 

Golden Brown at The Granary – 11 November 1981

“This night deserves a paragraph or two of its own,” says Batten-Foster. “Pritch and Steve had somehow got to know Hugh Cornwell and Jet Black (Steve used to drink cider with Hugh in some place outside Bath that was more like someone’s tiny sitting room than a proper pub) and I think invited them to perform on RPM only because they expected to be turned down. When the opposite unexpectedly happened, they agreed and we suddenly had to take the idea seriously, a certain level of panic set in…

“It’s almost impossible now to imagine how big The Stranglers were in those days so as soon as we announced we were doing it at The Granary both us and the venue were completely overwhelmed by demand for tickets. However much planning we did (and I can only remember it was a lot) came to nothing because when the big night finally arrived it descended almost immediately into total chaos. About three times more punters turned up than had tickets. A lot of them were really hard-core punks and demanded to be let in.

“We’d built camera platforms so we could get pictures over the heads of the audience but these began to tilt and sway dangerously as soon as the band hit the stage and the crowd began to surge back and forth. We honestly thought either a cameraman would fall into the heaving masses, which would almost certainly rip him apart in their frenzy, or a falling platform would kill some of the crowd. Either way we were in big trouble. Neither disaster actually happened, of course, or I`d probably be writing this from a prison cell, and the funny thing was that backstage after the gig The Stranglers were completely calm. Every show was like this to them.”

Men In Black & Keith Floyd

 

 

“Pritch and I only ever had two really big and enduring disagreements during the making of RPM – and one of these was about The Stranglers. As I’ve already said, I think his affection for their music is unreasonable, and yet virtually every week he’d want to include one of their songs in the show – usually Duchess – and every week I’d try and argue him out of it. At one point he became so furious that words failed him and instead he threw a telephone at me…

“My protests never worked; he and Steve responded by making a film with Hugh and Jet about Men In Black (this was long before the feature film and incorporated the band’s Waltz in Black which Pritch went on to use as the theme tune for all his later films with Keith Floyd, who was also discovered as an act during RPM).”

 

 

The Gospel According to the Meninblack

The Stranglers were fascinated with what they termed Meninblack legends of alien life. Their 1981 album, The Gospel According to the Meninblack (aka The Meninblack), explores conspiratorial themes involving alien visitations to Earth, the sinister governmental men in black, and the involvement of these elements in well-known biblical narratives.

This was not the first time The Stranglers had used this concept, recording Meninblack on the earlier The Raven album and subsequent 1980 single-release Who Wants the World? had also explored it.

 

 

“We were unearthing very curious connections between UFOs and dark forces,” says Cornwell in his autobiography. “It wasn’t until after we had finished on The Meninblack album and had moved on to working on La Folie, that the misfortunes stopped.”

“Jet and I made a television programme about how the colour black has always been associated with authority. We were doing a lot of research into the Meninblack, but there were certain crucial books that we couldn’t get hold of at the National Library. It just so happened to be the books that related to the connection between the Meninblack, religion and civilisation.”

 

 

Via: Bristol Archive Records,