Tuesday 26 October 2010

Vampire Blues

I need to do a long post on The Stranglers - in my opinion the greatest band of their era, and yet still to this day subject to a mysterious cultural omerta. In the meantime here's a track from Hugh Cornwell's inexplicable 1979 album "Nosferatu".



It's unclear why Cornwell felt the need to make a solo album at this time. One would have suspected that having freed himself from the seismic reaming machine that was The Stranglers' rhythm section he would have indulged his craftsmanlike songwritery side, but instead "Nosferatu" is an experimental, fragmentary hall-of-mirrors, fathomable only by its creator.

Perhaps a clue as to its purpose is given by the fact that The Stranglers had already used the smack-as-vampire meme in "Peasant In The Big Shitty". When injecting (no doubt adulterated) magical powders into your body, it's inevitable that you'll be injecting a certain amount of psychic filth with them. "Nosferatu" is Cornwell giving the larvae at the bottom of his psyche something else to feed on. It's a diseased record.

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