Stranglers – "(Get a) Grip (On Yourself)" – 1977

The worst crime that I ever did

Was playing rock ’n’ roll

Recording artists often achieve very different levels of success in the U.S. and the UK.

But rarely has a band that was so popular with the Brits been a bigger flop with Americans than the Stranglers.

I’m a 100%, red-blooded American, so I don’t really care that the Stranglers were popular in Merry Olde.  Few people in the U.S. paid any attention whatsoever to them, and that makes them “underrated” in my book.

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The Stranglers were founded by a thirtysomething businessman (he once owned a flotilla of ice-cream vans) named Brian Duffy – also known as “Jet Black” (which is about as cool a nickname as there is.)

Jet Black

The band’s original frontman, Hugh Cornwell, was a blues musician.  Jean-Jacques Burnet had been a classical guitarist who performed with symphony orchestras.  Black/Duffy had been a jazz drummer.

But the Stranglers are usually described as a punk band – although some of their songs have new wave, art rock, and “sophisti-pop” elements.

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Six of the group’s first seven studio albums made it to the top ten in the U.K.  (The seventh one fell just short, peaking at #11.)

The Stranglers had seven singles that were top-ten hits in Britain, and 15 more that made it into the top 40.  

That’s not too shabby.

But the story was quite different in the U.S., where only one Stranglers album charted (peaking at #172).  None of their singles ever made it into the Billboard “Hot 100.”  (In other words, the Stranglers are underrated as all get out by Americans.)

The only place I ever heard the Stranglers’ records was on Steven Lorber’s “Mystic Eyes” radio show.  Their music was as good as anyone’s from that era, so I’m eternally grateful to Mr. Lorber for doing me that solid.

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Dave Thompson of Allmusic has written that the Stranglers – who started out as “bad-mannered yobs” but eventually became “purveyors of supreme pop delicacies” – were “responsible for music that may have been ugly and might have been crude – but it was never, ever boring.”

Some critics were put off by what they saw as sexist innuendo.  But Thompson believed that those critics didn’t get that the Stranglers were being ironic:  

[T]he Stranglers revelled in an almost Monty Pythonesque grasp of absurdity (and, in particular, the absurdities of modern “men's talk”).  [NOTE: as someone whose “men’s talk” is often misunderstood by members of the fairer sex, I feel a certain kinship with Stranglers.]  That people are still offended by [the Stranglers’ music] only adds to its delight – if rock & roll (especially punk rock & roll) was meant to be pleasant, it would never have changed the world, after all.  

The fact that much of the Stranglers' message was actually hysterically funny – as they themselves intended it to be – only adds to their modern appeal.  And the fact that their fans are still called upon to defend them only proves what humorless zeroes their foes really were.

The Stranglers at Battersea
Park in London in 1978

You ladies don’t want to be a “humorless zero,” do you?  Like the feminist groups who went batty when the Stranglers lined the stage with topless dancing girls when they played in London’s Battersea Park back in the day?

Of course you don’t.  So get a grip on yourself and enjoy the Stranglers – beginning with today’s featured song.

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Click here to listen to “(Get a) Grip (On Yourself),” the Stranglers’ very first single.  It was released in 1977 on the group’s debut album, Rattus Norvegicus, which eventually went platinum: 

Click here to listen to the Stranglers performing this song live in 2007 at London’s Roundhouse theatre.  (Note especially Dave Greenfield’s keyboard playing.  He’s a one-man stick of dynamite on this track.)

Click on the link below to buy the original version of there song from Amazon: