‘I was just looking for a fight’: How The Stranglers’ JJ Burnel calmed down and grew up

Fifty years ago, an angry young man with attitude to spare stepped up to a microphone and screamed: “Something better change!”

The singer was Jean-Jacques “JJ” Burnel, the band he was fronting was The Stranglers and although at the time he was venting about the music scene he and the rapidly growing punk movement were about to well and truly disrupt, it was also a statement Burnel would go on to live by.

Since their explosive 1974 debut in Guildford, a Surrey town 40 kilometres south-west of London, The Stranglers have grown through multiple style changes from punk to new wave to gothic rock and even (gasp) borderline mainstream while perfecting their own unique sound. They’ve scored 24 UK top 40 singles and 19 albums along the way and changed members repeatedly until Burnel is the only original left.

Jean-Jacques Burnel performs in London in 2022.Credit: Redferns

It’s been an organic and constant evolution, he says, and that’s the point. How boring would it be if nothing changed?

″What artist doing anything remotely creative wants to be in a straightjacket?” Burnel, now 72, says from his home in the south of France as he prepares for yet another world tour with The Stranglers.

“I mean you want to explore the limits of your limited talent so to speak. You don’t want to say: ‘Okay, well I’m comfortable with this, I’ve found a formula, let’s stick with this!’… that’s just boring and life’s too short.

“And nobody likes seeing an artist just going through the motions.”

Even Burnel has managed to evolve, admitting he’s changed a lot from the ball of fury of his younger days.

“We were having fights every night,” he says of The Stranglers’ early days. “I mean it’s outrageous the number of fights! If I saw myself from then walking down the street approaching me now, I’d cross the road – I was just looking for a fight all the time.”

For a while, that attitude spilled over onto The Stranglers’ stage presence. with multiple venues banning them and many clashes with the press.

In Australia, for example, the band was rejected from a 1979 appearance on the ABC’s Countdown program after host Molly Meldrum watched an interview Burnel and his bandmates did for another network that ended, to put it mildly, badly, with barbs and beer being sprayed over the reporter.

These days, things are far more civilised. Burnel’s fights are confined to sparring in a gym, where he is a seventh-dan black belt and instructor in Shidokan karate.

Sometimes change has been forced on the band, like when key members (including original co-singer/guitarist Hugh Cornwell) left and others (drummer Jet Black and band-defining keyboard player Dave Greenfield) died.

Dave Greenfield, Hugh Cornwell, Jean-Jacques Burnel and Jet Black in 1980.Credit: AP

“[When Dave died] I thought well this is it we’ve had a good run,” Burnel says.

“But I was pointed to a guy who was playing a tribute to Dave on YouTube. He was somebody who had been studying Dave for 35 years. He knew every single note.”

So, with keyboard virtuoso Toby Hounsham joining the current line-up of Burnel, guitarist Baz Warne and drummer Jim Macaulay, the band played on.

But more often than not, Burnel says, the evolution has been deliberate, with each addition or new skill learned helping The Stranglers stay fresh.

The new influences, greater experience – and a huge back catalogue to play with – means The Stranglers have the luxury of being able to tweak songs if they’re sounding tired, or simply drop songs that were once staples. Their worldwide hit Peaches, for example, disappeared from the set-list for about a decade, Burnel says.

“It’s more for my sake than anyone else’s,” he says.

“I’d hate to be playing the same notes every night and just for my own entertainment I like to see what potential there is within a song.

“I think most songs are adaptable so you record it in one way and then 10 years down the line you think, ‘I f---ing wish I’d recorded it this other way!’ – because you’ve discovered another way of playing it.

“Then there are times when you rediscover an old song and think: ‘Shit! I was smarter than I thought when I wrote that why haven’t we played that for a while?’.”

The result is a band that is definitely still The Stranglers but a world away from where they started … an embodiment of the change Burnel was screaming for decades ago.

“When you shoot in the dark sometimes you’ll hit a target and other times not, but it’s no good being timid about anything,” Burnel says.

“So, you fall flat on your face sometimes? That’s not a problem, get up and try again.”

The Stranglers 50 Years In Black Anniversary Tour, March 19, Enmore Theatre, Sydney