Cornwell's parish punk protest
IT probably won’t go down as one of rock’s the great, noble protest songs of rock history.
But no one can say Hugh Cornwell’s new plaint, Please Don’t Put Me On A Slow Boat To Trowbridge, has not ruffled feathers.
Worthies have in the Wiltshire town have huffed and puffed, and the BBC Breakfast programme sent a reporter to investigate the local difficulties irking the former Stranglers frontman in the Wiltshire town.
“If the Mayor of Trowbridge wants to become hysterical just because someone has some complaints, then maybe he’s doing the wrong job,” says an unrepentant Cornwell, who is reserving most of his bile for the town’s one-way system.
“It was very tongue in cheek. The important thing is that I’ve never been politically correct. I think political correctness leads to a suppression of healthy discussion of things.”
So what exactly is wrong with Trowbridge, Hugh?
“I live close to Trowbridge but I avoid it like the plague because I always get lost there, and everybody I know says exactly the same thing,” he replies, citing in defence of his song not just the roads one-way system but also ‘Mount Crushmore’, which is “a lot of concrete waste they’ve dumped which is a bit of an eyesore”.
A few months short of his 60th birthday, there is little sign of Cornwell the former Strangler mellowing.
He ‘doesn’t give a damn’ about that impending landmark birthday, and is plainly fired up with enthusiasm for going on the road with Hooverdam, the album he released last year.
Although CD and vinyl versions were later released, the album was first – and still is – available as a free download.
“It was the record company’s decision to do it,” he says. “They said the internet was a perfect delivery system, and we want this album to go everywhere in the world, and the only way to do that was to give it away free.
Uzbekistan
“It’s been marvellously successful. We’re getting reports from places like Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan – people who have never heard of me but got the download and love it.”
Cornwell was a biochemist before rock ‘n’ roll beckoned and is fascinated with engineering.
He named his latest album in is honour of the huge Hoover Dam on the Colorado River.
It was completed in 1935 and, in an echo of today’s economic downturn, was one of several big public projects used to create jobs in the Great Depression.
“All the technology, 80 years later is still working perfectly,” he says.
“They reckon it’s one of the few structures on earth which will still be existing after human beings have gone.”
Joining Cornwell on the album and on tour are drummer Chris Bell, a long-time collaborator, and his new bass player Mancunian Caroline Campbell, a Mancunian.
“She plays the bass like a demon, puts in a lot of energy on stage, looks great and sings like an angel,” he says.
The album will be played in full during the tour – a feat of creativity he says he does not see his old muckers in The Stranglers matching.
Cornwell left the band in 1990 and there is plainly no sign of rapprochement with the Men in Black who he shared so many hits with in the 1970s and 1980s.
“The Stranglers are going out and doing a greatest hits tour. That speaks for itself,” he says.
“All the greatest hits were the records I was on. That was the main reason I wanted to leave the Stranglers. I could see that in 20 years time, that’s what we’d be doing.
“But it’s I’m quite happy with that though. It’s an accolade to my contribution as a songwriter, and also, I get performing rights royalties. They’re out there making money for me.”
Hugh Cornwell plays Buxton Opera House on Wednesday, February 18 and Manchester Academy on Friday, February 20. £15. Call 0161 832 1111.
Published: Wed, 20 February, 2008
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