Baz Warne - Pt3

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 Pt 1 -Intro | Pt 2 - Early Days | Pt4 - Suite XVI | Pt5 -Hugh, Paul & Odds & Sods

"Norfolk Coast was my first album and I was thrilled it was accepted and with the response. I was thrilled Long Black Veil was selected as a single and scraped into the lower reaches of the top 40." Baz Warne 2006
4 years to write but Christ was it worth it. As soon as I heard the bass start on the title track I got goosebumps all over. The boys were back and in style. Amazingly after 4 years they still hadn't finished the drums. Jet Black called it the great unfinished Stranglers album pointing out that some of the drum tracks used on the album were demo ones. Not withstanding that though its a great album that yielded their first Top 40 single in god knows how many years with 'Big Thing Coming' and aggressive uptempo vintage Stranglers single. Despite Baz's protestations about not caring about commercial success its obvious the band do.

Norfolk Coast…
I hadn’t been in the band very long when I made the journey down to the Cambridge from the North East and spent 10 days with JJ just bashing songs around with him. It became apparent that we could work together and between the two of us we’ve written the last 2 albums.

So we started writing middle to late 2001, two months after I joined the band. We wrote a lot of songs and ditched a lot of songs as is their wont being the old fashioned band they are. We turned a lot of stuff a round, a lot of stuff on its head…I’ve got demos at home that bear no resemblance at all to the songs that made the album apart from the lyrics and the title. We wrestled with them a lot.

Once we had got the idea for the song 'Norfolk Coast' that was the blue print for the record. We did that track separately in a studio in London and the producer sent a copy of it to me through the post and I remember playing it at home and thinking ‘fucking hell’ that’s powerful! And I was particularly pleased that he hadn’t smoothed the raw edges of the guitar either.

Was it deliberate to add the trademarks Stranglers sound?
 I wrote Long Black Veil, Dutch moon Into the Fire and I’ve been wild. What they’d done in the 90’s was to experiment a  bit more. It wasn’t deliberate it was just the way it went. We kind of got back to the classic short sharp songs. At the end of the day everybody just wanted an old fashioned kick arse album. I wrote a song called 'Dutch Moon' and presented it to them but it wasn’t going to appear on the album because they thought it wasn’t hard hitting enough. But then towards the end they did take it up. By then I had already released a version of it on an EP I had made.

I wanted to bring a bit more power and rock to it. Sounds a bit cheesy but you look at the Stranglers an you know their strengths - the bass and the keys. I wanted to make the guitar a bit of an issue as well - Stamp me authority on it type of thing.

Song writing..
 Songs were shaped – each person will come up with the nucleus on an idea whether its lyrics or a melody or whatever. You document it, catalogue it and then if you think its worth developing it will be a collaborative effort. There are a few occasions where I write differently to the way JJ does. There were a couple of times when I’d written a song and finished it off completely but I was very wary about taking full songs into the band and saying you play it like this, you play this. It doesn’t work like that. Which is where I think my predecessor got his lines crossed. I kind of had my song writing head on and was pretty prolific as was JJ. We would sit together at the farm; me, him and Dave.

In the year 2002 or 2003  I came down from Newcastle every week for 8 months. Flew in on Monday and back on Friday and lived at the farm for 8 months shaping these songs getting rid of all the fat. Then we took them into London, recorded them and when we listened to the whole thing back as a cohesive body of work we were just thrilled that it sounded so uniform i.e. not like a collection of songs just thrown into a pot. I was very proud of it.

The great unfinished Stranglers album…..according to Jet….
 I understand him. Everyone looks at their own instrument. Sonically I don't think it sounds anywhere as good as 'Suite XV1' as raw or as powerful. Mmmm not a lot more said by Baz but he's not letting on..

Baz continues...The Stranglers had been bitten on the arse with record labels, executives and budgets for years and years. This time with a new line up I think the band just wanted to ease into it and make it the best that they possibly could. and they were adamant that they didn’t need to be rushed into anything and they weren’t going to rush into anything and they were right to that because when the record came out it immediately got some of the best reviews the Stranglers had had for4 20 years. 'Norfolk Coast' sounds exactly like what The Stranglers should sound like in the new millennium. It was urgent, raw, lot of melody and stranglers quirkiness. We were right to deliberate. On the nineties out put if you boiled all those albums down you could probably come out with one good record.

With 'Norfolk Coast' rather than shop and try and get a deal and then make an album we made the album ourselves, completely self financed and then approached a record company. Once EMI heard it they made a very, very quick decision. They just loved it. To their ears it was the Stranglers of old with a  superior modern slant on it. Good production and sonically a good record. A choice of 4 possible 5 singles.

I think it’s a tribute to Sil that they managed to pull the deal but I’ve heard from many sources that they just liked the record and it helped that we had done all the hard work. All they had to do was promote it and the budget was secured for it. We did an awful lot of gigs behind it to support it. Jet Black confirms this with his historical list confirming 2004 was the most gigs done since 1983. In 2004 we did around 90 shows. Everyone got a whole new lease of life, not just the record company but the bands and fans. I was very proud of it because it was my opening shot.

It gets to the point in this bands career where we think do we care about commercial success. Does anyone give a shit?

Why wouldn’t you? A hit single puts you back in the public eye and if you’ve got something to say then you need the people to tell it to?
 A big factor behind the success of the album was the UB40 tour. I know it raised a lot of eyebrows. Frankly it was water off a ducks back. From a business angle it was an absolute fucking coup. We played to 10-12 thousand of people a night. The Stranglers are from the same era as UB40, obviously completely different genres of music, but they all knew each other. UB40 used to come and see the Stranglers when they played Birmingham during the mid seventies before they had even formed. We went out and played a 45 minutes greatest hits set with 'Big Thing Coming' sandwiched in the middle. People couldn’t believe how vibrant and how powerful we were because we tore it up every night.

We did that tour. Released the album 2 months later and then played the cities again in our own right and got rave reviews from Mojo, Uncut, Q ...everyone!

 Pt 1 -Intro | Pt 2 - Early Days | Pt4 - Suite XVI | Pt5 -Hugh, Paul & Odds & Sods

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Live photos Shepherds Bush 2006