The Songs....

Unbroken. JJ does verses and bridge. I sing chorus.

The Spectre Of Love. Its about my kid. I haven't spoken to her for 18 months for various reasons and its difficult. A personal thing. Its got commercial tough stranglers sound. It’s a really good song." Punk77 ..if you had bollocks you’d release 'Summat Outanowt' (laughs) Baz. Lets see how the first one does. You need to appeal to the broader cross section of the general public.

She’s Slipping Away. This was partially written during the 'Norfolk Coast' sessions. I read in the paper about a bloke who came home from the pub, had an argument with his girlfriend smacked her and she’d fallen and banged her head. He thought she was dead so he took her outside and buried her in the garden but she came round. Me and Paul Roberts wrote the lyrics to the song. It had an entirely different vocal melody which we binned and we made it a little bit more commercial. This and 'Spectre' was seen very early on as prime candidates for singles though there’s loads on there to choose.

Anything Can Happen. Paul recorded 9 vocals and we had to go and replace those. Its got a salsa/samba feel and that’s Paul playing Congas and marimbas, co wrote some bits of pieces and he’s credited on the album.  

See Me Coming. JJ wrote that. He did the soundtrack for an animated Jap TV series "Gankutsuou" in 2004. Amazing cutting edge animation. I’ve seen bits of it and its incredible. He wrote some things for it and I played quite a lot of guitar on the soundtrack. Its a futuristic version of the Count of Monte Christo and Edmond is the main character in there who gets locked away and comes out and exacts his revenge. We kind of thought it had a kind of heavy hip hop vibe almost. Dave shone through on this. Plenty of quirk. More details here about the soundtrack.

Bless You ( Save You, Spare You, Damn You). It’s the big production number on the album and whether we will be able to reproduce it live I don’t know. I wrote it with that kind of vibe. There was an amazing drum pattern that Jet was doing and I thought we could use it. I wrote it 2 years ago. Its an acoustic start and we were aiming for a Tudor minuet in the middle. I was adamant that female backing vocals would work so we got Lucy to try them and it sounded great. Lucy was the girl that worked in the letting  office that let us the house in Looe and who was in a duo with her husband. She was a singer songwriter who played acoustic guitar. At the end  you’ve got blues ...Gary Moore moment (laughs)...you don’t expect it on a Stranglers album!

A Soldier’s Diary. Its about a bloke who’s lost his legs and soldiers waiting to go over the top in Pascendale. I read a thing about old Tommies in the first world war and how when they went back afterwards they found old letters and diaries in the trenches and it was harrowing. I wanted to write about it but I didn’t want to make it maudlin. I think I’m right in saying It’s the fastest song that the stranglers ever recorded.

We like to juxtapose really dark subject matter with accessible melodies. We try to make things a little more obtuse and its up to people get their noses in and root about to find out about the songs

I Hate You. We had a lot of fun doing it. Again its a really dark subject. He (JJ) clearly doesn’t like somebody. It’s a song we had a couple of stabs doing different versions of and then JJ said how about a bit of a Johnny Cash thing and as soon as he said it it all just fell into place, A lot of people really like it.

When we were putting the running order together which is important especially for cds you want to pace it. You want light and shade. It does come down slightly in the middle but then that’s the way of most things. A couple of surprises towards the end and then put relentless on at the end a really long surfy style track.

Relentless. I didn’t want that song to be too heavy. We could have seriously rocked out and made it much more thrashy but I wanted it to be a bit more restrained. A lot of these songs were written for Paul Robert’s voice in his key. I did have the idea of shifting it up a tone so I could sing it easier but I realised the first verse has to be really deep and almost spoken. Whoever writes the song normally sings it. That’s not always the case though. 'Relentless' was the last song to be written. Its about the passage of time. I’ve had personally a bit of a rollercoaster 2 years in the midst of all of this its been a bit tumultuous. I wanted a way to express it. It can be really really heartbreaking but things are inevitable and you can’t stop them and you know that they are gonna come. The King Canute reference is the broader verse so that people would be in no doubt about what I was talking about.