Hugh Cornwell Interview

Ex-Stranglers frontman Hugh Cornwell is putting the finishing touches to his next album.

Currently touring Nosferatu, his 1979 collaboration with Captain Beefheart drummer Robert Williams, the veteran songsmith says work on his upcoming 11th solo studio opus – his first since 2022's Moments Of Madness – is at an advanced stage. "I had ideas so I started working on this one," he tells me.

"I thought I might as well. If you've got the ideas go for it if you've got the urge. There's a nice starting point for it and I don't know yet how much of it is going to be themed but some of it is.

"It just writes itself. I don't really write it, it just takes over. It's a bit like when you're doing a book the same things happen.

"You start off with an idea and then as you start writing it the book takes over and you've got to get yourself out of the way. Don't spoil it by getting in the way, just let it do its thing.

"It's the same thing with an album really, I find."

Cornwell's ambitious 12-date return to a themed work that featured guest appearances from Ian Dury and Devo's Mark Mothersbaugh, kicked off in Norwich on November 6.

The tour, which has been tagged Come And Get Some, is set to continue through to a closing show in Dublin on November 28. "The title is a steal from an ad-lib vocal Ian Dury did on one of the songs on Nosferatu, called The Wrong Way Round," he explains.

"I invited Ian in to do a scat vocal like a fairground barker because I thought he'd be perfect for it and he knew exactly what I wanted when I explained it to him.

"He didn't know anything about it, I just asked him to come in because I had something for him to do if he wanted to contribute and he said yes and came in.

"He did it in one take and one of the lines that he says is, 'Come and get some, come and see the bearded lady'.

"'What makes the husbands leave home?' that's another one that was on it. It's good though, so I thought I'd use that to describe the tour.

"You can hardly hear what he's saying on the record but I knew what he was saying. I hardly knew him but we had funny connections because I ended up working with Laurie Latham in The Stranglers on one album, and then Laurie produced two of my solo albums.

"And of course he was instrumental from the beginning with Ian from New Boots And Panties and during all the success. I'd been to see Ian and the band play and admired what he did, but I hadn't really known him at all so I was very pleased when I asked him out of the blue to appear on the album that he came along, it was great."

Featuring support from retro rock duo The Courettes, each live show sees Cornwell joined by his long-time drummer Windsor McGilvray and bassist Pat Hughes to perform Nosferatu in full for the first time, alongside highlights from his five-decade career.

He says the trio have resisted the temptation to rework the cult self-produced album, which was inspired by FW Murnau's 1922 silent vampire film of the same name starring the iconic Max Schreck. "The songs are exactly the same speed and the same arrangements," says the 76-year-old.

"It's just that there were so many overdubs on it. It was never conceived that it was going to be played live. You'd need a 50-piece orchestra to play everything that's on it and about five drummers and percussion players.

"What we've done is we've taken the essence of every track and that's what we're playing, and we've got a few samples of some of the percussion instruments, like a thing called a cuica, which is a Brazilian drum.

"I think it's a monkey skin stretched over a wooden frame and you rub a stick through a hole in the middle of the skin and it makes it vibrate and it makes this weird noise. Robert was very keen to use it so we put it on Wired and thought that's quite odd.

"It sounds like a bunch of monkeys laughing but we haven't got one, so that's a distinctive bit of Wired that we've sandwiched from the recording to play live.

"The song Big Bug we've been playing for two or three years and it goes down a storm and that's a very simplified version of what was recorded. It's very odd playing it all live because it's not something that I ever thought would happen."

Cornwell reveals that apart from a brief reunion a few years ago, he's barely seen his Nosferatu co-creator since they worked together. "Robert did a remarkable job – he was a very creative drummer," the Golden Brown hit-maker declares.

"I kept in touch with him for a while, for many years, and then about 10, 15 years ago my drummer at the time Chris Bell, he was having a child and he promised that he'd be there at the birth and it coincided with a tour so he couldn't do it.

"So I asked Robert to come over and deputise, which he did. We didn't really get on as well as we did back in the day, and so unfortunately we didn't keep in touch after that. I hear he hasn't been well and I don't think he's drumming anymore.

"He was a very gifted set painter in movies, so I don't know if he's still doing that. He'll probably listen to what we do online and then say, 'Oh no they're not playing that right'," he quips.

Among the lost gems on Nosferatu, which sold modestly at the time of its original release, is a cover of Cream classic White Room. "I can't remember exactly how that came about," Cornwell admits.

"It was always one of my favourite songs because of the mood that is created on it and the lyrical ideas and the north country of England with the flat roofs and the no gold pavements, the mining district and the sad love affair in this backdrop, almost like This Sporting Life or one of those '60s films.

"It has very cinematic imagery and I like the odd time signature going on in one part of the song. I always like it when pop visits these odd musical quirks which you wouldn't normally visit but they make legitimate.

"The Beatles did it with All You Need Is Love, which has got a strange time signature in it, and they made it work and it was top of the charts. I like that subversive element of modern culture, being able to insinuate something in which isn't normally accepted but you get people to swallow it and it's a great achievement when you can do that.

"I invented the ever decreasing verse, I call it. I don't use it all a time, but I have done extensively, in Stranglers songs as well. When you first hear a melody in a verse, you've got to hear it a few times then you get used to it and you know it, so the next time it comes in you don't need to play it so many times because people are familiar with it.

"So verse one is longer than verse two, verse two is longer than verse three. It's the ever-shrinking verse and it's not a convention. Normally verses are the same length every time.

"If you think about it, from the listener's point of view you don't need the verse to be as long every time. That's one of my contributions to pop music."

* Hugh Cornwell plays Brighton on November 16 before gigs in Glasgow, Dunfermline and Newcastle next week. Look up hughcornwell.com/live for full details.