Hugh Cornwell

Stranglers legend Hugh Cornwell is bracing himself for an "interrogation" when he plays in Scotland this weekend.

The veteran songsmith kicked off his Never Say Goodbye farewell solo acoustic tour last week and told me he expects a few probing enquiries when he hosts a Q and A session with fans at gigs in Dunfermline and Glasgow.

He also admitted that performing a one-man unplugged set can sometimes feel like a grilling in itself.

Cornwell said: "Given the choice I prefer playing electric with other musicians – it feels more natural to me and I can enjoy the moment more.

"When it's just you under the spotlight pounding the guitar trying to get a sound out of it that sounds okay, and your voice, it's a bit like you're being interrogated. It's very challenging and much more exhausting than playing with a band, but let's see if I can get through it.

"That's why I said it's probably the last tour of this kind – because it takes so much out of you. It's very, very demanding."

This time last year the Londoner was out with his bandmates Pat Hughes (bass) and Windsor McGilvray (drums) touring his cult album Nosferatu, a 1979 collaboration with Robert Williams.

Since then he's been busy completing work on his 11th solo opus Succubus, with a film to mark a landmark moment in his epic career also in the pipeline.

He added: "It's been non-stop this year – the first few months of this year I was finishing the final songs in the studio and the whole of 2026 I've been building a team of people that I think can help me to release it.

"I want to make it a significant event and to make a document of my career before and after The Stranglers, because next year it's 50 years since the release of the first Stranglers album in April 1977, which was the first time I made a record.

"My record won't be coming out on that day, I'm going to be leaving it until about six months after that, but still it's a significant time and it seems like the right time to do all this.

"Now that I'm getting into this project and planning all that we're going to be doing next year it seems like all the past's been building up to this moment and that feels about right."

Compiling a setlist for his latest tour has meant stripping down songs from his Stranglers days and beyond – a process that it seems has proven somewhat unpredictable.

Cornwell, 77, explained: "I came across a great arrangement just by accident for an old Stranglers song, Outside Tokyo.

"It's nothing to do with the way it started life or anything, it's just a good way to present it on a solo guitar with a voice. It works so well like that and it's nothing like the recorded version.

"It just seems to make sense to me and I found a few others as well that do that, including Dead Loss Angeles. They work because the arrangements are interesting, but others just get a bit boring.

"I don't do a Stranglers song just because it was a big hit. I do the ones that work well and if they don't, I don't do them."

After forming the Surrey outfit with late drummer Jet Black in 1974, the frontman quit the band in 1990 after writing a massive chunk of their 10 studio albums up to then.

His most recent solo offerings are 2022's Moments Of Madness and the live recording All The Fun Of The Fair (2024), and he recently made a guest appearance on a track on Tubes drummer Prairie Prince's latest release.

Never Say Goodbye sees Cornwell playing some new material, with three songs from Succubus featuring in his set, which also includes stories from across the decades.

Elaborating on the forthcoming album's lyrical concerns, he said: "There's a theme in the sense that the songs are all about things that have happened to me, or are happening to me.

"My songs have always been a way of writing a diary about how I feel and occurrences, but in slightly hidden code because a lot of it's personal. And some of them are about encounters with the fairer sex in my dreams and in reality as well – that links it to the theme of Succubus.

"I had a very interesting experience a few years ago. I dreamt of a girl – I'm not sex mad but all heterosexual men dream of women at some stage, and maybe a gay man dreams of a man, I don't know.

"I had a dream about a woman I'd never met but I could see exactly what she looked like, and then a few years later I met someone exactly the same as this person.

"They looked just like them. I didn't say, 'You are the girl of my dreams', I said, 'I had a dream about someone who looked just like you about two years ago and I never forgot it'.

"We ended up having a relationship for a while, and that's a weird thing to happen. Most of the time women come and go in the dreams and you think, 'Phew, I wonder who that was'.

"Sometimes it's people you know, but most of the time it's people you don't, but sometimes you can meet them, so be on your guard."

As far as his tour's spoken word element goes, the Wiltshire-based troubadour says fans should "expect the unexpected".

He went on: "I don't like preparing stories. I once went to see a favourite band of mine two days running and they did exactly the same things the second night as the first night like it was a script.

"I was very disappointed and I wished I hadn't gone the second night, which is a terrible admission. I don't want that to happen to anyone going to my tour.

"When I open my mouth I don't know what's going to come out and I think that's part of the reason why people like to come and see me."

* Hugh Cornwell plays Carnegie Hall, Dunfermline, on November 14 and St Luke's Glasgow on November 15, with his UK tour continuing until November 28.