In July '99, JJ Burnel and Jet Black of The Stranglers were interviewed for BFBS 1, The Forces FM by Dave Ramsay, while in Cyprus performing for the British Troops through CSE.

BFBS (British Forces Broadcasting Service) provides radio and TV programs for the forces and their families serving abroad. In Cyprus there are 3 main sites that the radio service is transmitted from: Akrotiri (Limassol), Dhekelia (Larnaca) and Nicosia.

For more information about BFBS or CSE, check out their website at: www.ssvc.com.

DR: I'm now joined in the studio by JJ Burnel and Jet Black of The Stranglers. It's great to have you here we've been crying out for a good band to come to Cyprus for ages now.

Jet: It's great to be here...

DR: You've been around since 1974, loads of singles and albums to your name. Are The Stranglers the most successful punk band ever, and would you describe yourself as such?

JJ: Well we wouldn't but the record companies would, yeah......

[P A U S E]

DR: It was a strange way you formed: two adverts in the Melody Maker and a chance lift to a hitchhiker. What do you think it was originally that bound you together musically?

JJ: Just a desire, but otherwise we had nothing in common really with each other. Just a desire to change things for ourselves and also in relation to what was happening musically at the time we were nowhere - just had nothing in common with the general scene at the time.

DR: When you first got together you must have played some covers to see if you would gel musically. What sort of stuff did you play to start off with?

Jet: Well, famously I think everyone remembers that we used to play "Walk On By" 'cos we ended up recording it, but we played one or two hits of the seventies.....

JJ: It was mainly rock 'n' roll songs wasn't it...

Jet: It was mainly rock'n'roll....

JJ: We had no pretentions, other than to be a rock and roll band.

DR: Who did you see as your peers in those days -- were there any bands that you particularly liked....

Jet: We felt totally separate and that was our problem initially, we were so different that everyone hated us...

DR: What everyone?

Jet: (laughing) We got booed off every night for nearly three years...

JJ: (laughing) And stoned...

DR: So it's fairly safe to say you didn't enjoy the punk tag?

Jet: Oh we enjoyed it. We were having a whale of a time, yeah, but it was a lot of fun like a big endless party for nearly three years. We didn't get paid and we were broke and we were skint and we were starving, but we were still having a good time..... funnily enough.... at least that's how I remember it...

JJ: Yeah !

DR: Is it true that when you were first looking for venues the councils that didn't like you were banning you and you booked gigs under pseudonyms?

JJ: Yeah.

DR: Can you remember any of them?

JJ: Well yeah, occasionally we would actually convince them to book us, and it would go terribly wrong for some reason and they would ask us to shut up or to switch off and we would say "well you've booked us now" and threaten to play the full set, they'd call the police and the police would come and all hell went off. But for every ten people that we booing us they'd be one that thought "well this is alright - I'm into this" so we created our own audience.

DR: Can you remember any of the pseudonyms you used?

JJ: There was Oil and the Slicks...

Jet: Shakespearo's.

JJ: Shakespearo's yeah, and something and the OAPs....

DR: Bingo Nightly....

JJ: Bingo Nightly and the OAPs.

DR: Did anyone ever actually turn up looking for bingo?

JJ: (laughing) No, no... can't remember.

DR: It's fair to say your that most of your songs have survived and are as relevant today as they were originally - which can't be said for many of the punk bands. Is that down to your musicianship, I mean you're a classically trained guitarist....?

JJ: It's not down to the musicianship, it's down to the song writing..... which is slightly different...... because the recording techniques and musicianship evolves all the time, but songs last forever whatever rhythm you give them. Every generation brings their own rhythms but a song lasts forever, even a song from the last century, you can actually modernize it, but the melody and the relationship of the lines stay intact.

DR: Now, you've released an amazing amount of records but looking at the chart positions it's really been the albums that have done it for you, do you think that's indicative of the fans you have. They're older and more mature and will go out and buy the album and listen to the album rather than the teeny-boppers who buy singles.

JJ: Well we had a few years of being teeny-bop sort of stars...

Jet: The truth behind the statistical thing your trying to bring up is that the singles didn't get much airplay on the radio. The BBC hated us, they never played us on Radio 1, very rarely anyway, so they didn't get exposure and people didn't know about the singles, whereas they knew for some reason about the albums and bought them.

DR: Looking back now none of the singles were dangerous, musically, like maybe some of the punk bands.

Jet: Well they used to think they were... (laughing)...funnily enough.....didn't they?

JJ: Yeah, I think it was more us, they weren't sure how to handle us. A lot of the punk bands, if you want to call them that, were kind of pretending. There was an attitude, they put the clothes on and suddenly there was a different attitude, they put on an attitude. They weren't sure about us because we were out on a limb compared to the other bands of that period and we seemed to be a bit more the real thing.

DR: How do you cope....you must get terribly frustrated, I mean you had a string of very good singles which failed to do anything, "No Mercy", "Let Me Down Easy", "Nice In Nice", "Always The Sun", "Big in America"?

JJ: Well they did well in different countries, at different times, but funnily enough we never had a really massive world wide hit...everywhere.

Jet: Well for a long time there has been a media, an industry paranoia about the band. I mean we've had some awful press over the years, some true, some not, but so much venomous press over the years that we have been painted as monsters. Be assured we have been monsters some of the time but not all the time.

DR: You've had some very famous incidents with journalists over the years....

JJ: (laughing) Yeah, yeah.

DR: I mean the guy who does Rapido. Is it true you gaffa-taped him to the Eiffel Tower?

JJ: Antoine De Cont. No it wasn't. It was actually a guy called Philip Menerve who has been dining out on that for 20 years. Yes, we did tie him to the first floor of the Eiffel Tour because basically he has being a pain in the arse,... and I saw him on French TV two weeks ago and he's still being a pratt. (laughs) You see, we treat people how they treat us, and if they treat us badly we'd treat them badly back, and unfortuently a lot of these guys at the time were junior reporters or junior this or that, and now they're editor in chief of Q magazine or BBC producers or TV producers and everything and now their probably getting their own back..... and that's OK.

DR: What are your favorite albums tracks, ... if you had to choose three?

JJ: Stranglers ones?

DR: Yeah.

JJ: I don't know.......

DR: Is there anything that you really look forward to playing live? Do you think "I can't wait to get this song over 'cos the next song is one I really like"?

Jet: I don't personally, no. I'm just getting off on the fact that we're obviously getting a reaction from people who seem to like what we do.

DR: Over the last 25 years The Stranglers have enjoyed a really settled line up apart from the small hic-up when Hugh left and was replaced by John Ellis and Paul Roberts. You're a hard working band -- in the last 9 years you've released 4 studio albums and gigged almost continuously. You're just in from Keil, you've got 4 CSE shows and then it's off to the Ukraine. Is it a case of "this is Tuesday it must be Cyprus"?

JJ: No it's (laughs), well it is this week. But, no we pace ourselves which is the way to keep the enthusiasm and keep a level of interest. If we were playing every night of the year we would end up going through the motions and being a cabaret band. We pace ourselves, know how much to play and pace ourselves accordingly. This is a busy week, but I think we all prefer an intense short period, going from Germany to Cyprus to the Ukraine in one week. Then we'll have a break for a while then an intense British Tour. Then a European Tour for us will only consist of 4 to 5 weeks, but that's the way after so long to keep body and soul together.

DR: The Cyprus CSE Tour isn't your first you've also been the the Falklands, how was that and what decided you to go?

JJ: I think it all started because we were offered after so many years. They obviously though we weren't so (laughs) dangerous, but also the Army and the services said they wanted a real band. We were asked to go originally to Bosnia, and that went down great. It was really good, mind blowing for us and the people down there really enjoyed it, so that work went off well. Subsequently we were asked to do the Falklands........

Jet: Which we have now done twice......

JJ: Which we have now down twice, and that's been a great education and we've met some wonderful people as a result.

DR: I want to ask you about the time when Elastica used the bass line from "No More Heroes" on their single - what did you think of that? That must have been bizarre, did one member of the band phone another and say, "have you heard Elastica's song, what are they doing ?"

JJ: No it was brought to our notice, we're always the last to know about these things. It was brought to our notice by fans getting in touch with our publishers, and our publishers were already on the case and we expected a long protracted legal case. The publishers said to Elastica's publishers that we thought we had a case and to be fair they put their hands up straight away and said "it's a fair cop guv".

DR: You'd have thought someone would have said something to them in the recording studio wouldn't you.

JJ: (laughing) No, well maybe.....

Jet: (laughing) I don't think we mind, we don't care.

DR: I mean it couldn't have come as a surprise to them, could it?

JJ: (laughing) No, but sometimes you chance it.... they chanced it.

DR: If anyone wants to know more about The Stranglers you have a website "The Rats Lair" at http://www.stranglers.net. Have you got a lot of input into it, it's a very good site.

JJ: It is a good site. We have as much input as we want with it -- we can let them know via our management what's the latest news. There's also the book "No Mercy", which is quite a comprehensive, quite a good read, a racy read, I'd say, of The Stranglers career to date.

DR: So you can still catch The Stranglers tonight at Akrotiri, tomorrow at the Ledra Palace in Nicosia and Dhekelia on Friday. Guys, thanks for coming in and I'm sure you'll get a great response from the forces.

Both: Great, thank you.