A Multitude of Sins: Golden Brown, The Stranglers and Strange Little Girls [Paperback]

This was one book I was really looking forward to reading this year.
Unfortunately I was left wondering who Hugh Cornwell really was.
And this was his autobiography!

As leader of outrageous former punk protagonists The Stranglers, Hugh was a formidable front man. A stream of quirky hit songs gave the one time most despised band in the world a successful career above and beyond fellow new wavers long-since fallen by the wayside. For me. The Stranglers were the best band in the world - and Hugh's atonal vocals chords were responsible for the hits Peaches, the anthemic No More Heroes and the snarling Nice 'n' Sleazy, as well as anodyne Golden Brown, which reached Number 2 in the UK charts in 1982.

Sixteen years on, (with three years shaved off in the back jacket inner) after a total of ten hit studio albums and over twenty hit singles, Hugh left the band in 1990. It followed a lacklustre live performance that I was (un)fortunate enough to witness at Alexandra Palace in North London. Like Hugh, I had also sussed something was not right on the night. While The Stranglers plodded on sans Hugh, Mr. Cornwell has quietly pursued a lower league solo career. But fourteen years on, evidence of the bitter acrimony existing between the two camps is well documented to this day.

Hugh is a gifted and creative artist. He was always sharp and acerbic, and although he was no hard man, he provided the threatening, the brooding jagged edge to The Stranglers menace. His famed onstage quips were omnipresent from the late 70s until the mid 80s. In my huge Stranglers collection I have a multitude of live recordings smattered with his dry humour and bad jokes. In press interviews he came across as a highly intelligent character keen to explain his weltanschauung to the world.

As an avid record collector of many styles, I bought everything the band ever released, yet Hugh's guitar lines were the cleverest, most angular. His nasal vocal tones are still instantly recognisable today - it is claimed that Golden Brown is being played somewhere in the world at any one moment.

So, as you can see - I relished the chance to read 'A Multitude Of Sins' to find out his life before, during and since The Stranglers.

However, having just put the book down, I must confess that I know even less about the man than I did before.

Which wasn't much in the first place.

There was no evidence of Hugh's personality, only a small peak into his music biz persona. Little wit, no hint of hurt, no insight - nothing that explains what makes this man tick. No tetchiness, no anger, no warmth, only a hint of intelligence and just one joke. And a very, very bad one at that. The back cover spiel hints at the backdrop of drug dependency and in-fighting, but juicy anecdotal snippets are just sanguinely breezed over with all the emotion of a bank statement.

Then suddenly you come across the "CUT TO HERE..." and the "CUT TO THERE..." segments that are evidence of lazy writing. These are minutaie-free, bland, dull recalls of past moments in time, randomly pasted in. The only sin in multitude was the never-ending name-dropping of minor celebrities made my eyes glaze over several times. "I did this with him, or I did that with her, he came over to me at this restaurant, and then I took some of that..."

...Wow!

Fans like me will get hold of it undoubtedly if they haven't already, and it will sell lots. But Stranglers anoraks will not learn anything new here. Only brief overviews. But once you have read it, I would strongly recommend checking out The Stranglers 'No Mercy: The Authorised And Uncensored Biography' by David Buckley (Hodder & Stoughton) - followed by 'Song By Song' by Hugh Cornwell & Jim Drury (Sanctuary).

Somewhere between the three books probably lies the truth.

Perhaps even some of the real Hugh Cornwell. You never know!

Gary

As I read on, this was clearly the case with this book, which follows a rambling structure, jumping about all over the place before finally dribbling to a halt in its closing pages with a series of Hugh's musing and fragmented memories on this, that & the other. As I read through Hugh's (or perhaps I should call him High) interminable boasts of drug taking excess, his constant name dropping and numerous star struck anecdotes (whilst at the same time claiming to eschew celebrity) and his damning with faint praise of his fellow Stranglers - effectively dismissing them as a bunch of underachievers who without his 'genius' would have been nowhere, my opinion of Hugh gradually shrank.

His sense of pompous self importance grows as you read on, with him expressing mock surprise that the rest of the Stranglers carried on after he left and more or less said "close the door after you then" when he told them. A less self centred personality would have seen that they were relieved to have seen the back of him. There are many other examples, such as his laughable assertion that the lack of success of the Meninblack album was down to dark forces afraid that the Stranglers were uncovering hidden knowledge, rather than because the album was a load of old rubbish based on ideas culled from dodgy UFO magazines! Another prime example is his self righteous outrage at being nicked for having a bag stuffed with drugs, including heroin, in his car (he blames unnamed others for giving him the drugs of course) accompanied by cod philosophising about his short experience in the nick (which is littered with Porridge style references to "the screws").

In conclusion, I started off with a high regard for Hugh Cornwell as a prime mover behind one of the great bands of the 70's but thanks to this book ended up despising the guy as a smug, self satisfied, name dropping tosser who I'd cross the street to avoid meeting.

At least he got one thing right. There are no more heroes any more!