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“I’m clutching my teddy bear” — How The Stranglers lost it, found God and rewrote the Bible…
There are two knowing quips about The Stranglers on the internet:
· ‘The Stranglers aren’t a band, they are a point of view’
· ‘God loves the Stranglers’
Which, if you really got The Stranglers and their worldview, you would understand. Even God…
‘God loves’…was a particularly interesting quip, because in 1980, the band knocked on God’s door with a whole list of questions and wrote a riposte to the Bible. The be-musingly titled:
‘The Gospel According to the Men In Black’…
This 12-month heroin fuelled search for the meaning of life, became to be known as their ‘Annus Horribilis’ and was a text book litany of — if it could go wrong, it went wrong.
Legend has it, that it was Jet Black who stumbled across the MIB, having read about them in a ‘Flying Saucer Review’ — January 1978. Their first musical outing appeared on 1979’s ‘The Raven’ album with the song: ‘We are The Men In Black’ an interesting tune, not exactly a dance floor filler and sung in…