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“I’m clutching my teddy bear” — How The Stranglers lost it, found God and rewrote the Bible…

Duncan Poundcake
7 min readJun 11, 2020

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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’…

Who Wants The World Tour 2/7/1980 — Rome

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…

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Duncan Poundcake
Duncan Poundcake

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