Giants van de Stranglers beluisteren

On 18 August 1979, The Stranglers supported The Who at Wembley Stadium, as part of a bill that also featured AC/DC and Nils Lofgren.

Thirty-three years on from this fracas, on the evidence of Giants it’s difficult to imagine anyone viewing The Stranglers as having ever been a punk band at all, let alone of a kind that could whip up its audience to the kind of levels sufficient to cause a scrap on a football field. That said, and as Elvis Costello once noted, the best groups to emerge in the initial wave of English punk could not wait to escape the straitjacket of the form. In this pursuit, The Stranglers performed more convincingly than most.

Longstanding fans of the band will no doubt be able to immediately fall in line with Giants’ odd and unique groove. But for the uninitiated, the overall sound seems crude, even amateurish: the drumming seems rudimentary, the production clumsy and blunt; worse yet, vocalist Baz Warne occasionally sounds like Mark Knopfler. Give this album a day or two, though, and its 10 songs begin to slip into context.

Mirror hier.