Jean-Jacques Burnel – Bass

There cannot be anything less ‘Punk’ that a bass transcription! I have to say, I was 13 in 1976 when Punk appeared in the UK and I HATED it. I was not far into my musical life having only got my first guitar at age 12 but I was already enjoying Prog type bands and Punk was the antithesis of everything I loved (I think that I came to Prog through an interest in classical music that had quietly crept in from somewhere by osmosis). I recognised it was an artistically ‘anti-elitism’ thing but it seemed to me to be ‘pro-stupid’. I came to respect a lot of the ethos behind the Punk sensibility as I got older and it was a politically much more astute idiom than Prog was at the time. I do recall, however, recognising that there was something ‘more’ to ‘The Stranglers’ and have since come to accept the argument that they were, in many ways, the Prog band that never was. Their first album, ‘Rattus Norvegicus’ (1977) was a record that I had a love-hate relationship with. I never owned it but I did have a friend who was a Punk (my little group of teenage chums looked like The Young Ones – I was Neil, he was Vivian) and he exposed me to a lot of Punk and New Wave in spite of myself. I didn’t dislike some of it (but would never have admitted that to him!).

This track, I loved. It’s all about the bass part, isn’t it? ‘Down In The Sewers’! Lot’s of repetition and not much in the way of chops playing but, with JJB, it’s all in the sound.