To almost everyone but Jet Black, the Stranglers were one of the most ferocious of all punk bands with a reputation to rival the infamy of the Sex Pistols and the Clash.
The Stranglers drummer and founder disagreed. “We were never a punk band,” he insisted. “We could play our instruments, that’s the difference. Punk was a flash in the pan; here today, gone tomorrow. We were the real thing.”
Certainly the Stranglers endured long after most of their rivals had faded away and in a career that spanned more than 40 years the band scored 23 Top 40 singles and 17 entries in the albums chart.
Despite Black’s protestations, the Stranglers’ early posturing was pure punk and he played his part in creating the band’s tough, aggressive persona. His bandmates Hugh Cornwell on vocals and guitar, bassist Jean-Jacques Burnel and keyboard player Dave Greenfield (obituary, May 6, 2020), called him “The Hoover”. The nickname didn’t come from his fondness for housework and his vaguely menacing aura drove the message home.
A string of Top Ten hits with risqué and sometimes crude lyrics such as Peaches, which was banned by radio for using the word “clitoris”, and Nice ’n’ Sleazy reinforced the Stranglers’ image as transgressive iconoclasts.
Yet Black had a point in his dislike for the “P” word for beneath the carefully cultivated yobbish veneer lurked a band with serious musical aspirations and whose songs had a sophistication that transcended the primitive three-chord thrash of so many of the punk hordes. As punk faded and gave way to “new wave”, the Stranglers emerged as sophisticated master pop craftsmen on radio-friendly hits such as Strange Little Girl, European Female and, most notably of all, the baroque-sounding Golden Brown, which featured a harpsichord and won the band an Ivor Novello award. George Melly, who sang on the track Old Codger on their 1978 album Black and White, called them “punk’s dada surrealists”. Later came a concept album about religion and extra-terrestrials, and synthesizers were added to the sound.
Whether Black liked it or not, he earned his spurs as “the oldest punk rocker in town” for by the time the Stranglers scored their first Top Ten hit in 1977 he was already in his 40th year. Punk’s target audience was half his age, largely made up of spotty teenagers who had rejected the prog-rock pretensions favoured by their older brothers and sisters in favour of something more basic and visceral.
Without Black, the Stranglers would never have existed and it was his funding that got the group off the ground. Prior to the band’s formation, he had been a successful businessman who owned an off-licence in Guildford, where he brewed his own beer and sold home brewing equipment. Called The Jackpot, it became the Stranglers’ HQ. He also operated a fleet of ice cream vans which he sold when the band started, although he kept one which served as the Stranglers’ transport to gigs for several years.
“We had a special way of arranging the speakers and equipment so they’d all fit in,” he recalled.
Band members lay awkwardly on top of the gear but it was too uncomfortable for sleep. Driving home from a gig at the other end of the country, on more than one occasion Black parked the van on a grass verge and the band slept in a nearby field. One morning, the group awoke to the sound of a lawnmower. They had slept on a cricket pitch and were disturbed by the groundsman’s preparation for the next match.
Early gigs were not always well received. Booked to play at a Young Conservatives dance, Black recalled that the Stranglers managed to empty a hall of 300 people before they had finished their first song. Things picked up when they supported the Ramones on the New York band’s first visit to Britain in 1976 and as the punk phenomenon exploded, notoriety began to follow the Stranglers wherever they went.
There was a fist fight with members of the Clash and the Sex Pistols in a north London club and a journalist who had given them a bad review was “sorted out” with a beating. Their “punk and disorderly” flair for controversy boiled over in 1980 when the group spent a week in a French jail for inciting a riot at a concert in Nice, where they left a trail of destruction. They were eventually fined the equivalent of £10,000 but Black judged that it had been worth it. “We laughed all the way to the bank. Before that, we were unknown in Europe. From then on, we played to packed houses,” he said.
They were arrested again in Australia for swearing on prime-time television and thrown out of Sweden after a running battle with a local gang who attempted to take them hostage in their dressing room. The Stranglers responded by making petrol bombs and lobbing them at their assailants.
They were expelled from Sweden a second time after Black got into a fight with staff at the band’s hotel. “I kicked up a fracas because I couldn’t get served any food and they called the police, who turned up with machineguns to escort us on to the next plane,” he recalled.
On another occasion a hotel night porter who refused to serve them more drinks was locked in a broom cupboard, where he was found the following morning by the receptionist.
Black was unapologetic about such behaviour. “We’ve always had to respond to circumstances and you’ve got to defend yourself,” he said.
Over the years the band mellowed and when Cornwell left in 1990 it was Black who persuaded his colleagues to carry on. Despite being diagnosed with a heart condition in 2007 that caused him to miss several gigs, he continued touring with the Stranglers until 2015 when ill health eventually caused his retirement at the age of 77.
He is survived by his wife Ava and his two children Charlotte and Anthony. From his home in north Wales, he continued to support his former bandmates from the sidelines, telling them, “Don’t stop! Don’t get sloppy!” They called him their “talisman”.
Jet Black was born Brian John Duffy in 1938 in Ilford, Essex. His father was a schoolteacher and as a child he took piano lessons, an experience he likened to “being in a prison and forced to sew mailbags”.
Sickly with chronic asthma, he was sent to board at a Catholic prep school in Broadstairs on the ground that the sea air would do him good. There he switched to violin lessons, which also soon fell by the wayside.
He later described his education as a “disaster” which he claimed had left him “almost illiterate’’, although in truth in adulthood he was erudite and well informed with a wide hinterland of interests. By his early teens he had discovered jazz, bought a second-hand drum kit and was soon playing at weddings and in local pubs. On leaving school in 1953 he signed on for a seven-year apprenticeship as a joiner and cabinet-maker, a trade he abandoned as soon as he was qualified in favour of drifting through a variety of odd jobs.
By the mid-1960s he had acquired his first ice cream van and there was no time to pursue his musical ambitions.
When he bought a new drum kit in the early 1970s and began answering small ads in Melody Maker, he had not wielded a drum stick in a decade.
By 1974 he had hooked up with Cornwell, whose band Johnny Sox was falling apart. Black invited the guitarist to stay at the off-licence and the pair set about reconstructing the band as the Guildford Stranglers, as they were initially known.
What persuaded him to wind up a successful business and risk his capital in the uncertain enterprise of starting a band he was never fully able to articulate. It was simply something that he felt he had to do regardless of the consequences, which included the end of his marriage to his wife Helena. According to Cornwell, the final straw that resulted in her walking out was the noise of the band rehearsing in the family home.
As they slogged around the circuit of pubs and college gigs, the Stranglers were turned down by no fewer than 24 record companies. They were eventually signed by United Artists in 1977, punk’s annus mirabilis, as label executives rushed to jump on a rapidly growing bandwagon which they had initially tried so hard to resist.
Black didn’t write the Stranglers’ songs and nor did he sing them, but he was in many ways the band’s heartbeat. “He was a force of nature and an inspiration,” said Burnel, who continues to lead the band as its only original remaining member. “The Stranglers would not have been if it wasn’t for him.”
Jet Black, drummer, was born on August 26, 1938. He died after a long illness on December 6, 2022, aged 84

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/jet- ... -tm6s0qf2v