From punk rock provocateur to solo artist, author and cricket obsessive, Hugh Cornwell has never been one to follow convention. Ahead of his Never Say Goodbye – Final Solo Acoustic Tour, which comes to Bath this November, the former Stranglers frontman talks to Melissa Blease about music, reinvention and the strange ol’ business of being happy.
I invented a great cricket game for cricket nerds like me the other day: think up a list of eleven active international Test cricketers with surnames that begin with the letter B. I was on a bike ride and it took me about 45 minutes, but you can just about do it!”
No, honestly, I really can’t – I know nothing about cricket, and therefore I’m completely stumped. I believe I can be excused, though, for not even coming up with the name Ian Botham until at least an hour after I’d been presented with the cricket challenge because I was pondering a stumper of an entirely different kind: how did my conversation with one of the most iconic, legendary, pioneering frontmen of the punk rock era, today celebrating a career that honours a five-decade foothold on the rock’n’roll/cultural cliff face, turn to… making up a cricket game while riding a bike?
But talking to Hugh Cornwell is, perhaps, the ultimate masterclass in learning to expect – and accept – the unexpected.
Since he departed The Stranglers in 1990 after 16 years of massive success with the band, Hugh has worked as a solo artist and consistently toured both nationally and internationally. He’s recorded 10 studio albums (and has a new one, Succubus, coming out next year), released 11 live albums and been involved in a handful of fascinating collaborative projects with fellow artistes including John Cooper Clarke. He’s acted on stage opposite Bob Hoskins and Stephen Rea, he pours his deep passion for cinema into his Mr DeMille FM podcast which has hosted superstar guests including Debbie Harry, Sir David Puttnam and Brian Eno, and he’s written six books including three novels, an autobiography… and an account of the time he spent in prison for drug possession.
But alongside – and, perhaps, despite? – all that, he describes cricket as one of his greatest passions… and, for decades, has made time to do 45 minutes of yoga and Alexander Technique every morning (“which means I’ve got to get up about an hour before I want to do anything else,” he says).
Hugh has so much going on that there’s a lot to take in before we even begin to talk about why we’re, erm, talking today, prior to the start of an outing that’s rather pessimistically billed as his Never Say Goodbye – Final Solo Acoustic Tour, which pitstops at Komedia Bath on Monday 23 November.
“I already had a bit of an interesting history before I got into the rock’n’roll game,” says Hugh, speaking from his home in Corsham, where he’s lived for more than 40 years. “I was into biochemistry, and fascinated by it. But I wasn’t very good at it! It’s all very well being interested in and liking something, but in order to be a success you’ve got to work hard creating the manifestation of your interests… and I just wasn’t that diligent in the laboratory!”
But how did a fledgling rock’n’roll star find himself in a laboratory in the first place?
“When I was growing up, parental approval and guidance was a lot more in evidence than it is today,” Hugh recalls. “At school, you couldn’t do both science and art subjects; you either did one or the other, and my parents pushed me down the science route. It wasn’t until I’d done my degree at Bristol University and went to Sweden to do a PhD that it dawned upon me that I wasn’t really where I should be. When I discovered playing electric guitar, it was as though I’d rolled a dice and couldn’t go back.”
To a generation of people who grew up with the results of the sound of that dice rolling acting as a backdrop to their early adulthood (Golden Brown; Peaches; No More Heroes – there’s today’s earworms sorted for you), we can only be thankful for Hugh’s lack of laboratory lure.
We were all just picked up in the tornado and the resulting furore around punk, and we all just embraced it.
Could it be argued, though, that back in the mid- to late-1970s, the incoming punk rock scene was easier for a career-flitting youngster to gain a foothold in than today’s music industry might be?
“The environment of making music these days has changed beyond recognition and there are pros and cons that come with that – nothing totally positively better, and nothing totally positively worse,” says Hugh. “But most of the musicians and songwriters who were involved in, or benefitted from, the original punk ‘scene’ didn’t have a clue what they were aiming to do; we were all just picked up in the tornado and the resulting furore around punk, and we all just embraced it. But I’ve always been ambitious. My inspiration came from the music I was hearing at the time; some of it was good, but some was so bad that I thought, I’m sure that, if I made an effort, I could be a little bit better. That’s always been the same mantra for me down the years, and I’m glad that I’ve still got that curiosity to see what can be done.” Which brings us on to…
“It’s been 10 years since I last did a solo acoustic tour so I thought, well let’s see if I can do it again!” says Hugh, of his Final Solo Acoustic Tour (which I predict probably won’t be a ‘final’ at all.) “It’s a stimulus for me to raise my game again. Playing solo takes a lot of physical effort – you’ve got to really bang that guitar to get a sound out of it, whereas with an electric guitar you’re just, like, playing a big machine that makes all the noise for you. And there are certain aspects of going solo that are unique, and impromptu – and you don’t get that when you’re playing with other people.”
And you certainly don’t usually get the extra-added bonus that comes with Hugh’s forthcoming show either: an up-close-and-personal, spontaneous insight into the fascinating man behind the music.
“I like making a connection with the audience, so why not throw in a Q&A?” he says. “I’m not going to be just staying on stage for the whole show; I’m going to go out and about in the audience, a bit like Newsnight or Question Time, and people can ask anything they like and I’ll try and give them an honest answer!”
Like the raw, punchy guitar riffs that define Hugh’s guitar-playing style, I can already predict that Hugh’s responses to any given question will be sharp, unexpected and memorable.
Hugh has enjoyed a career after The Stranglers that’s now more than twice as long as the time he spent as the impactful frontman of one of the UK punk scene’s most highly acclaimed and popular bands, and today enjoys Godfather of Alternative Music status alongside fellow genre-defying artistes such as Lou Reed, Nick Cave, Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits. Okay, we’re hardly on upbeat, ‘party people’ territory here, so I have to ask… Hugh Cornwell: are you a happy man?
“I try to be, but the basis of happiness is not being too optimistic because then you get the satisfaction of the outcome of having a lower threshold,” he says, albeit in a decidedly upbeat tone. “If you start putting too high expectations on anything that you do or any relationship you have, you’re probably going to be heading for a very depressing experience, so you’ve got to manage your expectations. It’s a survival technique, and our in-built sense of survival is almost like our sixth sense. And anyway, life is a grey area, really; nothing’s black and white. I like heavy fog because when you’re walking through it you don’t quite know where you’re going, and you have to work it out. Sometimes the going gets steeper, sometimes you trip over, sometimes it gets easier, sometimes it goes downhill, sometimes you get lucky. So to me, life – and the pursuit of happiness – is a bit like fog.”
Sometimes a tune comes into my head and I’m singing along to it and I think what is that? And it turns out it’s one of my songs!
Okay, so let’s take a different route to the ‘happy’ question: when Hugh isn’t navigating his way through that fog, what – apart from making up cricket games while riding his bike – keeps him buoyant? “Cinema and international cricket are my greatest sources of pleasure!” he says. “I don’t listen to any music though; I create music for the listener. Sometimes a tune comes into my head and I’m singing along to it and I think what is that? And it turns out it’s one of my songs! So basically, I entertain myself with my career.”
And making up cricket games. And doing yoga. And keeping us entertained; Rattus Norvegicus, ad infinitum.
Hugh Cornwell, Never Say Goodbye – Final Solo Acoustic Tour.
Komedia, Monday 23 November, 7.30 pm
For all event details and to book tickets, visit: komediabath.co.uk