Well, the virus has claimed yet another stalwart soul, so as Undertaker In Chief it's my duty to eulogize the dearly departed.
Today's martyr is one of those cats that most people don't know by name, but who shaped the sound and direction of one of our age's greatest groups.
He was in that one band for 45 years -- not easy to accomplish -- and appears on all their albums.
They only ever had one chart hit -- one of the greatest songs ever made about heroin -- and he wrote it.
His keyboards -- at once vaguely cheesy and deeply sinister -- shaped their sound arguably as much as their guitar-stroking leader out front did.
When our hero passed the other day, the leader said the keyboards were the X Factor that distinguished them from all the other groups of the time. He was right.
I guess now that Dave Greenfield is gone, we can forget about a proper Stranglers reunion.
To memorialize him, I have extracted the audio from the pre-broadcast tape of their episode of Rockpalast from German TV in 1983.
This dates from their Feline tour, for many their peak, and can finally circulate from the best source.
The Stranglers
Rockpalast
Markthalle
Hamburg, Germany
2.20.1983
01 Aural Sculpture Manifesto
02 Nuclear Device (The Wizard of Aus)
03 Toiler On the Sea
04 Ships That Pass In the Night
05 It's a Small World
06 Just Like Nothing On Earth
07 No More Heroes
08 Who Wants the World?
09 Never Say Goodbye
10 Baroque Bordello
11 Golden Brown
12 Princess of the Streets
13 Midnight Summer Dream
14 European Female
15 Tramp
16 The Raven
17 Duchess
18 London Lady
19 Bring On the Nubiles (Cocktail Version)
20 Genetix
Total time: 1:26:54
disc break goes after Track 10
Hugh Cornwell - vocals, percussion & guitars
Jean-Jacques Burnel - bass & vocals
Jet Black - drums & percussion
Dave Greenfield - keyboards & vocals
extracted 48k audio of an HD mkv file of the digitized pre-broadcast tape
tracked and converted to CD audio 16/44 by EN, May 2020
458 MB FLAC/May 2020 archive link
Another legendary figure has passed this morning -- from natural causes -- somehow as I was already prepping something for an anniversary tomorrow that now becomes yet another eulogy.
One funeral at a time, I say!
Today we remember Dave Greenfield... gone too soon from the dreadful plague but not soon to be forgotten in these pages.--J.
3.29.1949 - 5.3.2020