"Moments Of Madness": Hugh Cornwell’s new album

If Hugh Cornwell’s solo career has some­times looked like the stuff of cold, hard prag­matism — “I’ve never listened to anything The Stranglers have done since I left them,” he said in 2019 — it’s worth remembering that he ceded his 25 per cent share in the band’s moniker vol­untarily. Live performance-wise, that’s undoubtedly meant fewer bums on seats for The Stranglers’ hit-writer in chief, but perhaps Cornwell was playing a longer, cannier game. Why quibble over brand­ing, after all, when your former band gives your jewel-encrusted back catalogue a nightly polish, thus bolstering its earnings and profile.

On 2018's Monster this wily old campaigner flagged starry touchstones including Evel Knievel and Hedy Lamarr, but here Cornwell’s focus is more earthbound. “I’m coming out of the wilderness/Tired of chopping wood/" he growls, still game. A wiry, modern-day survival­ist, seemingly subsisting on spare chunks of garage punk, instinct and bile, he has, as with Monster, made another solo record near single­handedly. You don’t imagine he sweats about his process much, either. Capture a vivid, emphatic performance, overdub sparingly, balance the faders, master it and get it out there. When the tunes are this good, that’s really all there is to it.

Whether grappling with the dispiriting ubiq­uity of tattoos (Red Rose), extolling friends' culinary skills to a Bo Diddley beat (Lasagna) or remembering some of those lost to him (When I Was A Young Man), these missives have gnarly immediacy, nary a syllable wasted. Pleasing, too, that there’s more than a hint of Strange Little Girl-like foreboding about Looking For You, which builds tension via hooky, initially unac­companied bass and shivery, Robby Krieger/ John McGeoch-esque arpeggios.

Wearing long-standing influences such as Lou Reed and The Doors on its sleeve — and featuring Cornwell on all instruments save for the programmed-but-natural-sounding drums and the dub reggae title track’s harmonica shards —Moments Of Madness is reflective but never sentimental, love songs still not Cornwell’s bag. No great surprise, then, that his late former bandmate Dave Greenfield receives no discernible adieu here (though Cornwell did pay heartfelt tribute online when Greenfield died in 2020, calling him “the difference between The Stranglers and every other band’’).

Cornwell’s still doing things his way, and with often striking results. Punk’s Poet Laureate? He has extant rivals for that title, but Beware Of The Doll, a kind of Chris Isaak-goes- film-noir crooner with whistling and ghostly backing vocals, is undeniably potent. Moments Of Madness finds Cornwell flourishing, not just enduring, and you find yourself admiring his focused, steady forward trot. Unlike so many former singers of storied bands, he’s patently unencumbered by his past.