Hugh Cornwell - A Multitude of Sins - Golden Brown, The Stranglers and Strange Little Girls

Hugh Cornwell

A Multitude of Sins

The Autobiography

Cover

Title Page Hugh Cornwell A Multitude of Sins The Autobiography

Foreword

Prelude

1 Leave Me Alone

2 Rock ‘n’ Roll Part 1

3 Let me tell you about Sweden

4 Rock ‘n’ Roll Part 2

5 Sex

6 Drugs

7 Inside information

8 Making It

9 USA

10 Celebrity

11 Rest of the World

12 Heroes

13 The Other Three

14 Standing Room Only

15 Creativity, Cricket & Cadiz

Hugh Cornwell career flow sheet

Discography

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

PICTURE CREDITS

Copyright

About the Publisher

by Martin Roach

‘Have you tried goat’s milk?’

Hugh Cornwell, it seemed, had tried everything. I’d heard all about him, of course. About The Stranglers, about the drugs, the women, the violence, the songs, the drugs, the prisons, the controversy, the drugs …

And here he was, sitting in my front room, listening to me bleat on about the on-going health problems I suffer following a fabulous but ill-fated canoe trip down the Amazon years ago.

I hadn’t tried goat’s milk, no. Hugh said it was healthy and easy to digest, adding – in between sips from a cup of herbal tea – that it might just be worth a try.

This was just one of many incidents that bemused and yet delighted me while working with Hugh. I’d been asked to edit his life story and must admit to having felt some trepidation when his literary agent first called with the proposal. What? Work with a man who’d served time, taken more drugs than even rock ‘n’ roll’s licentious past would expect and caused more trouble than a smouldering cigarette in a firework factory? Possibly more worrying was the fact that Hugh was going to write the entire opus himself. So, yes, I have to admit to wondering whether Hugh would be up to the challenge.

I knew he would be after reading the very first sentence he e-mailed me … I should have known. After all, his musical quill has inked many songs that are rooted deep into the nation’s psyche. The jump from writing a classic song to an autobiographical book is a strange leap, but it’s one he has managed with finesse. When I did come across areas where I wanted to know more, I asked Hugh some very awkward questions. First, he would ask me why I wanted to know and then he would go away and, without a shred of resentment and always within a few hours, fill my Inbox once again. So, in many ways, Hugh has been the easiest person I’ve ever had to work with.

At the same time, we’ve argued – always with good humour – long into the night over a single word, a twist of grammar or a disputed turn of phrase. On a few occasions, he would not back down. And, on many occasions, he was right.

Some people might wonder if it is really necessary to go into such minute detail. However, I realized very early on in the process that to Hugh every word did matter, because every word represented an experience that counted, every sentence recalled a period in his life that was vital and every single syllable was there for a reason.

Of course, the text he religiously and diligently sent me had every Bacchanalian excess that I’d expected … and then some. However, more surprisingly, the words screaming down the fibre optics from the West Country to Essex were also rich in thought, musings, theories, opinions and ideas. On his countless treks around the world – while we were working together he was often away, but always available – he seemed to be an itinerant life magnet, scouring the globe for new encounters before returning back laden down with more souvenirs for his soul. If your experiences could literally be crammed into a suitcase at the end of each trip, then Hugh Cornwell would have the biggest excess baggage bill in aviation history.

Never having claimed to match rock ‘n’ roll’s finest for debauchery, I have always had to rely on a vicarious duality, experiencing lives that I could never, or would never, see myself. In living Hugh’s life these past months, I’ve had one hell of a ride.

On one occasion, I asked Hugh what on God’s green earth had gone through his mind when, faced with a knife caked in amphetamine held under his nose by a Hell’s Angel, he chose to snort the lot. ‘It just seemed polite,’ he said, raising his eyebrows.

When we finished the final draft of the manuscript, I dragged a cork out of a bottle of red wine and collapsed in front of the television for some mental respite. Channel-hopping through the usual banal Saturday night schedules, I flicked on to BBC 2 and a programme called The Rise of the Celebrity. After about thirty seconds, Hugh’s face loomed large on my old Toshiba, singing ‘No More Heroes’ on Top of the Pops. The archive footage was interspersed with a 2004 interview featuring that angry punk’s latter-day alter ego, the Hugh Cornwell I have come to know. And suddenly, everything made perfect sense.

Martin Roach, Editor, June 2004

PS. The goat’s milk worked.

It occurred to me that it might be an idea to welcome you to this book. Although it’s an autobiography, I’ve tried to avoid a strict chronological order, basically to introduce some elements of surprise. I’ve also tried to keep it pretty much as a stream of consciousness, as that’s the way we think when we’re going about our lives. Events have popped up in my memory in a completely haphazard way, and I’ve tried to convey that while I’ve been writing. I started to write the book in my head, but I first put pen to paper in southern Spain a couple of years ago, when I wrote the opening chapter just to see how it would turn out.

Any Stranglers fan will probably want to cut to the quick, thinking that there can’t be anything worth reading that can remotely compare to that period of my life. However, there was a ‘Before’ and there most definitely is an ‘After’. But if you want to find out about the formation of the band, then the chapter ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Part 2’ is probably what you’re looking for. Chapter 1, ‘Leave me alone’, deals with my leaving the band. ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Part 1’ deals with school, university and my first trip to Sweden. If you want the riots, then go to ‘Rest Of The World’. If you want to hear about how I lost my virginity then go to ‘Sex’. If you want to find out about my band Johnny Sox and bank robberies in Sweden then go to ‘Let me tell you about Sweden’. ‘Drugs’ will tell you how I happened to end up in Pentonville for five weeks. ‘Standing Room Only’ tells you what I’ve been up to recently amongst other things. The other chapter titles speak for themselves.