Celebrating
the 45th anniversary of its release today is the one-off collaboration
between former Stranglers main man, Hugh Cornwell, and then Captain
Beefheart drummer, Robert Williams, with Nosferatu being released on
November 16th, 1979. Intended as a kind of soundtrack to the classic
1922 silent film of the same name, it's a jagged collection of often
atonal tunes that failed to make much of an impact commercially, but
lingers with Stranglers fans looking for neglected deep cuts from the
band's early history.
This
collaboration began when Cornwell, after a North American Stranglers
tour, attended three consecutive Beefheart shows in San Francisco, in
April 1978. Cornwell and Williams struck up a friendship after the
shows and kept in touch. Later the same year, when Cornwell had a break
in his Stranglers schedule, he contacted Williams just before Christmas
1978 and invited him to record an album. "As far as the motivation to
make the record goes, Nosferatu was pure whimsy," Cornwell said in 2014.
"I mean [Stranglers bassist Jean-Jacques] Burnel had just recorded
Euroman, so I thought, why not have a go?" As the 1922 film Nosferatu
had been a silent movie originally, Cornwell decided that "a good
starting place would be to try to approximate a soundtrack for it."
Robert
Williams was told that it would just be the two of them recording
without a band, and that the songs would be written in the studio.
Williams then booked some of the best recording studios in Los Angeles
and invited his friend, Joe Chiccarelli, along as their recording
engineer. Cornwell flew out to Los Angeles to begin the recording
sessions just after Christmas 1978. With such short notice, they had to
move around from studio to studio every few days, which made the
recording process longer than necessary. Recording from late December
into January 1979, they continued the sessions in March and April after a
two month break due to Cornwell's touring commitments with the
Stranglers. Cornwell has stated that Nosferatu was an "extremely
expensive" album to make, and that it has never made any money. His
record label, United Artists, was unaware that he was recording the
album, until they started getting invoices sent to them from the
recording studios. However, they still paid them all.
Various
guests from the Los Angeles area were invited in to play: woodwind and
keyboard player Ian Underwood from Frank Zappa's the Mothers of
Invention, Devo's Mark and Bob Mothersbaugh, and Williams' guitarist
friend David Walldroop. "Wrong Way Round" features Ian Dury as a
fairground barker (listed as "Duncan Poundcake" on the album credits).
Williams said of the writing and recording process: "Hugh and I made the
songs up in the studio usually starting with the drum track ... Hugh
did not have a demo before starting Nosferatu but he had a few little
riffs on guitar for just a few songs that we both fleshed out. Then we
would bring home cassettes from the sessions to study and come up with
subsequent parts. We spent daylight hours sleeping and worked throughout
the night, very much like vampires."
The
album was released to little fanfare, with poor sales resulting, and
critical response mixed to negative, on the whole. Yet for my own
tastes, I have always felt an attraction to the album's idiosyncratic
& ugly awkwardness. It has a kind of angular, jagged dissonance to
it that is just the right kind of wrong. I love the drumming and the
quality of the production. Overall, it's got a sort of quirkiness that
makes it entirely distinctive when placed in context with the rest of
the Stranglers catalogue from the late '70s and early '80s. It's
definitely its own "thing", owing little to anything that preceded its
release.
