Stranger from another planet welcome to our hole.
A love letter to the lyrics of (Get a) Grip (On Yourself) by The Stranglers
The lyrics to (Get a) Grip (On Yourself) are bracketed between a trilling keyboard and a thundering bass guitar. The former is reminiscent of a Grade 8 piano scale exercise. The latter is more like an 8 magnitude Richter Scale earth movement.
The Stranglers are a percussive band. You can feel the bass as much as hear it. To listen to them loud is like stepping down into the engine room of a tramp steamer. It is like Philip Hoare’s description of being echo-located at close quarters by a sperm whale. It is musical CPR.
All of which calls to mind the B Side to Two Tribes by Frankie Goes To Hollywood.
Eh?
Bear with me. It (said B side) includes an interview with the band, set to music, called One February Friday.
The chat is a mixed bag of scally banter about sex, gangs, fame and music. But, most pertinently, when asked whether they consider themselves musicians, guitarist Brian ‘Nasher’ Nash says:
We’re the hammer that knocks the nail in.
As a sentence it is God’s gift to the Scouse accent.
But as a sentiment it is more apposite to The Stranglers than Frankie.
The combination of Jet Black (drums) and Jean-Jacques Burnel (playing bass guitar as a lead instrument) adds up to one mighty hammer. The kind of hammer that would make Thor himself a tad jealous. I pity the nail that gets knocked in by them.
Here, for instance, is Something Better Change, which is a nailed on (and hammered down) candidate for one of the best song openings of all time.
You won’t find that “ugh!” sound, fourteen seconds in, listed on any of the lyrics websites. Big mistake. It is not a word as such, but it conveys more emotion and meaning than most sentences. It is hammer and nail rolled into one.
The Stranglers were fond of guttural utterances, most notably in Peaches (which reminds me of this section of The Right Profile by The Clash), but such musical throat clearing is conspicuous by its absence from (Get a) Grip (On Yourself).
Grip (for short) was The Stranglers’ first single, released in 1977.
But I didn’t get into the song or the band until the early 80's. As such, The Stranglers, and Grip in particular, signify the halcyon period of my life that was bracketed between carefree youth and becoming a grown-up — old enough for the definition of fun to be expanding along all sorts of interesting dimensions, but still young enough for the idea of consequences not to compute.
My friends and I were listening to The Stranglers at the apogee of life’s roller coaster, enjoying that moment of weightlessness before the descent and the G force and the A Levels and the career ladder and the negative equity and the bread winning and the mouths to feed.
Now I find from week to week the sentence sticking fast
Turn the corner, rub my eyes and hope the world will last
Stranger from another planet welcome to our hole
Just strap on your guitar and we’ll play some rock ‘n’ roll
Retrospectively, the stranger from another planet was adulthood and we gladly, stupidly invited the vampire of responsibility into our lives. We’d have been better advised to rub our eyes and make the most of that world while it lasted.
(Maybe Grip was that better advice.)
But the money’s no good
Just get a grip on yourself
Maybe The Stranglers had a deeper message than we gave them credit for.
Money’s no good. There is more to life than being a wage slave.
Just get a grip on your self (two words). Get a grip on your soul. Understand who you really are, follow your own dreams, not the herd, and be true to your identity.
And you should know
(But we didn’t know. We had no idea.)
(Even when the wisdom was being hammered home by relentless bass.)
‘Get a grip,’ back then, was a patronising, teenage put-down. But, in the sense that The Stranglers meant it, we were no more going to get a grip on ourselves, or our selves, than we were going to take an oath of celibacy.
Didn’t have the money round to buy a Morry Thou
Been around and seen a lot to shake me anyhow
Begged and borrowed sometimes, I admit I even stole
The worse crime that I ever did was playing rock ‘n’ roll.
But the money’s no good
Just get a grip on your self
But the money’s no good
Just get a grip on your self
We played this to death in 1982/83. A-Levels and university were a year away. We were blissfully free of commitment. And we were blissfully ignorant of how special that was. I’m tempted to say ‘If only we’d known,’ but to have appreciated the momentousness of the moment in the moment would have been to increase the pressure to make the most of it. I’m actually glad that I didn’t know then what I know now. It would have spoiled it.
Grip was our salad days anthem.
Suffering convictions on a two-way stretch inside
The air in here is pretty thin, I think I’ll go outside
Committed for insanity and crimes against the soul
The worst crime that I ever did was play some rock ‘n’ roll.
We didn’t think too hard about the lyrics at the time. We just bathed in the anarchy.
We missed the good advice that The Stranglers had hidden in full view.
Convictions can be suffered as much as stuck to if you choose the wrong ones.
Adulthood is a two way stretch if your approach is wrong.
Don’t do the crimes against your soul if you can’t do the time (which is also known as the rest of your life.)
Is this hideous over-analysis now? (Damned if I do.)
Or was it hideous under-analysis back then? (Damned because I didn’t.)
Looking back, those were musically indifferent times. Side A of an early 80's mixtape might have looked like this:
Down Under — Men At Work
Almost With You — The Church
Tin Soldiers — Stiff Little Fingers
Smash It Up — The Damned
Teenage Kicks — The Undertones
Heat Of The Moment — Asia
Romeo & Juliet — Dire Straits
Radio Gaga — Queen
Doctor Doctor — UFO
Down In The Tube Station At Midnight — The Jam
All Night Long — Lionel Richie
Owner Of A Lonely Heart — Yes
The Trees — Rush
Aside from some notable exceptions the music of the early 80's was a tall dwarf competition.
(The Stranglers were notable.)
(And exceptional.)
(They still are.)
What Grip means to me now is just a nostalgic phantom version of what it meant back then. Although, paradoxically, maybe I understand it better and appreciate it more these days.
Nonetheless, the force is strong with this song. It draws upon an inexhaustible source of John Lydon anger-energy. Listening to it is like sticking a knitting needle into an electrical socket, the jolt reminding you that the worst crime you ever did was to grow up.
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