13 Oct 2026
He’ll undoubtedly hate the comparison, but there’s definitely something of the Billy Mack about former Stranglers frontman Hugh Cornwell; although it’s the dry sense of humour with a generous slug of sarcasm, rather than any tendency to wear skintight leather like Bill Nighy’s aging Love Actually rock icon.
An initial request for clarification about Never Say Goodbye, the show coming to Harpenden’s Eric Morecambe Centre billed as his ‘Final Solo Acoustic Tour’, met with a typically acerbic response.
“Yeah, it is what it is, Matt. It is what it says it is. It’s the final acoustic tour. Acoustic meaning me with an acoustic guitar and my voice. You got it? Sorry, I thought it was clear because it was in English.
“So many people aren’t getting it. They’re going, ‘But does that mean you’re not performing anymore?’ I said, ‘Can’t you read English?’ Maybe it’s so unbelievable that people are just in shock?”
But despite that somewhat critical introduction, it’s hard not to warm to Hugh, arguably one of the UK’s greatest living songwriters, as not only is he genuinely funny, but his delivery reminds us that one of punk’s premier performers definitely still has some bite.
He explains why he’s calling time on the one-man-and-a-guitar gig: “It’s about 15 years since I did my last acoustic tour, and it takes a lot out of you, which is something people don’t quite realise unless they play guitar.
“There’s a big difference between getting a sound out of an acoustic guitar and getting a sound out of an electric guitar. With electric, you just plug it into an amplifier and pluck the string, with an acoustic it really depends on the physicality – how much sound you get out of it depends on how hard you hit it.
“So it’s quite physically demanding doing a two hour show where you’ve got to pound the shit out of the box, and I’m not getting any younger. I also much more enjoy playing with other people on stage because you’ve got a connection, whereas when you’re by yourself it does set up this antagonism between you and the audience, which puts you on the defensive a bit.”
Does he feel he builds on that rather confrontational relationship by offering himself as a sacrificial lamb to an audience Q&A at the end of the show? “No that’s going to be fun. I’ve never shirked away from answering questions and that’s just a way to make it more interesting you know?
“Not that I’m going to be bored, because I’ve picked songs that I like playing acoustically because they’re fun to play. Some are more interesting than others, Peaches isn’t very interesting as an acoustic number because nothing happens, so I might as well read a poem, so that’s why I’m not doing it.
“I’ve looked across the Stranglers’ catalogue and my solo catalogue to make it as enjoyable as possible, and I’ve managed to find a couple of new old ones – so to speak – that work.
“I never thought Dead Loss Angeles from the [Stranglers] album The Raven would work acoustically, but it does and I love playing it. So who knows, Never Say Goodbye right, maybe it won’t be, but my feeling before I go into this is that I’m sort of done with acoustic shows.
“Another thing that makes me uncomfortable is that as soon as you see someone with a guitar alone on stage, like Ed Sheeran, you immediately think singer-songwriter, and I don’t like the implications of that. I don’t want to be a singer-songwriter because I feel I’m more than that, it’s a bit limiting.”
Unlike many artists who break away from the band that first brought them fame, refusing to play any of their songs to avoid looking backwards, Hugh has now fully embraced his Stranglers era, including much of the group’s material on his set lists (although this acceptance wasn’t always the case during the early years of his solo career).
“They are my songs, so I don’t want to disown them, just because I’m not in the band anymore,” he explains.
“But I think I’ve embraced it a bit too much, actually, because people tend to dismiss the fact that I haven’t played with them for over 30 years and still consider me one of the band, which is totally wrong and doesn’t do me any favours at all.
“So maybe I should play less, maybe I should try and ignore the old catalogue and pretend The Stranglers don’t exist anymore? But then we’re in a modern world where Golden Brown has been rediscovered and reinvented, so it would be very difficult to do that, especially as it has been very financially helpful to me for it to be that popular!”
Hugh’s obviously got no intention of abandoning his Stranglers roots, especially with his next studio album Succubus coming out a few months after the 50th anniversary of their first LP Rattus Norvegicus next year.
“Talk about trying to get away from it and not being able to! Who knows, I might even do a whole set of Stranglers at a festival if they pay me enough money… If there’s a time to celebrate then it’s next year. I can’t imagine another 50 years going by and still being out there doing it, or being above ground actually!”
(For the uninitiated, The Stranglers’ back catalogue includes such seminal classics as No More Heroes, Duchess, Strange Little Girl, Hanging Around, Always The Sun and Something Better Change. Well worth checking out on your favourite streaming service…)
Hugh continues waxing lyrical about their hits: “It’s a good catalogue of songs. It’s one of the best catalogue of songs ever written. [Music producer] Pete Waterman of Stock Aiken Waterman compared The Stranglers to The Beatles.”
The music mogul actually told The Guardian newspaper that “there were two great British pop bands: The Beatles and The Stranglers”, which is high praise indeed.
“It’s a great catalogue,” he continues, “Long may it last, and may many people continue to enjoy listening to it and discovering it if they didn’t know it before.”
Does he listen to any contemporary music?
“No, I don’t have the time or the inclination. I remember about five or six years ago thinking, ‘I haven’t listened to any music for a long time, so maybe I should try and listen to some’. I went to a cabinet of CDs and started looking through them, but I couldn’t decide what to listen to. An hour went by and I still hadn’t made a decision, so I thought, ‘Well that’s a waste of time, I was better off before’. So who needs to listen to music?
“I’m always writing or rehearsing or playing songs or thinking about new ones. What happens nowadays is a tune comes into my head and I suddenly realise it’s one of my old songs, so I steer myself away from new music because what’s the point? I’m entertaining myself, and that’s all I’ve been doing for the last 50 years, and quite by coincidence, a few other people have enjoyed it as well.”
It’s this droll sardonism which is reflected in many of his songs: “Really when you’re writing a song, painting a painting or writing a book or something, it should be as close a portrait of yourself as it is of what you’re trying to capture. I can’t think of anyone who is not true to themselves when they’re doing something artistic, you can’t help it. I can’t imagine trying to do it duplicitously. It would be counterproductive, I think.”
Away from his musical work, Hugh has also written six books, including autobiographical works and a selection of novels, which he agrees was a natural progression from writing songs.
“I’ve always liked words; what you can do with them and the power of them. I’d really like to write a movie, and a movie writer once told me that the best way to get into screenwriting is to write a book, so I’ve been trying to do that ever since.”
Perhaps foolishly, I said it was a shock to learn that he also wrote books: “That should have been a surprise, not a shock. A shock sounds like something unpleasant.”
Apologies, it was a pleasant surprise, but that aside, what is the inspiration for his fiction work?
“When I’m writing, I’m always trying to emulate the people whose work I admire. I thought, God I really like a good thriller, so my first novel was a thriller, and for the next one I wanted to find out how I felt about religion, so I wrote a book about a thinker. I really like a good western, and they’re sort of out of fashion, so I’ve just written a noir western, set in 1870 America.”
His devil-may-care attitude to writing books is reflected in his approach to songs, as he often goes into the studio with unfinished material to work through.
“Yeah, that’s a bit of a gamble, isn’t it? It’s precarious, it’s a bit of a rollercoaster, but it’s good fun.
“I went into the studio with a vague idea for the title track for Succubus, and after the first day I came out and listened to what we’d done. I thought, ‘What am I going to make out of this? Jesus Christ, where’s this going?’ It took about six months to finish it, whereas another song was done and dusted in two days. It doesn’t mean it’s any worse or any better, that’s just what happens.”
As we wind up our conversation, he elaborates on the themes of the new album: “A succubus is a woman who appears in your dreams and seduces you. The opposite version is an incubus, the men that appear in women’s dreams. There’s nothing you can do about it really, they just appear.
“I love the word, and I thought it would conjure up a very interesting, mysterious and curious thing that people might be inquisitive about. So obviously the title song is about that subject, but I don’t know how much of the rest of it relates.
“There’s a couple of songs about women that I’ve had relationships with that have been good and bad in there as well. There’s some contemplation about getting close to the end of your life, some memories, a bit of different things, really. It’s been an interesting journey, it really has.
“But I don’t really see it as a combined thing, I just think of things in isolation because each one is an experience I’ve had, I don’t really look back and think about it all together.”
Hugh is coming to the Eric Morecambe Centre on November 20. Tickets are available here.
