Well, they aren't building any statues to Hugh Cornwell in Trowbridge. “The mayor said on TV that it was terrible, what I said,” Cornwell snickers to the Straight, from his home in London, England. The former Stranglers frontman takes the sleepy English village to task for the sheer effrontery of not being New York or Calcutta in “Please Don't Put Me on a Slow Boat to Trowbridge”, the scrappy first track from his eighth solo album, Hooverdam. The fallout from this delicate, not-quite-international incident illustrates that Hugh Cornwell 2010 has surprising clout. Having evolved somewhat from the black-clad bruiser who leched after all the peaches on the beaches back in the late '70s, these days he's something of a grand old man in the U.K., appearing fairly regularly as a pop-culture pundit on radio and television.

Like a certain butter-shilling former Sex Pistol, it's not that unusual for one of the U.K.'s first-generation punks to find a cozy place in the public's affections. Indeed, only a year after “God Save the Queen”, the British public was welcoming punk into its living room, and the Stranglers were just one of countless new bands swarming the breakfast playlists of BBC Radio 1. In contrast, punk was kept firmly underground on the other side of Atlantic. “Well,” he says, “the perception of me is different in North America than it is here, absolutely. Over here I'm just part of the wallpaper because I've been around forever. ‘Oh yeah, he was always on Top of the Pops.' Whereas in North America, the fame has been more elusive.” Admirably enough, this is precisely why Cornwell plans to hit Canada and the States more aggressively in the future, generally planning on a visit every six months or so.

“I have a level playing field in North America,” he says. “I'm not fighting against perception which is what I seem to have been doing for the last 20 years over here. I've been constantly trying to redesign myself so that they know I'm not just a Strangler, I'm not always dressed in black, I've got other things going on, I'm more of a rounded individual.” Cornwell walked from the Stranglers in 1990, “because I didn't feel that it was expressing me very well or accurately.” With Hooverdam—available as a free download from his Web site—he's in full command. The album is a charming collection of rough-hewn pop songs sprinkled with analogue '60s dust at Jack White's favourite studio, Toe Rag. More seasoned fans will recognize his old band's ugly-pretty dynamic—think “Duchess”—in the sludgy psychedelia of “Delightful Nightmare” or the garage-y distortion goosing the otherwise lovely melody of “Beat of My Heart”. They'll also be delighted to hear that Cornwell's live set includes a big chunk of Stranglers hits. And why not? The other guys are still playing them.

“They constantly try to pretend that I never existed,” Cornwell sighs. “Good luck to 'em. And listen, they're doing very well in Europe, and that's fantastic because I get paid. I just look at it positively and think, ‘Well, it's a tribute to me.' They're like my tribute band, so what's wrong with that?”

Georgia Straight, March 2010