STRANGLERS TRIBUTE: Rattus Inheritus

Rattus Inheritus are Stranglers obsessives bringing you the music of the Stranglers, played with passion, aggression and conviction! Classic Stranglers line up, with bass, keys, guitar and drums. Each musician has over 20 years professional, session and live experience. Rattus Inheritus play the music of the Stranglers with stunning power and fidelity, mixing classics wirh more modern deep cuts. The black blood of the MeninBlack flow through theor veins. Apocalyptic music ... 'Great musicians playing their favourite music to die hard fans' DJ Liz Kershaw. 'Great night out, loved hearing the truly great STranglers tracks being played so well' - football legend Stuart Pearce

The band:

Ian – Drums

Drumming for a Stranglers covers band, easy right? Wrong. Anyone with more than a passing knowledge of The Stranglers knows that in addition to some of the best kick arse straight ahead rock classics from any era, The Stranglers back catalogue, and indeed many of their finest moments feature really bizarre, innovative and challenging drumming. Starter for ten? Golden Brown, obvious right? But the iconic waltz time with the 7/8 bars chucked in are a major contributor to what makes that track so great. Jet Black, the oldest of the boys, was steeped in jazz tradition which explains his distinctly left field approach to the material. Things you might notice are the rolling intricacies of the hypnotic drum line to Genetix, from The Raven, the constantly displacing beat on the distinctly un-rocky yet inexorably driving drum part to Shah Shah a Go Go, the nasty insistence of the in yer face Nice 'n' Sleazy and the belligerent groove of Peaches. Things you probably wouldn't notice, unless you are a drummer, are quite how much bass drum there is in Grip, the staccato elements to the wonderful Hanging Around that counter intuitively make the song groove so much and, a real Jet Black trade mark, his tendency to be fluid with the tempo of many of The Stranglers classic tracks. Down In The Sewer speeds up rushing towards its cataclysmic ending descent into the sewer, Dagenham Dave slows down and Longships running into Raven features an abrupt step up in tempo shifting from 3/4 to 4/4. Nuclear Device plays fast and loose with bar length which in itself has become a crowd-pleasing highlight leading to the joyous crowd participation moments of "Bruce" and "Sheila". Then at the end, Jet switches from straight ahead rock to the frenetically fast closing sequence in 6/8 Way down under Australia…etc.

Ask a mediocre drummer to play these tracks and frankly, they'd struggle. So we needed an extremely capable and experienced drummer, so turned to lan, also a major Stranglers fan! From big band, through jazz supremos Weather Report, jazz funk, jazz club (nice!) to blues, he's done it all. Learning The Stranglers back catalogue has been a joy for Ian and his approach has been meticulous, frequently posting a Stranglers classic drum part on his drum part of the week podcast released to his on-line followers.

In an act of punkish rebellion, Ian stormed out of Leeds College of Music, where he was studying percussion because they tried to make him play the piano!

Doc - guitar / vocals

Andy first saw The Stranglers on The Raven Tour 29th October 1979. He was blown away and his life was never the same again. Mean bass player, brooding guitarist, weird keyboard player, scary drummer. Songs dripping with menace and power. Unbelievably cool and dangerously subversive. This was the band for him. Cornwell's guitar playing captivated Andy - angular, sinister and inventive. He became a disciple.

Having played most musical genres over a twenty year period, Andy never completely left the Stranglers behind. He's mastered Cornwell's technique and when a chance meeting occurred at a Cornwell solo gig with Glenn and Owen, who were looking for a guitarist to complete the ultimate Stranglers homage band, the die was cast!

Glenn - bass / vocals

Glenn's Stranglers love story began at 13, when his uncle played him the Rattus Norvegicus album. As a fan and bassist himself he introduced Glenn to JJs unique sound & playing style. Glenn knew then that they were the band for him and the bass was the instrument he would eventually take up. Completely enamoured, he joined SIS and subscribed to Strangled in which he read an interview with JJ & Tony Visconti which induced a pivotal moment, Glenn clearly remembers it was about Karate, something about the combination of playing the Bass and training in martial arts really struck a chord with him as a teenager. It wasn't too long before he had joined a Tae Kwon Do dojo. Obviously like many others, JJ had become Glenn's role model, this culminated when he received the first of many hand written letters from JJ via the SIS, he enclosed a Feline sticker that went on to adorn the scratch plate of his first Fender Precision - a 16th birthday gift. The same year he saw them live for the first time at Sheffield City Hall, a year before Hugh left the band. As a bassist, Glenn was fortunate to have had music lessons, learned sight reading and has been exposed to many bass players with different styles. Having endeavoured to learn all the disciplines in bass playing, Glenn always comes back to his first love, the plectrum. He has a long-standing career in live music, performing in many other bands including The Nutty Boys whom he is very much still involved with. As well as playing in bands Glenn has also written, produced and directed his own films and professional music videos including working with punk veterans, Hung Like Hanratty.

For Glenn; Rattus Inheritus is much more than a band…… it is the realisation of a lifelong dream.

O - keyboards

Nobody knows exactly how many keyboards Owen has. Owen, himself, is somewhat cagey on the subject. As such, he is something of a tinkerer/ hoarder/ discerning seeker of the true Greenfield sound (depending on who you ask). Pretty much everyone knows that it was Greenfield's keyboard wizardry that helped set The Stranglers apart. But follow the boys through their albums and you'll be able to map the technological evolution of organs, keyboards, synthesizers, emulators and beyond. Remember this was the 70's resolving into the 80's. Greenfield freely admitted that his formative influences included Prog Rockers Rick Wakeman and Greg Emerson, and from Hard Rock, Deep Purple's, John Lord. So the early albums are dominated by Hammond sounds. Deep and growling with sinister swells and melodrama.

Even with this limited resource at his disposal, Greenfield was inventive as the various phases of the operatic Down In The Sewer demonstrate, in which Greenfield coaxes distinctly different voices out of the Hammond to deliver the glorious tones adorning the various movements before resolving from minor to major in the final phase whilst featuring two of Greenfield's most engaging and iconic keyboard solos. Relentless arpeggios decorate many classic tracks including No More Heroes and Duchess. But cometh the third and fourth albums, Black and White and Raven, the keyboard palette is distinctly different. Black and White's Nice 'n' Sleazy features one of the most freaked out explosions of Moog driven modulations, glissando's and sweeping filters ever heard in a rock song and all within the space of a masterful and concise pop song. Of course, he could, and did, stretch out, most famously on the boys take on Walk On By, which most lazy reviewers cite as evidence of a Doors influence, completely denied by Greenfield who wasn't familiar with the LA psychedelic darlings. Raven, too, is littered with weirdo tones probably provided by Greenfield's Oppenheim keyboards. Duchess features the classically awkward flat black and yellow keyed, Wasp synthesizer - horrible to play but now lauded as containing many classic synthesizer tones.

So, it's only natural that Owen should be on a quest to find the perfect set up which has got to span this technological evolution from classic Hammond, complete with the bulk and styling of a 1940's sitting room cabinet, through to state of the art synthesizers, capable of reproducing every sound know to humans and aliens across the universe.

The Zenith of O's keyboard odyssey finally arrived when Paul (Wig) McGuigan served up an offer O couldn’t refuse, it was a very exciting moment, he felt like that woman who found the box of black magic chocolates in her bedroom…

An Oppenheimer owned by the legendary Dave!

Owen's mum was a music teacher who forced him to learn the piano. Owen promptly rebelled and lost interest for many years only resuming the dark arts when he realised it was a great way of meeting girls. He has indeed mastered the Greenfield sound but it's very much doubted that his quest to pin down the ultimate Greenfield set is complete.