When former Stranglers frontman Hugh Cornwell takes the stage at The Crowbar on June 14, he returns to a city where a rock gig once ended in a police raid and blood on the floor.
Older punks will remember the infamous two-night stand at the Queen’s Hotel on Creek Street in March 1979, when the Task Force—the blunt instrument of Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen—stormed the venue under draconian illegal assembly laws.
The second night remains part of Brisbane’s musical folklore. After Cornwell was struck by a beer glass, the band trashed their gear and walked off just 35 minutes into the set, fleeing across the border into New South Wales ahead of police.
That climate of systemic corruption and heavy-handed policing fed the venom behind their 1979 single Nuclear Device (The Wizard of Aus).
Today, the Queen’s Hotel is long gone, replaced by the glass and steel of the Riverside Centre—a familiar story in a city that rarely hesitates to erase its past. It was a time when, under Joh, bulldozers moved in under cover of night to level heritage venues like Cloudland.
Cornwell’s return, then, feels less like a reunion than a reminder—of what happens when power decides the public interest is best served by concrete and steel.
That instinct hasn’t disappeared. This year, Queensland’s LNP government overrode 150-year-old public trust protections to fast-track the Games stadium at Victoria Park.
Cornwell, long dubbed the “Poet Laureate of Punk” and a former biochemist with a clinician’s eye for recurring patterns, sees the parallels immediately.
“History repeats, doesn’t it? I can’t believe there is a plan to bulldoze Victoria Park for a stadium,” he said. “Surely some of your sports stars have spoken out—Queensland cricket players, someone in the public eye?”
To maintain his creative edge, Cornwell has adopted a stark media diet: he no longer listens to other music.
“I’m a creator. I’m not a listener,” he said. “I need to clear the mental bandwidth and stay focused while I write for my upcoming album, Succubus.”
That same stripped-back logic shapes his gear. He remains steadfastly loyal to his Fender Telecaster.
“A Stratocaster quadruples the sound combinations; that’s too confusing,” he said. “I’ve only got two hands, two legs, and one brain.”
For his Valley show, fans can expect a masterclass in that singular approach. Touring in a raw trio format, Cornwell will revisit early Stranglers material in its most elemental form.
“Jet, John and myself worked as a trio for a long time before a fourth player came,” he said, promising bare-bones renditions of “absolute scorchers” like Hanging Around.
Yet Cornwell remains characteristically nonchalant about the “punk” label—a journalistic shorthand that lumped The Stranglers into the mid- to late-’70s scene while underselling their musical range, and one they quickly outlived as punk’s initial fury faded.
“The press even called Elvis Costello a punk, yet you couldn’t find someone further away from that tag,” he said.
“We embraced the fact that we held the world’s attention for a brief moment. Who cares what they called us. We got the chance to make our mark in musical history.”
Whether dissecting cinema on his Mr DeMille podcast, reflecting on his legacy, or drawing unlikely parallels between cricket and chaos, Cornwell’s ethos remains unchanged—dry, self-assured, and faintly defiant. It’s captured neatly by the Virgo T-shirt he still wears: “I may be wrong, but I’m not.”
The fire that once put him on a collision course with Queensland’s police state hasn’t dimmed so much as sharpened with age.
“I don’t mind being busy—touring, being creative—because I get enormous pleasure from what I do,” he said.
“I’m extremely fortunate, and I thank the Lord for that.”
