The Stranglers – Always the Sun

October 1986, and a chart that would not move

Epic Records released “Always the Sun” on 6 October 1986. It is the second single from Dreamtime, the Stranglers album that followed on 27 October. Hugh Cornwell sings and plays guitar. Dave Greenfield plays keyboards. Jean-Jacques Burnel plays bass. Jet Black plays drums. All four are credited as writers. The band and Mike Kemp produced it. The album sessions ran in March and April 1986 at ICP in Brussels, and also at Spaceward in Cambridge, Crescent in Bath, and Farmyard in Little Chalfont. The B-side, “Norman Normal,” comes from an earlier pass at the record and was produced by Laurie Latham.

The single came out as a 7-inch (catalogue SOLAR 1), a shaped picture disc, a 12-inch with a longer “Hot Mix,” and a double 7-inch pack. The song asks, in plain lines, who you are supposed to trust: school, a mother, the weatherman, politicians. The answer it keeps is the sun. Cornwell stands on the floor in the video, with the others on small separate stages in a dark room. After the line about a man with a gun, he fires at an Aztec sun calendar and the wheel breaks.

British radio played it. The UK chart still stopped at No. 30. France took it to No. 15, Ireland to No. 16, Australia to No. 21. Cornwell wrote later that he had thought it could be as big as “Golden Brown.” He went to CBS, which owned Epic, for a midweek tip on the chart and came away angry at the company, not at the song. Dreamtime itself reached No. 16 in Britain, the lowest studio album of his years in the band.