It turns out that the other godfather of the British New Wave is Jim Morrison. It's like this: lots of these boys are crude alright and most of them are angry with it, but not all of them have that Authentic Working Class Pfazz like, say, The Clash (whose album, by the way, is the best New Wave commodity so far). I mean, there are ex-hippies involved, hoping for better luck this time, and there are public school boys and sixth formers and trainee teachers. There are the Stranglers, straight into the album charts at number 4, an obnoxious lot who hate women and haven't quite made it out of the classroom. Which is where Jim Morrison comes in.

When I went to the States in 1967 the first two bands I saw were the Grateful Dead and the Doors. Both were dreadful. The Dead were scruffy and speedy and hadn't a clue as to how a pop group should either look or behave—they could just as easily have been members of the audience. But the Doors were worse because they yjete so unutterably boring. "Light My Fire" was a huge hit just then and is still one of the finest singles there ever was, but in performance what one hit wonders they were! Until that magic riff started the whole audience was in a gentle doze, and I could understand, later on, why Morrison had to resort to flashing —to see if anyone in Florida still had their eyes open.

The Doors did make some other pretty pop tunes but mostly their claim to fame lies in being the most overrated rock group of all time: that Unique Doors Sound was a limited and rabidly perfected formula and, for poetic insight, a line like "People are strange, when you're a stranger" has about as much to offer as "Love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage .''If there was any justice in the world of rock, not only would it be much more boring, but also the Doors would be confined to a classic track on Lenny Kaye's Nuggets LP.

But rock isn't about justice it's about needs; and the Doors met a need intensely felt—for a punk act that respectable teenagers could call their own. Formally, the Doors had the same sneering incompetence as any good garbage band, but for content they had Morrison's poetry and Manzarek's artful organ runs; the effect was so classy that they just couldn't be another pop group. And the effect rubbed off, which was the joy of it. Doors fans were classy too—their angst was cosmic, their blues weren't just the result of some trivial quarrel with a girlfriend. Nice English teenagers had the same needs (they were best met by Jethro Tull) and we ended up with a genre called Art Rock or, sometimes, Pop With Pretensions.

Originally, the pretensions were technical and musical, the pretensions of ELP and the Moody Blues, and musical art rock is still being played by bands like Genesis. But these days British Art Rock is more a matter of attitude than of skill; there has been a shift from technical to emotional exhibitionism; the genre is dominated by lOcc, Roxy Music and Queen. There are obvious differences between their sounds and concerns (Roxy Music, for example, make good music; Queen don't) but these groups can be described in similar terms: clever, eclectic, cold, decadent. They all make music of bow-ties and sound effects; they all raid the storehouse of rock effects to make their cynical points about the faithlessness of people, the randomness of the world; they're all secondary rather than primary rock sources. And they've all had a bad influence, as the record racks get filled with the products of lesser but glibber art rockets—City Boy,. Deaf School, Metro, Nasty Pop—each with their slick tales of freaks and losers, each with their assured use of every style in the art rock composer's copybook.

Enter the Stranglers.

The theory was that the new> wave was a vulgar rock reaction to the bland and sophisticated easeof ex-vulgar rockers like Rod Stewart and the Who, but the Stranglers represent something else—the art rock reaction to the bland and sophisticated ease of ex-art rockers like Bryan Ferry and Lou Reed. If the other punks' seach for simplicity and attack led to the Stooges, the Stranglers' search for the same qualities led to the Doors, and so, together with the lack of overdubs and electronics and tricks and know-how, we get heavy lyrics and, guess what, those artful organ licks again.

In pop tune terms the results are pretty nifty. At least two Stranglers' numbers—"Hanging Around" and "(Get A) Grip (On Yourself)" are fine additions to the art rock catalogue, But the Stranglers' success as an image and a style and a band is depressing. IV Rattus Norvegicus, their album, is as selfish and self-obsessed (and sexist) a set of songs as you could hope never to have to hear. It lacks the collective joie de vivre of the other punks; its sneers are unalloted with any self-mockery or doubt, its delusions are desperate, its hatred meant. The only time I saw the Stranglers they were supporting Patti Smith and played a singularly unpleasant set to the permanent accompaniment of boos and feminist cat-calls. This probably just proved their point— there's no doubt that the Stranglers are the new wave band who'll get the quickest and biggest sales—but I heard their music as pimple rock, the songs of slighted men gazing in the mirror and dreaming of revenge.