Hugh Cornwell can’t believe he’s never been invited to perform in Hong Kong before. Since his angry-young-man days fronting The Stranglers, up until his tirelessly touring eighth decade, he has never performed in the city. “I’ve always wanted to, and I’ve put out feelers, but I’ve never had the opportunity,” he tells Zolima CityMag over Zoom.
Until now. Aged 76, Cornwell performs his debut show in the city on 6 June. When Saturday night at the 150-capacity Fringe Dairy sold out, a second date on the next Sunday was added. “Apparently I’m a bit more popular there than I thought,” the singer, songwriter and guitarist says wryly.
He wants to make one thing clear: this loyalty will be repaid. “I hope you can put this in your piece – there are so many great Stranglers songs that I can play, so the second night is going to be about 80 per cent different from the first night, which is really nice.”
Cornwell has been to Hong Kong once before, to visit a girlfriend in the early 1990s, and he holds a nostalgic memory of a city in the dying days of colonial rule. Said girlfriend “loved the cosmopolitan feel of it,” he remembers. “There’s always people coming and going through, isn’t there? And I guess that’s always going to] be, whether it’s run by China or the UK — they’ll never, they’ll never lose that element.”
Hangin’ around
Cornwell’s live trio has rehearsed around 40 songs for this tour, which next heads to Australia. In untested Hong Kong at least, fans can expect around half of the setlist to be made up of hits recorded by The Stranglers, the band he co-led from its formation in 1974, recording 10 albums and co-authoring hits like “Peaches,” “No More Heroes” and “Golden Brown” before suddenly quitting in 1990. The band’s other lead singer and bassist Jean-Jacques Burnel has kept the brand alive ever since, touring with a completely new line up, following the death of all three other heyday-era members. “I couldn’t do it, anyway — but good luck,” says Cornwell of his bandmate. “I couldn’t still be going out under the name with a bunch of other people. It’d be like if I went out as Hugh Cornwell and I wasn’t in the band, it’d be a bit awkward, wouldn’t it?”
The last time he crossed paths with the sole surviving Strangler was a quarter of a century ago, and Cornwell shows no desire to bury the hatchet. “I mean, we were polite and civil with each other, it was in a public place and that was that,” he remembers, before quoting Muhammed Ali: “‘Different strokes for different folks.’ Listen, the world is a big enough place, and both he and I are gifted enough musicians to be able to find an audience for whatever we want to do.”
For the record, when this writer interviewed Burnel in 2009, he had this to say: “In retrospect I’m glad he left, it gave us a new lease of life — we were in danger of getting stale. What I do regret is the kind of rewriting of history that Hugh has done over the years.”
Looking forward
Since quitting The Stranglers, Cornwell has released 10 solo albums, as well as collaborating with punk-poet John Cooper Clarke on 2016’s joint-credited This Time It’s Personal. There’s evident excitement in his voice when Cornwell describes his next project, entitled Succubus.
“There’s a band called Incubus,” he notes. “An incubus is the dreamlike manifestation of a man who seduces the woman dreamer — and so a succubus is the opposite. The word came about from priests who obviously were in a state of inertia sexually, but they couldn’t keep them from dreaming about sex. And so succubus is the female entity, the ghost that appears to them in their dreams and seduces them.”
Wait a second — does this mean a 76-year-old is writing a sex-rock album? “Well, not quite,” he replies. “I mean, there’s a title song where the lyrics speak about the priest not being able to get any sleep because every night she comes and haunts him, you know. So that’s quite an interesting little set of lyrics.”
Interesting — some might say troubling — lyrics regarding the fairer gender are nothing new for students of Cornwell’s oeuvre. He took the lead vocal on “Peaches,” widely understood to be about observing more than fresh fruit when taking a summer stroll on the beach. That top 10 UK hit came from the band’s 1977 debut Rattus Norvegicus, which opens with “Sometimes,” another one sung by Cornwell that describes domestic abuse in most troubling terms, opening with the line “Someday I’m going to smack your face,” and featuring the refrain “Beat you honey till you drop.” These aren’t the only moments that make the band’s widely heralded masterpiece an uncomfortable listen in 2026 — something this writer has grappled with personally.
“It wasn’t acceptable, really,” admits Cornwell, who no longer performs “Sometimes” live. “But then that’s what happens when you’re, you know, 23, 25 years old and you’re hot blooded. You think you can do anything, you know, that’s the environment in which those songs came about.”
These days, Cornwell has cleaned up his act and curbed that macho testosterone. The biggest difference between touring now and then? “Well, there are no groupies anymore,” he replies. “They’ve been gone a long time ago. They ceased to exist in the noughties, so now you’re really doing it for the love of it. Back in the day, there was that added bonus to the prospects of doing a tour. But these days it’s purely for the love of playing the music.”
Without those value-added enticements to keep him going, Cornwell’s enthusiasm for the stage seems undiminished. Despite looking down his 77th birthday later this summer, he still clocks up to 100 live gigs a year. It seems likely the paramedics may have to pry that prized 1978 Fender Telecaster — his road companion of five decades and counting — from his cold hands. “I’ll go, until I can’t do it anymore, for whatever reason,” he says matter of factly. “Maybe I’ll lose my voice. Maybe I’ll lose control of my hands. Maybe my health won’t be good. You know — these are the things that would stop me.
“I couldn’t really do it if I lost my voice, now, could I?”
Hugh Cornwell performs at The Fringe Dairy, Central on 6–7 June 2026; tickets for the second night available here.