Nosferatu is an album by Hugh Cornwell of the Stranglers and Robert Williams, drummer in Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band. It was released on 16 November 1979 by United Artists.
The album cover features a still from F. W. Murnau's 1922 film of the same name, with the album styled as a soundtrack to the film. Guest musicians on the album include keyboardist Ian Underwood from Frank Zappa's band and guitarist David Walldroop. Mark and Bob Mothersbaugh of the band Devo play on the song "Rhythmic Itch", and "Wrong Way Round" features Ian Dury as a fairground barker (listed as "Duncan Poundcake" on the album credits).
Background
The one-off album collaboration between guitarist and vocalist Hugh Cornwell of the Stranglers and Captain Beefheart drummer Robert Williams began when Cornwell, after a North American Stranglers tour, attended three consecutive Beefheart shows in San Francisco in April 1978. Cornwell and Williams befriended each other after the shows and decided to keep in touch. Later the same year, when Cornwell had a break in his Stranglers schedule, he contacted Williams just before Christmas 1978 and invited him to record an album. "As far as the motivation to make the record goes, Nosferatu was pure whimsy," Cornwell said in 2014. "I mean [Stranglers bassist Jean-Jacques] Burnel had just recorded Euroman, so I thought, why not have a go?" As the 1922 film Nosferatu had been a silent movie originally, Cornwell decided that "a good starting place would be to try to approximate a soundtrack for it,"
Robert Williams was told that it would just be the two of them recording without a band, and that the songs would be written in the studio. Williams then booked some of the best recording studios in Los Angeles and invited his friend Joe Chiccarelli along as their recording engineer. Cornwell flew out to Los Angeles to begin the recording sessions just after Christmas 1978. With such short notice, they had to move around from studio to studio every few days, which made the recording process longer than necessary. In 2014, Williams said of the writing and recording procedure: "Hugh and I made the songs up in the studio usually starting with the drum track ... Hugh did not have a demo before starting Nosferatu but he had a few little riffs on guitar for just a few songs that we both fleshed out. Then we would bring home cassettes from the sessions to study and come up with subsequent parts. We spent daylight hours sleeping and worked throughout the night, very much like vampires."
The album is dedicated to the memory of actor Max Schreck, who played the lead role as the vampire Count Orlok in the 1922 film. The inner sleeve features song lyrics on one side and a lifesize Japanese hannya mask (by K. Kaneko) on the other.
Songs and themes
In a 1979 interview with NME, Cornwell said that all the songs on side one of the album are "portions or episodes" of an imaginary film about Nosferatu. In "Losers in a Lost Land", he's back in his crypt, "pondering his miserable existence."
The album's second side consists mostly of "studies in aspects of perversity," Cornwell stated. "It fascinates me. Perversity is a part of everyone, because all humans are imperfect and those imperfections create perversities."
Critical reception
Ira Robbins of Trouser Press praised the album's lyrics, but disliked its "atonal performances." He felt that "if not for an incongruous cover of Cream's "White Room," there wouldn't be any light relief at all." He concluded that the album "requires more from the listener than it deserves (or returns)." Robert Endeacott, on the other hand, in his 2014 book Peaches: A Chronicle of The Stranglers 1974-1990, called the album "pretty bloody hot and startlingly original."