ON THIS DAY IN 1981 - A REAL CANNIBAL MURDER INSPIRED THE ALBUM'S SIX-MINUTE FRENCH FINALE

ON THIS DAY IN 1981 — A REAL CANNIBAL MURDER INSPIRED THE ALBUM’S SIX-MINUTE FRENCH FINALE 🗓️

When The Stranglers released La folie on November 9, 1981, the album’s most disturbing inspiration was waiting at the very end. Its closing title track, sung entirely in French and running just over six minutes, drew on a murder case that was unfolding while the record was being made. 🎸

During the 1981 recording sessions, bassist and singer Jean-Jacques Burnel was following newspaper reports about Issei Sagawa. In Paris that June, Sagawa murdered and cannibalized Dutch woman Renée Hartevelt. 📰

Burnel later recalled that the reports emerged while the band was in the studio. As more details became known, a friend showed him confiscated photographs from a police reconstruction. Burnel then wrote the story into “La Folie,” using French and describing it in deliberately indirect terms. 🇫🇷

That grim inspiration fit the wider idea behind the album. The Stranglers described La folie as an examination of love in many forms: not only romantic love, but devotion, fixation and obsession. Burnel called Sagawa’s crime the album’s ultimate example of obsession.

For listeners who did not understand the language, the title track could pass as an atmospheric, enigmatic finale. Translate the words, however, and the real narrative becomes much clearer. That contrast—elegant music carrying a horrifying contemporary story—gave the album one of its most unsettling moments. 🎧

The song later followed “Golden Brown” as the album’s third and final single, but its deepest impact remains in its original position: closing La folie with beauty, dread and a story taken from the headlines. 🖤

Some finales resolve an album. This one leaves the door open to the darkness.

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