The Stranglers: No More Heroes

IT'S SO HARD to decode the Stranglers. After you've gone through the easy observations about Dave Greenfield's keyboard sound and its relationship to Ray Manzarek, all the obvious stuff one gets from an album cover that features a rat, and the simple revulsion that can be gleaned from songs about sewers and other horrible environs, it's extremely difficult to understand two things about the Stranglers. First, why did their debut album sell almost 200,000 copies in England, and second, what are they really about?