THE STRANGLERS Peaches The Very Best Of (2002 UK 20-track compilation CD album including classics such as Peaches No More Heroes Nice N Sleazy Golden Brown and Hanging Around picture sleeve)  Of all the first wave punk bands, the gruesomely mercurial Stranglers had the highest disregard for law and order and--as this melody-heavy collection serves to remind us--the highest tally of hits. Peaches--The Very Best Of packs 20 of them ("Hanging Around" was never released as a single but it was a hit for Hugh Cornwell's then girlfriend Hazel O'Connor) into one tin but even then there isn't enough room for either "Go Buddy Go" or "Nice in Nice". Famously short of fuse and occasionally sweary of mouth (at least in the early days) Guildford's self-styled "Meninblack" eventually moved away from the snarling, year-zero tenacity of "Something Better to Change" and "No More Heroes" to plough a sophisticated 1980s adult-rock furrow with the beguiling likes of "Always the Sun", "Skin Deep" and the odd-waltz of "Golden Brown". If anything, the non-chronological running order disproves the "they were punk and then all of a sudden and ever-so-conveniently they weren't anymore" notion which the Stranglers' detractors still persist on carping on about to this day. Things with the Stranglers were never that black and white (except on the band's third album, of course) and to listen to the bikini-ogling quasi-reggae laddishness of "Peaches" or to improve one's command of the French language on the extraordinarily sinister "La Folie" is to experience a band who were creatively flexible and adventurously out-of-step with the times, punk or no punk. Strangely, in a poacher-turned-gamekeeper kind of way, the Stranglers ended up doing charity work for the Metropolitan Police and haven't had a hit in yonks. There's a moral in their somewhere. --Kevin Maidment