The Chameleons - Strange Times, 40 Years On

Released 1 September 1986, Strange Times is still one of the most underrated albums of its decade, and forty years on it has not aged a single day.

By the time The Chameleons signed to Geffen Records, they had already released two records that should have made them stars in their own right: Script of the Bridge in 1983 and What Does Anything Mean? Basically in 1985, both moody, guitar-driven and dense with atmosphere, and neither one broke them past cult status. Regular touring and the persistence of their manager, Tony Fletcher, eventually persuaded David Geffen to sign the band, and the record they made for him, produced by David M. Allen, was the most expansive thing they had done yet: atmospheric, dark, unsettling, built around long, hypnotic tracks like “Caution” and “Soul in Isolation” and the closest thing they ever had to a hit, “Swamp Thing.” Strange Times peaked at number 44 in the UK, their highest chart position ever. Proof, if it was needed, that chart position and lasting influence almost never agree.

It should have been the beginning of something bigger. Instead, it became the end. In 1987, with the band ready to go back into the studio for what would have been their fourth album, Fletcher died suddenly of a heart attack, two days before the sessions were due to start. The band recorded four songs anyway and split apart almost immediately after, worn down by internal tensions that had been building for years. Those four songs surfaced three years later as a tribute EP named after him, Tony Fletcher Walked on Water. Strange Times became, by accident, the closing statement of The Chameleons' original run.

The sleeve is part of why the record has stayed with people the way it has. Every Chameleons cover was designed by the band's own guitarist, Reg Smithies, and Strange Times is no exception: mysterious, dreamlike, slightly unsettling, and completely in tune with what is happening on the record. On the 3LP gatefold edition, the artwork gets even more room to breathe.

Its reputation only grew from there. Noel Gallagher has said the album shaped his own songwriting, admitting in a 2018 post that he had forgotten how much the record meant to him, that he had been listening to it every day and it had blown his mind all over again, and that he can still “hear me in it everywhere.” He is not the only one who owes it something. The Stone Roses' earliest singles carried its fingerprints before they became the band everyone remembers. The Scottish post-punk band Lowlife wore the influence openly in the mid-80s. Slowdive's Neil Halstead has said The Chameleons were “a big influence early on,” right down to a specific guitar trick: two amps run through a stereo delay. Trace the line forward from there and it runs through post-punk revival, shoegaze, goth and what people now call Britpop: Interpol, the Editors, the National, Verve before superstardom and before they were forced to add “The” to their name, Oasis. The list goes on.

This copy is mine. A beautiful gatefold 3xLP, signed by Vox (Mark Burgess) at the merch stand before their gig in Madrid, in June 2025. After he signed the sleeve, I got to talk with him for a few minutes. A proper gent, a proper band, a proper gig.

It was supposed to sound like a beginning. Instead, it became the end. Forty years on, Strange Times is as vital as when it was released.