On February 13, 1982, after six weeks on the UK's national singles chart, Golden Brown, the second single from The Stranglers' sixth studio album La Folie, climbed to number 2, the highest chart-placing that the Guildford punk band would ever achieve. Not that Golden Brown, with its waltz rhythms and harpsichord-heavy instrumentation sounded like anyone's idea of a punk song. Which, as bassist J-J Burnel acknowledges in a new interview, was entirely the point.
"The whole thing about that song is it really represented us sticking our fingers up to our detractors," he tells Q's Dominic Utton.
Explaining the meaning of the song in his book The Stranglers Song By Song, former Stranglers' frontman Hugh Cornwell revealed: "Golden Brown works on two levels. It's about heroin and also about a girl [his girlfriend at the time]. Essentially the lyrics describe how both provided me with pleasurable times."
