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."
Whether the band's record label was aware of this dual meaning is debatable, but even without knowing the lyrical link to heroin, the label didn't ever intend the song being a single.
"We had to insist on it being released. We'd been taken over by EMI and they thought we were awful – and they hated Golden Brown. They said: this song, you can't dance to it, you're finished."
"So they released it just before Christmas and in those days December was just a fucking tsunami of Christmas songs. And they thought, it's weak, it's gonna die, it's gonna drown in the tsunami of Christmas shit… but it didn’t. It developed legs of its own, it became a worldwide hit. So in a sense it became a real threat to the powers that be."
"I'm very proud that it made people reconsider the band," Burnel adds. "A lot of people hated us because we weren't the Sex Pistols or the Clash or the Damned, and they thought we were parvenus and had jumped on a bandwagon. So it was a real significant thing, and I’m so grateful we had that moment."
The Stranglers will embark on their 50th anniversary tour next month.
