The Stranglers formed in 1974, and they emerged with their debut album Ratticus Norwegicus in 1977 amongst a wave of punk bands. From the beginning until 1990 they were Hugh Cornwell (guitar/vocals), JJ Burnel (bass/vocals), Dave Greenfield (keyboards/vocals) and Jet Black (drums). In 1990 Cornwell left and the band continued with a new singer and a new guitarist.
Golden Brown was one of the tracks on their sixth studio album La Folie (released 9 November 1981). Initially the song was considered a decent album track – nothing more, nothing less. As soon as the album was sent out to press and media, radio DJs across Britain took note of the track and started playing it. The song was also highlighted in album reviews. The song had something unique, and people were taking note.
Drummer Jet Black was quick to take note of the notetaking, so to speak. He had always felt it would be a hit, and was quick to point out what was happening and push for its release as a single. Things moved quickly, and the single appeared two months after the album on 11 January 1982. It was instantly successful.
JJ Burnel remembers those days with a mixture of frustration and vindication in an interview with Reminiscin’: “We were written off by then. There was a new record company at the time that had taken us over because they have swallowed up our previous record company. They said punk was over and we were finished, and then we forced them to release that record. They said it didn’t sound like The Stranglers and that you couldn’t dance to it, etc. They released it before Christmas thinking it would kinda die a death, but it developed its own legs. As a result it won an Ivor Novello award that year.”
The record company people were right about one thing: the song really did not sound like anything the band had done up to that point. They were however wrong about that being a problem. Many bands reinvented themselves as they moved from the 1970s into the 80s, and as time was about to show, The Stranglers did this with more success than many of their contemporaries. This song has an important part to play in that.
How the song came about was as unusual as the song itself. JJ Burnel revealed its surprising origins in an interview with Prog Magazine in June 2020: “I will tell you something about Golden Brown that I’ve never told anyone before. It actually developed out of a prog rock suite. We were recording the ‘La Folie’ album, and Hugh [Cornwall] and I were pissed off because we seemed to be writing all the songs. So we said to Jet [Black] and Dave [Greenfield], “right, you two are going to write a song. We’re off to the pub. Have it written when we get back.” We fecked off to the pub all afternoon. Now, with Dave being a prog rocker and Jet being a jazzer, when we got back they presented us with this six-part piece of music. And we were like, “Fecking hell, we can’t record this.” We went, “don’t like that bit… don’t like that… oh, wait a minute, we could do something with that.” And the part we did like formed the basis for Golden Brown.”
The musical passage in question featured Greenfield experimenting with a synthesizer/harpsichord backing texture. Hugh Cornwell found it inspiring and ended up writing about 10 minutes’ worth of lyrics for it. As the music was shaped and formed into a more concise three-minute opus, the lyrics were cut down to fit the song.
There has been much controversy surrounding the lyrics. The band spent years denying persistent accusations that they were about heroin use and trade, claiming that different listeners will hear different things in the lyrics.
Hugh Cornwell finally admitted to the drug reference in his book The Stranglers Song By Song (2001) when he said, “Golden Brown works on two levels. It’s about heroin and also about a girl.” This girl was Cornwell’s Mediterranean girlfriend at the time – who had golden brown skin. Essentially the lyrics describe how “both provided me with pleasurable times.”
The band had played down the drug angle not for fear of repercussions, but because they didn’t want the song reduced to merely a drug song. They may have known that the drug angle would be the sole media line about the song from there on out. Which, as time has shown, was a valid concern.
The hoopla about the lyrics makes it easy to forget that underneath it all, we also have a musically complex and innovative song with several time signature changes and unusual instrumentation.
It certainly wasn’t typical Punk fare. The song features a 1960s type harpsichord riff with an unusual time signature. The intro (and the parts like it) sound like three bars of 3/4, then one of 4/4, with the rest just straight 3/4 like a waltz.
The main body of the song has a 6/8 feel and is pitched halfway between the keys of E minor and E-flat minor, possibly to accommodate the tuning of the harpsichord. The instrumental introduction, in (a very flat) B minor, is unconventional. The keyboard and harpsichord vamp in 3/4, and in the head every fourth bar is in 4/4. The song revealed a level of musicality coming from the band that few thought they had in them. It managed to cross the difficult divide of pleasing the “pop” fans while also making music aficionados stop and take note.
But what about the punks? No worries. Cornwell had them covered by way of the lyrics. “It wasn’t just punks who liked the song,” he said. “Your grandmothers liked it. People in the street. But what was nice about it is that it’s very subversive. It’s very nice to hear this song about heroin on the most popular show on the radio, you know, with the family entertainment. So in a way it was more Punk than anything else we’d done!”
In hindsight it will seem like an obvious thing for the band to do, with it being so successful, but they had no way of knowing that. They were pushing their boundaries with this song, to such an extent that they weren’t sure how the fans would like it.
The song gave the band major mainstream success on a level they never quite saw again, and it’s easy to think it was topping the charts all over the world – but alas, it didn’t. It came very close in a few countries though, making it to #2 in the UK (failing to beat The Jam’s double A-side Town Called Malice/Precious), #3 in Ireland, #7 in Belgium, #8 in the Netherlands, and #10 in Australia.
Missing out on the top spot in the UK did hurt a bit, to the point that The Stranglers’ record label (EMI) took action. They objected to The Jam’s single being available in both a studio-recorded 7-inch version and a live 12-inch version. They argued that the Jam’s fans were buying both versions of the single, giving it an unfair advantage. Not that such complaints helped.
Hugh Cornwell added, “It would have got to #1, but bigmouth Burnell [bass] decided to tell the press what it was about, and suddenly it was removed from all the playlists. And I said, ‘oh, thank you very much’ you know. I would have waited until it got to number one, and THEN said it! Haha!”
The song was accompanied by a music video, directed by Lindsey Clennell. It depicts the band members both as explorers in Arabia and non-Arab Muslim countries (sequences include images of the Pyramids as well as the explorers studying a map of Egypt) in the 1920s and performers for a fictional “Radio Cairo”.
In addition to the Pyramids, the video is intercut with stock footage of the Mir-i-Arab Madrasah in Bukhara, the Shah Mosque in Isfahan, and Great Sphinx, Feluccas sailing, Bedouins riding and camel racing in the United Arab Emirates. The performance scenes were filmed in the Leighton House Museum in Holland Park, London, which was also used in the filming of the video for “Gold” by Spandau Ballet.
Years later, Cornwall reflected on the song in the TV programme “Top 2000 a go-go”: “It was a lovely period of time, and romantic, and you can get into the romanticism of it. A lot of people get into the romanticism of drug taking because of the Old English poets. You know, Shelley and Coleridge… they were all drug addicts, so people get this romantic line of thinking about art, drugs, romance, poetry… and really it doesn’t really [work that way]. The best poetry comes up when you’re stone cold sober. People who hear the lyrics not knowing what it is about, will pick up on the romance in the lyrics. But really, it’s saying be careful. Heroin is a very dangerous thing so I tried to put that in the lyric, you know.”
In the end, the band were correct when they said listeners will hear different things in the lyrics. The romanticism in the song – no matter what it’s about or referring to – is undeniable, and that means it has become a special song for many couples all over the world. This includes Berit and Kevin – good friends of Mrs. Norselands and myself – who chose this song to dance to at their wedding, refusing to be deterred by the alternating time signatures that makes it a less than straightforward song to dance to. For that bravery, and for showing everybody the feelings and significance that this song truly can embrace, I want to dedicate this article to them.
Facebook Comments