The Stranglers – Golden Brown

A harpsichord line the label did not want

Liberty Records released “Golden Brown” on 11 January 1982. It was the second single from La Folie, the Stranglers album that had come out in November 1981. The song was recorded at The Manor, in Shipton-on-Cherwell, and produced by the band with Steve Churchyard. Hugh Cornwell sings and plays guitar. Dave Greenfield plays the harpsichord figure that carries the record. Jet Black, a drummer with a jazz background, plays lightly around it. Jean-Jacques Burnel is credited as a writer with the other three. Cornwell later said Burnel did not play on the finished take: he could not find a bass part, so he left, and Greenfield put a keyboard bass underneath.

The music did not start as a single. Greenfield kept offering a keyboard idea in a different count from the songs Cornwell and Burnel were building, and they kept telling him to drop it. Cornwell has also described walking in on Greenfield playing the part on its own and deciding it was a song, not a spare section. Most of the tune steps in three. Then a bar steps in four, so the pattern never quite settles. Cornwell wrote the words while Greenfield played, a long draft he then cut down. The label that had taken the band over after punk was supposed to be finished did not want the record. They said it did not sound like the Stranglers and that you could not dance to it. They put it out before Christmas expecting it to die.

It did not die. David Hamilton made it his record of the week on BBC Radio 2. In February 1982 it reached No. 2 in Britain, the band’s highest place. It also made the top 10 in Ireland, the Netherlands, Flanders, and Australia. EMI said it missed No. 1 because sales of The Jam’s “Town Called Malice” counted the studio 7-inch and a live 12-inch together. Cornwell blamed something else: Burnel had told the press the song was about heroin, and some stations pulled it. The song won an Ivor Novello award that year.