"Golden Brown" is a song by the English rock band the Stranglers, released as a 7-inch single on EMI's Liberty label in 1982. Noted for its distinctive harpsichord instrumentation, it was the second single released from the band's sixth studio album La Folie (1981). The single peaked at No. 2 on the UK Singles Chart, making it the band's highest-charting single in the country.
Composition
The main body of the song has a triple metre waltz rhythm, with beats grouped in threes, but the instrumental parts add an extra beat to create a phrase of thirteen beats. The thirteen beats appear in the sheet music as alternating bars of and , which has also been described as three bars of followed by one bar of . Sheet music of "Golden Brown" on musicnotes.com is published in B-flat minor. The music was adapted from an unused part of "Second Coming", a track which featured on their previous album, The Gospel According to the Meninblack.
According to bassist Jean-Jacques Burnel, the song's atypical style for the group was intended to defy expectations: "The whole thing about that song is it really represented us sticking our fingers up to our detractors".
Lyrics
In his 2001 book The Stranglers Song by Song, Cornwell states: Golden Brown' works on two levels. It's about heroin and also about a girl... both provided me with pleasurable times." David Hamilton, disc jockey on the middle-of-the-road and comparatively conservative BBC Radio 2, made the single his "record of the week". EMI instead blamed the single's failure to reach the top spot on sales of both the studio and live single releases of the Jam's "Town Called Malice", the number one single at the time, being counted together. The song also reached the Top 10 in Ireland, Flanders, the Netherlands, and Australia.
In 1995, Black, Burnel and Greenfield appeared with impressionist Rory Bremner on his satirical Christmas special performing a parody version of the song about future Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who was then Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer.
In a 2012 BBC Radio 2 listener poll of the nation's favourite singles to have peaked at number two, "Golden Brown" ranked fifth.
In January 2014, NME ranked the song at No. 488 on its list of "The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time".
Music video
thumb|200px|Two shots from the music clip of "Golden Brown": the band performing the song in Leighton House and as explorers
The video for "Golden Brown" was directed by Lindsey Clennell. It depicts the band members as explorers in Egypt in the 1920s and performers for a fictional "Radio Cairo".
The video is intercut with stock footage of the Giza pyramid complex, the Mir-i-Arab Madrasah in Bukhara, the Shah Mosque in Isfahan, the Great Sphinx, sailing feluccas, Bedouins riding camels, 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 featured in the video for "Gold" by Spandau Ballet in 1983.
Track listing
Songs, lyrics and music by the Stranglers.