Radio Reaction – have a toke on some golden brown
Golden Brown – The Stranglers
What would you rather during lockdown: a lover or heroin? Well, you can imagine both with “Golden Brown”, an aural Rorschach test from 1981.
The song appears on La Folie, The Stranglers’ sixth studio album, and one that marked a resurgence for the group after a period of duds and commercial flops. BBC Radio 2, having had little to do with punk bands historically, made it single of the week at the time (perhaps in wilful ignorance of its alternative subject matter).
The first hit, though, right between the ears is the harpsichord; what is this baroque instrument doing in a punk song? Who knows, but it seems to work. Then you’re thrown off-kilter by the cockeyed composition of changing time signatures: three bars of 3 beats, followed by one of 4 beats, on top of which the harpsichord is playing in a totally different meter. The tuning sits in a stinky quagmire between E and E flat.
The lyrics, just three short verses, saunter over the top, and the wonderful guitar solo twists and turns like a plume of smoke. Altogether it conjures up a heady, intoxicating mix of key and time and timbre.
The music video too is something of a curio, filmed in London’s Leighton House Museum, an extraordinary building of Middle Eastern influences filled with colourful tile-work and gilded domes and arches. The Stranglers alternate guises between a group of explorer-dilletantes, and a rabble of unkempt tuxedoed musicians who look not to have slept for days (actually, perhaps the latter isn’t dress-up…). Interpolated is footage of the Pyramids and Great Sphinx of Giza, Mir-i-Arab Madrasah in Bukhara, the Shah Mosque in Isfahan, Feluccas sailing and slow-motion camel racing.
The lifeless, doped-up, dead-behind-the-eyes musicians are captivating in their own way, though. The double bass player teetering about, the total blankness of the lead singer, and the maniacal harpsichord operator. There’s the same feeling of morbid fascination as when you see someone, off their head, stumbling about. If this song was about a lover, it sure was a funny relationship.