Videodrone #7: Golden Brown

Videodrone is a weekly feature looking at music videos from the last half century. 

Golden Brown (1982)

The Stranglers are one of those bands that never got their due in the U.S. and I'll certainly admit I still don't know enough about them, other than they made a lot of good music that I need to listen to more. The band got its start in 1974 as the Guildford Stranglers in England, quickly becoming part of the growing pub rock scene. 

As punk emerged, the Stranglers opened for the first British tours of the Ramones and Patti Smith and became part of that scene in the U.K. They had hits with songs like "Peaches" and "But the band, whose members were older and more musically adept than their contemporaries, soon started exploring different sounds. 

In 1982, the band released the single "Golden Brown" off its 1981 album La Folie, which was a concept album about love. The song is very different than anything the band had previously released, a waltz-time ballad written by keyboardist Dave Greenfield and drummer Jet Black, with lyrics by singer-guitarist Hugh Cornwell. It was so different, featuring harpsichord as the primary instrumentation, that the Stranglers' label was hesitant to release it as a single.

"We had to insist on it being released," bassist Jean-Jacques Brunel told Loudersound in 2024. "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.'"

But the song was released during the holiday season, along with a video directed by Lindsey Clennell (who has also directed videos by Elton John, the Jam, Big Country and Whitesnake). The song has a double meaning: Cornwell later said it was about both his Mediterranean girlfriend at the time and his fondness for heroin.

The video features the band members as 1920s-era explorers in Egypt and also musical performers for a fictional Cairo radio station. Unlike Duran Duran's much more popular "Hungry Like the Wolf" video--which was also released in 1982, featured the band members as Indiana Jones-esque adventurers filmed on location in Sri Lanka, and was phenomenally successful in the U.S.--"Golden Brown" used stock footage of various Middle Eastern staples such as the Giza pyramid complex, the Great Sphinx, the Shah Mosque in Isfahan and Bedouins riding camels. 

The single reached #2 on the U.K. Singles chart, and Cornwell later said he thought it would have hit the top spot if Burnel hadn't told the press that it was about heroin, which led radio stations to remove it from their playlists. The song also hit the top 10 in Ireland, the Netherlands and Australia. 

But here in the U.S., the new sensation that was MTV never played the "Golden Brown" video when it first came out. It likely showed up on "120 Minutes" when that show premiered a few years later. The song became better known over here when Guy Ritchie used "Golden Brown" during a fight scene in the 2000 movie Snatch. It has been used in the movie Away We Go and the TV shows Black Mirror, The Umbrella Academy and Trust.

As for the Stranglers, they had some success in the '80s with "Always the Sun" and "Skin Deep." Cornwell left the band in 1990 to pursue a solo career, but the Stranglers continued on with various lineups. Although Greenfield and Black died in the last several years, the group is still touring with Burnel as the last original member.