A harpsichord waltz in 6/8 time about the joys of heroin use performed by a bunch of aggro toughs from Guilford, The Stranglers’ Golden Brown was, on paper at least, an unlikely international hit single.
Speaking in the latest issue of MOJO, Stranglers bassist JJ Burnel reveals that the band had to force their label to release the song in 1981 and discusses the song’s opiate-inspired creation and the group’s subsequent struggles with heroin addiction.
“We actually forced the label to release it. We had a clause in our contract which could invoke that demand,” Burnel tells MOJO’s James McNair. “They put it out in January expecting it to drown in the New Year tsunami, and when it was a huge hit, they wanted more of the same. We gave them La Folie, a six-minute, very controversial song in French.
Golden Brown’s thinly veiled double meaning has long been rumoured to be about heroin use, something which the band themselves tended to skirt around if asked, comparing the song to a Rorschach test where listeners heard what they wanted to hear.
However, in 2001 singer Hugh Cornwell admitted that the song was about both his Mediterranean girlfriend at the time and his growing fondness for the drug.
Golden Brown works on two levels,” he told Jim Drury in The Stranglers Song By Song. “It’s about heroin and also about a girl... both provided me with pleasurable times.”
“I think Hugh got introduced to heroin by one of The Tubes in Los Angeles,” Burnel tells MOJO. “He was making his [1979 LP] Nosferatu album with Captain Beefheart’s drummer Robert Williams, and I was making my first solo album, Euroman Cometh. Hugh and I discussed heroin use and decided to make a Stranglers album after a whole year of us all taking it.”
The resulting record, The Gospel According To The Meninblack, was a dark, synth-led concept album about alien visitations which resolutely failed to capitalise on the band’s newfound pop success.
“It sounds completely out of it! It wasn’t very commercial, but I think it’s a masterpiece,” Burnel tells MOJO, going on to expand on the group’s growing use of heroin at the time.
“It was Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: let’s take something and see what happens. Jet [Black, drummer] and Dave [Greenfield, keyboards] quit heroin after a week, but me and Hugh continued. We started to have visions. We thought we were the Matrix and the real world was out in space. Jet, who was brought up Irish Catholic, couldn’t stand the whole thing. It reminded him of organised religion.”
Born in Notting Hill to French parents, alongside now leading The Stranglers following Cornwell’s departure in 1990 and the deaths of Black and Greenfield, Burnel is a lifelong karate enthusiast who only stopped competing in tournaments into his 40s. Before joining The Stranglers in 1974 he was about to travel to Japan to earn his black belt when Cornwell and Jet Black convinced him to play bass in the group.
“First rehearsal, I’d done a karate tournament in Kingston during the day, so I turned up with my arm in a sling,” Burnel recalls. “But I got in.”
If I could get an erection, it wouldn’t go down. Five hours later, the girl would be like, ‘Can you bring this to some kind of conclusion?’
JJ Burnel
Burnel kept up martial arts throughout The Stranglers’ career, but heroin addiction and visits to the dojo proved to be incompatible.
“One lovely English summer’s day I woke up about four in the afternoon. I looked in the mirror and there was nothing left of me. I was grey. All the muscle had gone. I’d stopped training. My world had gotten very small and I wasn’t interested in anything,” he remembers.
“Dave turned up, probably wanting to play music or go to the pub. And when he saw the state of me, he very deliberately got me drunk for two days solid, for which I’ll be forever grateful. After that, I realised that I needed to get clean. It had reached the point where I wasn’t even interested in girls. If I could get an erection, it wouldn’t go down. Five, six hours later, the girl would be like, ‘Can you bring this to some kind of conclusion, sir?’”
Hugh Cornwell wasn’t quite so lucky, and after a routine police search outside Hammersmith Broadway station, five separate drug charges saw the singer serve five weeks of an eight-week sentence in HMP Pentonville in 1980.
“They found a whole fucking pharmacy on him while he was driving to London and he ended up in Pentonville,” recalls Burnel. “That was the end of The Stranglers and heroin. It was nothing romantic.”
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“It was violent all the time - we felt that London was ours and it didn’t belong to all those phoney, fabricated punk bands…”
Punch-ups, heroin and Hugh - get the latest issue of MOJO to read the interview with JJ Burnel in full. “I can still kick arse,” he assures James McNair, “I’m not decrepit yet...” More info and to order a copy HERE!
Photo: Michael Putland/Getty