"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) and peaked at No. 2 in the UK Singles Chart, the band's highest ever placing in that chart. It has also been recorded by many other artists. Composition There is disagreement among experts as to which time signatures best represents parts of the song. 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 . The sheet music of "Golden Brown" is published in B-flat minor. The music was largely written by keyboardist Dave Greenfield and drummer Jet Black, with lyrics by singer/guitarist Hugh Cornwell. The basis for the tune came from an unused part of "Second Coming", a track which featured on their previous album. Lyrics In his book The Stranglers Song by Song (2001), Hugh Cornwell states, Golden Brown' works on two levels. It's about heroin and also about a girl... both provided me with pleasurable times." Release and reception Originally featured on the group's album La folie, which was released in November 1981, and later on the US pressings of Feline (1983), "Golden Brown" was released as a single in January 1982, and was accompanied by a music video. It was a top 10 hit around the world. David Hamilton, disc jockey on the comparatively conservative BBC Radio 2, which was a middle-of-the-road (MOR) music radio station at that time, made the single his "record of the week". The single reached No. 2 in the official UK Singles Chart in February 1982, remaining there for two weeks behind double A-sided record "Town Called Malice/Precious" by the Jam. In a 2017 interview for Dutch television station Top 2000 a gogo, Hugh Cornwell says he believes that the song would have got to Number 1 if bassist Jean-Jacques Burnel had not told the press that the song was about heroin, at which point broadcasters removed it from their playlists, prejudicing sales. "I would have waited