http://www.state.ie/32347-features/states-office-stereo-the-80s-edition
The Stranglers – Golden Brown _ Chosen by Dara Higgins
Cher Loyd is number one and the kids riot. Popular culture is further diminished by the callous science of the hit record. Everyone is told that they should like this chaff week after week on soulless, vampirical tv. We’re told that she, and all the others in a long line of vacuous, mono-celled, shiny fleshed imbeciles plucked from well deserved obscurity, are “stars”. We’re given a package, so scrubbed that the sheen has gone. We can’t see ourselves reflected in this over-produced, auto-tuned, overloud excreta. We can’t see ourselves because humans did not make this music. Smug, asexual cashregisters-for-mouths shit-bots did.
It was very different in the eighties. There was no information superhighway. There was Supertramp and Steve Heighway, and that’s about it. Real music had no choice but to attempt the treacherous terrain of the “traditional route” in order to get their product (we used to call them songs) out there. You know: practice, write songs, do gigs, get signed, record music. Record good music, or bad, depending on your oeuvre. Get it on the radio and cross your fingers. Back in the eighties, anything was possible, and Golden Brown is my go to track to remind me that real songs, and real humans, could and can connect with the charts. A paean to heroin and/or sex performed by reprobates, not unfamiliar with the odd riot themselves, on an obsolete instrument, the harpsichord, and without a discernable chorus got to number 2! (Real eighties fans know that number 2 was always a lot cooler than number 1. Number 1 is for Rod Stewart, number 2 is for the Pistols.) Golden Brown, with it’s louche and dishevelled video, an effortless cool a legion of marketing gonks couldn’t replicate, is full of hubris, grubbiness, resignation, Hugh Cornwall’s wonderfully monotonous drawl invokes the so-so highs and rapturous lows of being a human. It’s pretty much everything the modern, text message and shit-bot decided charts isn’t.
