It was an unexpected hit in early 1982 when it reached number two in the official UK charts. It is interesting to note that the song was not the first choice of single from the album La Folie released the previous year.
The highly conservative Radio Two, listened to by housewives up and down the country, decided to make the record the single of the week. An unprecedented step considering the band was as notorious as The Sex Pistols only a few short years before.
Surely the good and mighty at Radio Two also failed to notice that the song was actually all about the drug heroin. The success of this song commercially is probably the single factor that secured The Stranglers their continuing life in pop mainstream for the remainder of the 1980s.
wikipedia.org dumped 2003-03-17 with terodump