I bought my first Stranglers record in 1984, when Aural Sculpture came out. Not their greatest effort, but I'd been busily making up for lost time by devouring their previous efforts by way of three C90 tapes full of their first albums taped for me by a helpful school chum. La Folie was on one of these cassettes, and it was matched up with Feline on the other side. Feline, as I recall, was pretty dire - awful electronic drum sounds and a 'mellower' direction. I always have associated La Folie itself with the title track, which is a wistful lament sung in French, (though atmospheric, a long way from 'Bring on the Nubiles'.) As a result, that particular tape got a lot less play than the ones containing their first 4 albums.
As years went on, I slowly and surely bought their early albums on vinyl, mainly from secondhand shops. I've got two copies of Black and White for some reason! Evidently from the sticker on the front, I bought this from one of London's Record & Tape exchanges for £2, which isn't a bad deal at all. So, how does La Folie stand up years after being paired with Feline & consequently given somewhat short shrift? Well, it turns out to be a lot better than I thought. Due to the afformentioned Feline fiasco, I'd always thought that La Folie had a bit of a crummy plastic sound to it, but in reality it sounds like vintage Stranglers. Quite a few stormers on there - 'Let Me Introduce You to the Family' & 'The Man They Love to Hate' stick out, as does 'How to Find True Love and Happiness in the Present Day'. 'Golden Brown' sticks out in a different way - a true classic that everyone knows (though only a minority seem to realise it's by the Stranglers!). Only one dud to my mind - 'Pin-Up'.
Anyway, while this certainly points to the softer direction the band was (temporarily) headed in, it's definitely one to be included as part of their first incarnation, when they were firing on all cylinders.
The Stranglers are one of my alltime favorite New Wave/Punk groups. I dig 'em in a high school and do so now. La Folie was their turn to pop music and I think it's pretty cool. My fav tunes are "Non Stop"[with 60s Question Mark & Mysterians feel], Let Me Introduce You to the Family","The Man They Love to Hate", 'How to Find True Love and Happiness in the Present Day', "Golden Brown" and title track "La Folie" which is on my top 10 Stranglers tunes list. By the way, for very long I thaught this song [La Folie] is some French romantic love song and it was often played on parties when you want a slow dance tune to hold & squeeze a girl, and I was shocked when found out that actually it's a song inspired by Issei Sagawa a Japanese cannibal who killed a Dutch girl in 1981,dismembered and ate her !?! Anyway, Stranglers always got that dark side and La Folie supposed to be a cannibal love song. Cheers!
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