Songfacts®:

• This was released as the lead single from Anglo-Swedish indie rock band Razorlight's debut album Up All Night.
• The rhythm and guitar riff was heavily influenced by the Cure's "10.15 Saturday Night" from their 1979 debut album Three Imaginary Boys.
• The song is about the London-based based DJ and party girl Mairead Nash, with whom frontman Johnny Borrell had a brief relationship. Nash has been the inspiration for several other songs, including The Von Bondies' "Mairead" and Graham Coxon's "No Good Time."
  
  "She was part of our gang," Borrell explained to The Guardian. "It was us, the Libertines, and Mairead. Once I had written 'I know a girl with a golden touch. She's got enough. She's got too much,' I thought, 'Boom! There's the song.'"
• Johnny Borrell wrote "Golden Touch" during a particularly focused period in his life. He was living above a Nigerian clothes shop called La Chi Chi, where his sparse setup consisted of a bed, a record player, a desk, and a fridge stocked with beer. "I was of the opinion that if you want to be a songwriter, you have to spend every waking hour writing. I was totally focused," Borrell explained.
  
  His approach was simple yet dedicated. "Most of my favorite songs are just three chords. If I just play three chords for eight hours, hopefully, a good song will come out."
  
  After hours of playing A, G#m, and C#m, he landed on the first line: "I know a man with the golden hand. You better get him. If you can." From there, the rest of the song began to take shape.
• Guitarist Björn Ågren recalled their rehearsal sessions in east London, near the Leyton ice rink. "I was the only one with a regular job, selling jeans at Diesel, so we had to wait for me to finish work before starting. Rehearsals were exciting because Johnny would often show up with a new song. When he first played Golden Touch, I told him, 'The verse is absolutely brilliant, but the chorus doesn't lift.' The next rehearsal, he came back with the chorus, and I thought, 'That's killer now.'"
• Ågren also reflected on his contribution to the song: "I'd just learned about chord inversions, which allow you to stay in the same frequency range, making the music blend better with other instruments. The pre-chorus to Golden Touch is a great example - two chords repeat while I play further up the neck each time. When I saw the sheet music for the first Razorlight album, I laughed at how simple my parts looked. I thought, 'A five-year-old could play this!'"