Ian Brown

Ian Brown first started work on his second album, Golden Greats, Christmas Eve 1998. There’s nothing festive or romantic about that date. It’s just that he’d been locked up in jail for the previous sixty days and it was the first day he could get back to his music.

If it’s true that he had briefly considered becoming a landscape gardener after the demise of The Stone Roses, it’s possible that he reconsidered that career option during the dark days of last year. But, it’s clear with Golden Greats that he’s re-emerged stronger than ever.

If ever there was an artist who could return from the brink it’s Ian Brown. After all, he’d already done it once, imagine how difficult that was. He’d only fronted one of the most important British bands of all time, played to 28,000 delirious fans at Spike Island, united ravers and rock fans alike. A band which, every day, got bigger and bigger, aimed high and nearly made it and gave life to such 90s landmark groups as Oasis, The Verve, The Charlatans and Blur. But then it had took five years to make their second album, there were acrimonious departures, and finally there was the infamous smashing of the Roses myth at the 1996 Reading Festival.

When all that comes to an end you must wonder what life’s all about. You shouldn’t come back from that. But he did. People would go up to him and say “You’re Ian Brown, do something,” until finally he became convinced that he could. He decided to make it on his own and come back with something positive, uplifting. With his own money he bought an eight track studio, got some gear together, taught himself to play guitar, bass, drums, and harmonica, then wrote and recorded a self-financed solo album Unfinished Monkey Business. In January 1998, his debut solo single, ‘My Star’ went top five and the rough-edged, bittersweet album followed suit. UMB embraced lyrical influences that ranged from his hatred of stardom and cocaine to such ambitious topics as British imperialism, situationism and the conspiracy behind space-exploration. There followed a huge press campaign in which Ian talked frankly and openly about such sensitive issues as the demise of the Roses and what he saw as the drug abuse and corruption inherent in the music industry.

By the spring , Ian was reading to re-enter the live arena. With a touring band that featured Aziz Ibrahim on guitar alongside Inder Mathura (percussion), Simon Moore (drums) and Sylvan Richardson (bass), Ian played a 5 date secret club tour followed by impressive appearances at the 1998 Glastonbury festival and V98.

The frank and hectic press schedule continued apace and, in April of 1998 during a Melody Maker singles review, Ian Brown bizarrely found himself accused of homophobia, a charge that, given his stand on gay rights in the past, still upsets him today. Then, in October he was sentenced to 4 months in jail for allegedly making violent threats to a flight attendant. A17-date theatre tour was cancelled and work on the album delayed . “It made me more determined and more focused,” says Ian Brown today. “I took the view that they shouldn’t have sent me to jail in the first place. The state owed me sixty days, so it was my job to try and get those sixty days back.”

The result is that Golden Greats feels like Ian Brown’s real return to the game – forsaking the charm and whimsy of Unfinished Monkey Business for real force, hunger and power. Recorded on twenty-four track at London’s Metropolis Studios, during a sixty day stretch at the start of this year, Golden Greats is, says Brown, “a full-on expansive album.” He’s got that right. For example, you’d be hard pushed to find a better opening track this year than ‘Gettin’ High.’ After a deceptively delicate Oriental intro we’re submerged beneath a humungous metal rock riff lashed to some suitably vicious lyrics about a friend/collaborator too stoned to see the talent in front of him. “Aziz played me this riff,” says Ian, “It was the classic rock ‘n’ roll riff like Free’s ‘All Right Now.’ It’s the first track, I wanted it to sound definitive.” Like the rest of Golden Greats, it’s a track borne of democratic collaboration. You sense that after those final years in the Roses, Ian Brown couldn’t work any other way.

The album was engineered by Tim Wills and programmed by Dave Mc Cracken, both of whom help out on co-writing and playing duties. Along with Ibrahim, other collaborators include Sylvan Richardson Jnr, Inder Mathura, former Fall drummer Simon Wolstencraft and Chapter and Verse’s Anif Cousins. “I was going for a communal feel for the whole album,” explains Brown. “I was thinking about acid house days when any record could be dropped, you’d have the beats always running, maybe a bit of Hendrix, Beatles, Stone Roses in between electronic music. You open this door and you hear it all, clear and sharp, and I’m singing over it.” The point, explains Brown, is to get back to that sense of optimism that came with acid house, that sense of an anything-goes community. You can hear it in the squelchy acid elation of ‘Love Like A Fountain’ – “Let it shower over me/soak me to the bone yeah” – and the unbridled “throw your hands into the air” exhilaration of ‘Dolphins were Monkeys’, a track which also carries on the now familiar ‘King Monkey’ imagery, albeit unconsciously. “I didn’t do that deliberately,” explains Brown, “I was reading a book that said dolphins were mammals who made a conscious decision to returning to the water. I wanted to tell people that. I was trying to make an ecstasy record without ecstasy. I wanted it to feel as natural as possible.”

However, despite the mood of optimism that imbues much of Golden Greats, it can’t help but be influenced by the bad stuff as well. The lyrics on the stark, cello-driven ‘Free My Way’ and the beautifully mournful ‘So Many Soldiers’ were both written during Ian’s time in Strangeways. “I wanted ‘Free My Way’ to have a Victorian workhouse vibe,” says Brown, “jailers listening to a string quartet while people are being sentenced. With ‘So Many Soldiers’ I’m singing about Manchester, the fear that a lot of people have about young gangsters and singing that the good will always overcome.” Similarly, the lyrics set to the staccato electro rap of ‘Set My Baby Free’ – “Hey you ugly people/I want you to set my baby free – were taken from a letter that Ian’s girlfriend sent to him while he was ‘away’.

Overall, however, the mood on Golden Greats is one of uplift. Underneath a particularly filthy insect riff, ‘First World’ is a song that looks to the third world for signs of hope. Alternatively, over the top of ‘Neptune’s mesmerising, narcotic beat, Brown gives us a guided tour round the wonders of the universe through a haunting refrain – “Wake up we’re going places, without ever leaving a trace.” If there is one track where all this anger, optimism and beauty comes together it’s on ‘Babasonicos.’ The lyrics are sung by Ian directly to the magistrate who convicted him yet, the Lalo Schifrin spy soundtrack and the drama in Brown’s voice turns it into something equally dramatic, mesmerising and, at the same time, disturbing. The title comes from the name of the artists who recorded the music – an Argentinian group called Babasonicos. “I wanted to name the track that,” says Brown, “so that when people ask me about it I can tell them about this band. They sent me the music over from Argentina on a CD and it’s beautiful. I just sang on it.”

Or, as he says of the beautifully jagged ‘Golden Gaze’, “It’s not about much. It’s just about wanting people to have a good time.” That unpretentious desire to make a record that makes people happy also extends to the album title. He nearly called it ‘Born A Win’ or ‘Born Wina’ because they’re both anagrams of his name. But he figured that he already had enough people knocking him anyway and that would have been setting himself up for another fall. There was one other idea. Every night, before they left the studio, Ian and the team would say, “Let’s play our greatest hits.” They originally wanted to call it just that, ‘Greatest Hits’, but that would have been just too confusing. So, Golden Greats it was, just like those magical K-Tel albums with the Woolworths price tag that changed your life when you were twelve years old.

Golden Greats. Ten tracks. Forty-five minutes long. Perfect. “I wanted people to be able to sit down and listen to it all in one go,” says Brown, “I look at that first Roses album and I think you can listen to that all in one go. Forty-five minutes is about right for people’s attention span. Plus, you can fit it all on one side of a C90, tape it for your mates.” At last a musician in touch with what makes records great. “I’ve now made as many LPs as I did in the Roses,” says Ian Brown laughing, “I feel like I’ve finally broken free.”

Currently dividing his time between New York and Manchester, in ovember/December Ian Brown plans to take Golden Greats out on the road for a major theatre tour with a new touring band comprising keyboardist Dave McCracken, former Fall drummer, Simon Wolstencraft and percussionist Inder Mathura.

Ian Brown is back. What’s that? The Second Coming? Oh, it’s better than that.