Ian Brown
Over the past 10 years,
Ian George Brown has lived what might at the risk of understatement be termed an eventful rock'n'roll life. The son of a carpenter, Ian Brown has always managed to divide
music-lovers into devout sceptics or firm believers.
In Scotland, we keep the faith. Four years after Ian Brown's last, less-than-happy performance in Glasgow, as well as last year's sudden last-minute cancellation of what would have been his most recent gig, enough devotees remain to ensure that he can stage two
sell-out shows at Barrowland the week after next in support of his second solo album, Golden Greats.
But let's start by looking at Ian Brown's first band, the Stone Roses. They spun gorgeous gauze-thin melodies while dryly evincing a cocky, devil-may-care attitude and simultaneously keeping the press at arm's length. They were moody, morose, mysterious, magnificent. Along with the Happy Mondays, the Roses put Manchester at the centre of the map of British popular culture at the end of the eighties.
Moreover, Ian Brown's off-hand stage demeanour - his shambling, cheeky-monkey swagger and simian pout - directly inspired another iconic Mancunian vocalist, one
Liam Gallagher.
In the eyes of the faithful, the first Stone Roses' album is a work which eclipses anything by the Beatles in the list of all-time greats. On the other hand, if you're not a believer, then the Stone Roses are simply derivative: a bunch of sixties-retro merchants whose Merseybeat-tinged jingle-jangle provided the blueprint for another Gallagher bloke, Liam's big brother, Noel. The Roses also avoided playing the media question-and-answer game, their detractors likewise reckon, because they had little or nothing to say.
This certainly seemed to be the gist of a scandalised Bob Geldof's disbelieving argument when the Stone Roses' debut LP was rated higher than many an old unlistened-to predictable fave by Jo Whiley's panel of informed pop pundits in C4's original Music of the Millennium poll last year.
Of course, Bob's of a different generational stripe to Ian Brown altogether. The former Boomtown Rat earned his greatest and most lasting fame by going out and doing positive, practical stuff to help others less fortunate than himself via Live Aid, all the while exhorting us to do the same.
In contrast, Ian Brown's rock'n'roll immortality has been a result of him not doing anything at all, on occasion,
or by doing things with a
sublime and wilful indifference to the consequences.
Because a full five years passed - with ever-wilder rumours and increasing expectation - before the Roses released their second, frankly-not-very-good album in 1994. The following year, the Roses played a series of gigs which became notorious for Brown's indifferent approach to staying in tune.
Indeed, when the Stone Roses made their final appearance at Barrowland, in 1995, I have only painful memories of what had been a hotly anticipated event. Principally, I recall Ian Brown that night, clad in an orange acrylic Jimmy-wig thrown to him by one of the adoring throng, roaring his way through one of the Roses' more delicately plangent masterpieces of adolescent yearning, Waterfall.
His temporary headgear gave him a yobbish air which matched his inelegant vocalising, and it was with a heaviness of heart that I had to write these words in a review in The Herald: ''Last night Ian Brown sang in a costermonger's hectoring tones, having forsaken the fey uncertainty of his original vocal style. He's become the latest graduate of the Shaun Ryder Memorial School of Flat Mancunian Atonality.''
This sad state of affairs became more evident during the Stone Roses' now-notorious appearance at the Reading Festival in September, 1996. This precipitated the Roses' acrimonious disintegration the following month. Without exception, every reviewer from the metropolitan music press slated the waywardness of Brown's live singing abilities, criticism with which he subsequently agreed.
''Everything I've read about that gig is right,'' he said later. ''The band was smokin', but the singer let them down, definitely.''
Towards the middle of last year, in the wake of the release of his first solo album, Unfinished Monkey Business, Brown let himself down rather badly by becoming involved in a mid-air fracas with a British Airways stewardess on a flight from Paris to Manchester. He was arrested when the plane landed and charged with threatening behaviour.
The case came to court amid a climate of public outrage over various other incidences of so-called air rage. Lurid newspaper reports of the prosecution's allegations had Brown threatening to cut the stewardess's hands off, and then angrily pounding his fists on the door to the plane's cockpit as it came in to land.
He was found guilty and sentenced to four months in jail, eventually serving 60 days in Manchester's Strangeways prison. A 17-date British tour - including a date at Barrowland - was cancelled.
Released from jail shortly before Christmas, Brown began work on Golden Greats on Christmas Eve. The product of a spell of recording with a Biblical span of 40 days and 40 nights, the album is a convincing leap forward, revealing the 36-year-old Brown to be a mature and masterly songwriter
and singer.
For there are moments when Golden Greats evokes Led Zeppelin at their most darkly powerful and riffmongously metaltastic. Not that the album is ever anything less than uplifting, but there are other occasions when it would
seem to be the edgy soundtrack to a latterday version of that epic of paranoia Performance.
Golden Greats has got baroque'n'roll bits. It's got Latinate bits. More particularly, in the form of studio wizards and
co-songwriters Tim Wills and Dave McCracken, Brown seems to have found highly complementary musical partners. Both of them seem set to overshadow the memory of his previous collaborator in the Stone Roses, guitarist John Squire, latterly the focus of the Seahorses.
''I've now made as many LPs as I did in the Stone Roses,'' Brown has observed. ''I feel like I've finally broken free.'' Brown made a fleeting return to Scotland last month, staging a semi-secret mid-afternoon charity fund-raiser to 300 fans in Edinburgh's Liquid Rooms. Accompanied by a drummer and backing tape, he sang tunefully and rattled his tambourine through two songs. Naturally enough, frantic adoration was the order of the day as Ian Brown's resurrection continues.
l Ian Brown appears at Glasgow's Barrowland on Monday, November 29, and Tuesday, November 30.
