Hello, Hurray-The Super Sane World of Arthur Brown

Hello, HurrayThe Super Sane World of Arthur Brown

LETTER FROM BRITAIN

by Simon Frith

I was a young man back in the 1960 s but so wera most people The spirit of `67 haunts us ills the scent of a dying rose No one knows what really happened I but we've still got the silhouettes on our shades. One up the arse for the business, one more toke for the audience and a media mess. Rock was a happening we staged ourselves, and glory of glories was Arthur Brown, hair ablaze, descendir.g from a icopier into the 1967 Woiburn festival'. 5.00 sheep died, the Ml was closeth It ws the start of something:guod and the et:d of something better Arthur Brown didn't lust fall from the sky:

f ‘'Well, when I ,was a little kid my ; father had one of those windup gramophones, yeah, and he used to have all . these ridiculous records of Peter Pears and the Miami Syncopators and Glen Colquohn singing 'Abide with me' — j really deep - all on HMV and that was the first music I remember. And then, like, my brother and I used to sing in the Welsh choirs, we lived in Wales for quite a bit and we did some Eis* tedffords. We used to do hits on the radio. You'd have Marvin Rainwater singing ‘Whole lotta woman’ and wed have the radio going and a little taperecorder and we’d: sing along. My brother used to sing the Platters and one and we d vrvi„ a one and put our voic^ on top, so you got all this really autnul* expensive backing with our voices coming out. It sounded good.

, ,n * werit to University and the second I went to, which was Reading. I suddenly decided I wanted to sing and l started taking classical lessons (at the time I was' playing double bass) and jomea .a - trad band. I actually once guested with Acker Bilk at the Reading Olympic and I used to sit in' with all the trad bands, original bands like the Syncopators and all those, freaks, and then, suddenly, Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies came out. I’d started getting interested in the blues in ’60-*61 when Alexis Korner brought out the Kings of Blues series with Furry, Lewis and I bought a collection of records off this cat who, was down and out and wanted some bread. One of them happened to be Blues from the Ghetto, Champion Jack Dupree, and that really got into me. The university was divided into lots of little groups, as usual, and one side was like these angry cultural geezers who were into the Beaties and this side was like all the dopies who were into the blues and going to all the Blues

Ickages and all the parties and the ones and we started an r’n’b group, Blues and BrownThat went right till th* And. we were - gigging till finals, my bit and the sound came out like irmchchchchch . . . Tiger in Your ik\ ‘You Can't Judge a Book By

Brown was a graduate, had no glittery connections and no audience. The rVb dole queue. In 1961 the Beatles went to Hamburg, in 1965 Arthur Brown went to Paris, less sweaty.

“We-formed the group three days before we went over and we were doing Tames Brown stuff and Bobby Bland, things like that. The manager chose the name for the band, the Arthur Brown Set, because the Alan Price Set had just started. After Paris we went to Spain for three or four months, then we came back to England and started up the Crazy World in 1966. Oh yeah, 1 joined the Foundations for a bit. It was really strange - the Crazy World had just got its second booking down at the UFO, which had just started, and these two geezers came down and said we've got this song for you, it’s called ‘Baby, Now That I've Found You' and we want you to sing it in unison-. Only before you do you're gonna have to sign this contract for life. I'm glad I didn’t, really, 'cos it isn't my. kind of music; It was* but we were doing bits of r-'n*bj bits of' John Mayall and we used to do Mingus as well. Then. I started - writing. The theatrics has started: back in Paris. Just odd things — like you’d get stupid little kids about six years old coining and painting your face. And all the people In the audience would be totally transfixed, So obviously the theatrics were -visually attractive and nobody was making use of it and so we did. Especially as we were dealing with areas of imagination like we were in the songs we were writing. It strengthened the image. We found people weren’t relating to the . words, but as soon as we . put the image there, they started reacting,

“We did our first gig as ferazy World down in a club in Bopor Regis. That was probably the earliest. Vincent Crane," had-to play in the of her roomItwas divided by big arches into two rooms.

He turned his organ on and it belched , green smoke, so we got the other group to lend us Their organ, but he had to. play it in the other room. At the end of every number he had to run through to find out what the next one would be. It was pretty chaotic and when we first played UFO, about November ’66, we’d not been gigging for eight months — we didn’t get many bookings.”

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But then Arthur became the God of Hell-Fire.

“At the time I wanted to be successful and a star, but at the same time I used to go around and see all the people and think what their life is is a heap of’ shit. There were pressures like how would you like to do two sorts of things, one was the underground, the other was shave off your mustache, have a nose job, cap your tooth, and one night you Can go out as a ballad singer doing Tom Jones stuff and the next night you wear a false mustache and beard-and do -underground. There was all that shit and we used to do ten nights out of eleven and some of those we’d be doing two gigs a night. If you’re just dealing with rock ‘n’ roll, bopping energy, it’s alright but ours was much stronger and that’s one of the reasons why I packed it in. I made certain stipulations and none of them were met, but at the same time if you’re told you’ve been booked out for the next twelve nights you can’t say no. So you do it but say I don’t want it to happen again and it happens again, and finally you just say fuck it, I don’t want to go this way, I don’t want to go in this direction. And they say fuck you,'if you don’t want to go in that direction we’ll make sure you don’t go in any other direction.”

In 1967 street words weren’t the opening titles of a new epic, but the closing credits of the old Beatles movie. The theory of IT, Oz, UFO, etc. was that the traditional rock relationship of industry/commodity/consumer had been replaced by a new one: artist/ complex Work of art/audience. The Beatles had given this ideal its credibility and geezers like Arthur Brown, Pink Floyd and Soft Machine — purist, articulate, self-conscious — were to fulfill it. Up through blues and r‘n’b and out over the artistic top. Problem was that only the musicians cared. The industry marketed and the audience consumed art like it was a lollipop. I like lollipops arid was amazed to find that Arthur Brown took ‘Fire’ seriously:

“No, it wasn’t funny, that part. It was just something that was like there. It wasn’t really jokey, but when something’s really heavy you have to offset it. Like Shakespeare’s prose had to be offset”.

Ghouls. We went along to see Arthur Brown go up in real flames and he got fed up and left for inner space. Kingdom Come — correct principles, a robot drummer, heavy wailing and Brown’s superb, bluesy voice. The art is more organized now, and the life-style:

“The next two years there’ll be totally differently oriented music, and one of the ways it’s going to change is that certain parts of the music — due to quadrophonic sound — are going to be based not on scales but on shapes. And you’re going to have music which instead of being self-expression is an expression of certain basic laws, which have to do with peoples’ minds. And it’s not just going to be someone getting up and singing, ‘Oh baby, I want to fuck you all night, I feel so bad, I feel so good, I’ve got so much money baby, I don’t want to have any money baby, and I’m feeling far out’ and all that — it’s going to be'like objective music.

“Music’s only sound expressing certain patterns so to what extent is that sound architecture, to what extent is it theatre? The imagery of whatever group is putting on any theatrics basically depends upon to what depth the directors or actors are involved in what they’re doing. Because all that sound does, and all that visuals do, and dancing, is to give body to a vibration that’s coming out of you anyway. And if that vibration isn’t coming out of you, you can do all the imagery that you like, but it’s not going to communicate anything. People are going to sit back and be impressed and say “That’s big” or “Isn’t it colorful?” but they’re not going to get anything from it. In general, people in audiences operate from three points of view: from the body, the emotions and the mind. And you’ve got to try to do something that’s going to appeal to all those three sorts of people without cutting out any of the others. But I don’t believe it’s limited to any age or background.

“I think that within two years the whole format of groups will be gone because the way of life they’re putting over is like very false. If groups are supposed to be leading people towards good ways of living then their health habits are totally disgusting. I mean, who wants to go to bed at six in the morning, most of them doped out of their brains and full of really revolting beans and three year old eggs that you get at the Blue Boar. And the way they breathe in a van, man, you can’t even breathe properly — you’re curled up in there, you spend two-thirds of your life in a Transit, and then you come out on stage and have your moment of glory, I mean it’s totally false. Even if you’re playing to the freaks, the freaks are mostly living on the dole and have no reason at all to be unhealthy night people. And if the leisure society comes in there’s no need for it and at the inoment groups are the working class of the leisure society, that’s all they are.

“I’ve been experimenting with communities ancf in this one we?re just getting into the stage of encounter therapy and all that with the group and all the people who live there. The manager lives there as well. We’re just moving up near Norwich and it’s all open country. I tried that before and it was a dismal failure but this time it should work”.

This time it should work, but is it cool? The crazy world where Arthur Brown’s now living is symptomatic of more general problems (doing the West Coast Groove): the refusal to admit that rock comes out of a tension in a business and the lack of a genuine relationship with an audience (envy Slade’s relaxed authority). It’s all in the head, man, and Arthur Brown isn’t political:

“Let’s say that we’re concerned with slightly different areas of the mind. You’ve got all those pressures but underneath all that is something those pressures are acting on. If you can get directly to that you can do more than you can attacking each particular one. And that’s what we’re trying to do, the same way that Fellini does with his dream images. I mean Leary says like politics in America is now neurological politics. It’s not economic politics, it’s the politics of repressing the right to experiment with yourself and to do with your body what you want”.

So it goes, but ‘Fire’ was a great grotesque single in show-biz style and Kingdom Come are recording at Rockfield, Dave Edmunds’ place. Their instincts are still intact and their new single, ‘Spirit of Joy’, is alright, a post Hawkwind space appeal. What bothers me is not that Arthur Brown isn’t the English Alice Cooper, but that he doesn’t want to be.