Joe Brown, hair spiky as ever, pauses, meat pie halfway to his mouth, and says: “When I was with Larry Parnes, I worked every single night for two years. A show every night all over the country. The first year I was getting £15 a week, the second year £30 a week.”
The no-nonsense impresario of the late 50s and early 60s knew how to get the most out of his charges.
Brown recently celebrated his 60th year as a musical force and he did it his way, which is the way he’s always done it, going back to the Parnes days. There was a 44-night tour that took him up to Christmas, with another sackful of dates in the new year. “It’s a bit different now,”
he grins, chirpy as ever. “I’m not sleeping on straw mattresses in the back of the van.”
Brown has gone from teenage pop icon to musical theatre star to TV host, eventually re-emerging as a hip, rootsy performer who mixes country, blues, a cappella vocals and early rock’n’roll, even managing to weave in I’m Henery The Eighth I Am and make it work. It’s a varied life, one chronicled in a new luxury 6CD/DVD/book set.
Pinned as a cheeky chappie, Brown was actually born in Lincolnshire, moving to London’s East End as a child. His parents ran a pub in Plaistow: “There was no music in my family, though my grandfather, who I never met, was in the circus – and was with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. I had a grandfather who met Sitting Bull: can you imagine?” Joe played the guitar, had a skiffle group, The Spacemen, and success came quickly when he was 18.
“I was in skiffle groups and then rock’n’roll came out and skiffle virtually died overnight,” he says. “I was playing my guitar around the East End, in clubs and stuff, and got asked if I wanted to do a big show that Larry Parnes was putting on – the guitar player had gone sick. I did the gig and in the audience was Jack Good, the TV producer. He took a shine to me and booked me for his new show, the follow-up to Oh Boy! – Boy Meets Girls.
“It was the best break anyone could ever get,” he continues. “I was just 18. I’m still touring, which I feel really good about, as I haven’t done any TV for years and years. Never did like it, even though I hosted quite a lot of things, mainly on ITV, including three series of The Joe Brown Show. Done everything, me! Documentary stuff, too – Joe Brown’s East End. Big orchestras – everything. Amazing guests, but my stuff has always been with a band on the road.”
It wasn’t always easy but he’s avoided becoming a middle-of-the-road entertainer – thankfully, Nicholas Parsons got the job as host of TV quiz The Price Is Right, despite Brown having recorded a pilot show.
And Brown on the road is far from a veteran pop star, knocking out a few hits and covers for a quick buck. Over the past two decades his shows have been finely-crafted performances in the best theatres, music along with outrageous stories – and there were tours with a guest star. Both Dave Edmunds and Alvin Lee proved inspired sparring partners, while a two-man show with Henry Gross (youngest performer at Woodstock with Sha Na Na, and hit songwriter) was a mostly acoustic treat.
This year’s tour features long-time band member Phil Capaldi (brother of Jim) on percussion and guitarist Steve Simpson, veteran of Ronnie Lane’s Slim Chance. There’s also double-bass and a fiddler. “I’m playing the fiddle, too, because I met a guy in the village who’s a fiddle player and he’s been teaching me – I played a bit before, but only a bit of sawing.”
The village is Cropredy in Oxfordshire, once home to various Fairport Convention members but now simply their Cropredy festival. On the way to the pub he points out where Dave Pegg used to live – and mentions his invitation to sing a song or two at this year’s event.
Brown is back with a bang. “Foolishly, a year ago I said to my manager I’ve never had any length of time off, ever, and I think I’d like to take a year off – but I ended up going stir-crazy. I made things in my workshop and did things around the village – one old lady’s door blew off when her boiler exploded, so I put that back on!”
The Joe Brown legend started from the moment he first appeared on Boy Meets Girls, backing American stars such as Johnny Cash, Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran. “On my first show,” he says, “Johnny had his guitar player, Luther Perkins, very simple, just plonk-plink, and I’m doing the song, How High Is The Water Mamma? The song went on about nine foot and we got to one point where I threw in a little break. Johnny stopped the live show and said, ‘Joe, there’ll be no picking there,’ and I got fired on the spot.” When he mentioned it to Cash after the show, the Man In Black said, “We’ll just have to see about that…” and got it sorted.
Some months later, there was a message that a package had arrived for him at the docks and he needed to pay the import duty. Opening it in the office he found a gleaming pair of cowboy boots from Cash – but far too expensive for him to pay the charge.
The official urged him to put them on and walk around – then charged a token rate for used footwear.
There was also rocker Ronnie Hawkins. “Ronnie bought over Levon Helm and Rick Danko,” recalls Brown. “I got to tour with these guys… they even asked me to go and join them in Canada. I sometimes wish I had.”
And he played the nifty rockabilly guitar on Billy Fury’s 1960 album, The Sound Of Fury. By this time, he was touring with Vincent and Cochran and was due to be in the car that crashed, crippling Vincent and killing Cochran. Brown escaped only because of his growing popularity with records such as The Darktown Strutters Ball. “Parnsey didn’t need me on the tour, it was sold out, so he pulled me off and gave me my own tour, with Johnny Kidd,” he says.
He was 21 when, in 1962, A Picture Of You, a hit that sounds as good now as it did then, reached No 2. He was a star, one who the Fab Four were delighted to support. “The Beatles were doing really well in the clubs of Liverpool, but Brian Epstein wanted them to play in the bigger theatres,” he says. “So, he booked me for a few gigs and got them to open for me.
By the end of the year they’d gone ‘whoosh!’ … I didn’t see hide nor hair of them for years, only John, occasionally, in posh London clubs.”
There were other hits, including 1963’s That’s What Love Will Do, but increasingly manufactured to take advantage of his supposed Cockney character. “You did what you were told,” says Brown. “One day, Larry Parnes said, ‘You’re coming with me – a friend of mine, a famous songwriter, has written you a hit.’ I went along and it was Lionel Bart. It was Jellied Eels … Now, I’m into Chuck Berry and here’s these ‘jellied eels, jellied eels, wobbling about like wonky wheels.’ Of course, it was a minor hit and I had to keep playing it.”
That was 1960 but, a little later, he did get to veto a song – and regretted it. Brown’s wife Vicki, one of the Vernons Girls, had just given birth to daughter Sam (a future star herself). “A guy wrote a song for me, Mrs Brown You’ve Got A Lovely Daughter. He’d just written That’s What Love Will Do, which got to No 2, but I said, ‘Sorry, that’s too middle-of-the-road.’ Anyway, next thing I know, Herman’s Hermits have sold millions worldwide, in the US, too. Not only that, they’re doing Henery The Eighth as well. We all make mistakes – but I still don’t like the bloody song.”
Brown’s career moved towards the mainstream. There were half a dozen films, including What A Crazy World (1963) with Marty Wilde and Harry H Corbett, and Three Hats For Lisa (1965), with Sid James and Una Stubbs. That same year came the West End, starring in Charlie Girl, with Anna Neagle. “I was told to do it,” he says. “As soon as I met Anna I thought, ‘What a lovely lady’ – but I was the star of the show, not Anna. I was top billing. I was a bit mbarrassed about that.”
Also in the show was comedy actor Derek Nimmo. “Hmm, I had problems with him – but I sorted it out. There was a little bit of upstaging – he had a bunch of balloons and I was singing and he’d dance in front of me. Everyone was horrified.
Then I stuck my foot out and over he went.
Didn’t do it again!”It might not have been Chuck Berry but, says Brown: “I loved the business and just adapted to whatever was going on.
At the end of Charlie Girl, after two-and- a-half years, it was the time that all the posh nightclubs came along, so I started doing them. And I had a proper nightclub band with a saxophone section, nothing to do with rock’n’roll. There were places like Batley Variety Club starting up – at one point I was working on a play for the BBC by day, driving to Yorkshire at night. It was a nightmare.”
By the early 70s, Joe had decided that he wanted to be himself again and formed the band Brown’s Home Brew (with wife Vicki and later solo hitmaker, Joe Fagin), with two albums on the progressive Vertigo label.
“I had to deny I was Joe Brown, which I did to the extent of growing a big beard,” he says. But the beard didn’t disguise Brown’s light entertainment reputation, and Home Brew went flat: “We did country-rock stuff, but my management was still sending me out as Joe Brown & The Bruvvers, so we never had a bloody chance.” The albums can be heard for the first time on CD as part of a new box set.
“Then I did 20 years of clubs, pantos and summer seasons – Blackpool, Yarmouth, Brighton, about 12 weeks each – as a result of which I developed a hatred of British seaside resorts,” he continues. At one point, there was even a return to Charlie Girl. “Twenty years on, I was asked to fill in for Paul Nicholas. I didn’t want to do it and asked my agent to price me out of it. I asked for an enormous sum of money, to which they said, ‘Of course.’ They’d arranged
a week’s rehearsals with the other stars – Cyd Charisse, Nicholas Parsons, Mark Wynter – but I went on holiday to Greece. By the time the plane landed I knew every word of the script because they’d never changed anything. In the early days, you weren’t even allowed to change the intonation of a line.
I used to alter a couple of lines and would get told off for it but it kept me going. Paul was doing lines I’d invented in the early days, didn’t know what they meant – but when I did them people roared.”
The real Joe Brown didn’t start to emerge until the mid-90s. Vicki – who tragically died of cancer, in 1991, after a later career as a backing singer, touring with groups such as Pink Floyd – had been managed by John Taylor, bassist in Freddie Mercury’s pre-Queen band, Ibex. A man of music as well as business, he helped Joe shut the door on the clubs and find a place in the theatres. And there was a move to make real records – with 1997’s Fifty Six And Taller Than You Think being a turning point. It was airy, intelligent and thoroughly likeable, produced by son Pete (who’d produced Sam’s 1989 hit, Stop!), his own memorable songs alongside covers by Nick Lowe, among others.
“When we started, we were getting about 80-90 people in and now we’re doing the same places, three nights on the trot,” he says, justly proud. “You can’t get a seat. Fifteen years ago, I used to look through
the curtain and there’d be a sea of blue and pink, all these old ladies with their hairdos, but now the audience is mainly in their 50s.”
There has been a string of impressive records, such as On A Day Like This (1999), produced in Nashville by Brit ex-pat songwriter, Roger Cook, using country’s finest, and The Ukulele Album (2011),
using one of Brown’s favourite instruments in a band setting and combining historic songs, and numbers such as Motörhead’s Ace Of Spades (!).
The ukulele holds many memories for Brown, who was a good friend of George Harrison’s, another fan of the instrument – and who played and sang I’ll See You In My Dreams at the 2002 Concert For George tribute.
“After The Beatles became big I didn’t see him for years. Then one day I got a call: this voice said, ‘Hello? Joe Brown? I don’t know if you remember me but it’s George, George Harrison.
Why don’t you bring your guitar and we’ll have a little play? … Oh, don’t bother, I’ve got loads of guitars here.’
“We used to play ukuleles together,” he explains. “And, one time, Scotty Moore and DJ Fontana from Elvis’ band were on my radio show and George heard I was interviewing them and said, ‘Oh, I’d love to meet them, bring them round.’ So, I did, and he played them George Formby records all night: ‘Listen to this one, it’s called My Little Stick Of Blackpool Rock.’”
In 2000, Brown married long-time friend Manon (former partner of Steve Marriott, and mother of singer, Mollie), with George as his best man. Life with the extended family is sweet, Brown having both a home studio in his barn and
a workshop, where he is still busy with his woodworking hobby, making rocking horses – one of which gazes across the studio. It’s a place where it would be easy to put up one’s feet (either there or in
his other place, in Nashville). But the road calls…
“Our programme this year involves some old songs – very old songs – but no rock’n’roll,” he says. “For a bloke my age, I think it’s a bit undignified – leather waistcoat, showing your chest.
“I could quite easily book myself an opening act, then go out in the second half, do my old hits, tell a couple of stories and come home with the money,” he says. “The reason I do a full two hours is because I want to play music …”
The no-nonsense impresario of the late 50s and early 60s knew how to get the most out of his charges.
Brown recently celebrated his 60th year as a musical force and he did it his way, which is the way he’s always done it, going back to the Parnes days. There was a 44-night tour that took him up to Christmas, with another sackful of dates in the new year. “It’s a bit different now,”
he grins, chirpy as ever. “I’m not sleeping on straw mattresses in the back of the van.”
Brown has gone from teenage pop icon to musical theatre star to TV host, eventually re-emerging as a hip, rootsy performer who mixes country, blues, a cappella vocals and early rock’n’roll, even managing to weave in I’m Henery The Eighth I Am and make it work. It’s a varied life, one chronicled in a new luxury 6CD/DVD/book set.
Pinned as a cheeky chappie, Brown was actually born in Lincolnshire, moving to London’s East End as a child. His parents ran a pub in Plaistow: “There was no music in my family, though my grandfather, who I never met, was in the circus – and was with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. I had a grandfather who met Sitting Bull: can you imagine?” Joe played the guitar, had a skiffle group, The Spacemen, and success came quickly when he was 18.
“I was in skiffle groups and then rock’n’roll came out and skiffle virtually died overnight,” he says. “I was playing my guitar around the East End, in clubs and stuff, and got asked if I wanted to do a big show that Larry Parnes was putting on – the guitar player had gone sick. I did the gig and in the audience was Jack Good, the TV producer. He took a shine to me and booked me for his new show, the follow-up to Oh Boy! – Boy Meets Girls.
“It was the best break anyone could ever get,” he continues. “I was just 18. I’m still touring, which I feel really good about, as I haven’t done any TV for years and years. Never did like it, even though I hosted quite a lot of things, mainly on ITV, including three series of The Joe Brown Show. Done everything, me! Documentary stuff, too – Joe Brown’s East End. Big orchestras – everything. Amazing guests, but my stuff has always been with a band on the road.”
It wasn’t always easy but he’s avoided becoming a middle-of-the-road entertainer – thankfully, Nicholas Parsons got the job as host of TV quiz The Price Is Right, despite Brown having recorded a pilot show.
And Brown on the road is far from a veteran pop star, knocking out a few hits and covers for a quick buck. Over the past two decades his shows have been finely-crafted performances in the best theatres, music along with outrageous stories – and there were tours with a guest star. Both Dave Edmunds and Alvin Lee proved inspired sparring partners, while a two-man show with Henry Gross (youngest performer at Woodstock with Sha Na Na, and hit songwriter) was a mostly acoustic treat.
This year’s tour features long-time band member Phil Capaldi (brother of Jim) on percussion and guitarist Steve Simpson, veteran of Ronnie Lane’s Slim Chance. There’s also double-bass and a fiddler. “I’m playing the fiddle, too, because I met a guy in the village who’s a fiddle player and he’s been teaching me – I played a bit before, but only a bit of sawing.”
The village is Cropredy in Oxfordshire, once home to various Fairport Convention members but now simply their Cropredy festival. On the way to the pub he points out where Dave Pegg used to live – and mentions his invitation to sing a song or two at this year’s event.
Brown is back with a bang. “Foolishly, a year ago I said to my manager I’ve never had any length of time off, ever, and I think I’d like to take a year off – but I ended up going stir-crazy. I made things in my workshop and did things around the village – one old lady’s door blew off when her boiler exploded, so I put that back on!”
The Joe Brown legend started from the moment he first appeared on Boy Meets Girls, backing American stars such as Johnny Cash, Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran. “On my first show,” he says, “Johnny had his guitar player, Luther Perkins, very simple, just plonk-plink, and I’m doing the song, How High Is The Water Mamma? The song went on about nine foot and we got to one point where I threw in a little break. Johnny stopped the live show and said, ‘Joe, there’ll be no picking there,’ and I got fired on the spot.” When he mentioned it to Cash after the show, the Man In Black said, “We’ll just have to see about that…” and got it sorted.
Some months later, there was a message that a package had arrived for him at the docks and he needed to pay the import duty. Opening it in the office he found a gleaming pair of cowboy boots from Cash – but far too expensive for him to pay the charge.
The official urged him to put them on and walk around – then charged a token rate for used footwear.
There was also rocker Ronnie Hawkins. “Ronnie bought over Levon Helm and Rick Danko,” recalls Brown. “I got to tour with these guys… they even asked me to go and join them in Canada. I sometimes wish I had.”
And he played the nifty rockabilly guitar on Billy Fury’s 1960 album, The Sound Of Fury. By this time, he was touring with Vincent and Cochran and was due to be in the car that crashed, crippling Vincent and killing Cochran. Brown escaped only because of his growing popularity with records such as The Darktown Strutters Ball. “Parnsey didn’t need me on the tour, it was sold out, so he pulled me off and gave me my own tour, with Johnny Kidd,” he says.
He was 21 when, in 1962, A Picture Of You, a hit that sounds as good now as it did then, reached No 2. He was a star, one who the Fab Four were delighted to support. “The Beatles were doing really well in the clubs of Liverpool, but Brian Epstein wanted them to play in the bigger theatres,” he says. “So, he booked me for a few gigs and got them to open for me.
By the end of the year they’d gone ‘whoosh!’ … I didn’t see hide nor hair of them for years, only John, occasionally, in posh London clubs.”
There were other hits, including 1963’s That’s What Love Will Do, but increasingly manufactured to take advantage of his supposed Cockney character. “You did what you were told,” says Brown. “One day, Larry Parnes said, ‘You’re coming with me – a friend of mine, a famous songwriter, has written you a hit.’ I went along and it was Lionel Bart. It was Jellied Eels … Now, I’m into Chuck Berry and here’s these ‘jellied eels, jellied eels, wobbling about like wonky wheels.’ Of course, it was a minor hit and I had to keep playing it.”
That was 1960 but, a little later, he did get to veto a song – and regretted it. Brown’s wife Vicki, one of the Vernons Girls, had just given birth to daughter Sam (a future star herself). “A guy wrote a song for me, Mrs Brown You’ve Got A Lovely Daughter. He’d just written That’s What Love Will Do, which got to No 2, but I said, ‘Sorry, that’s too middle-of-the-road.’ Anyway, next thing I know, Herman’s Hermits have sold millions worldwide, in the US, too. Not only that, they’re doing Henery The Eighth as well. We all make mistakes – but I still don’t like the bloody song.”
Brown’s career moved towards the mainstream. There were half a dozen films, including What A Crazy World (1963) with Marty Wilde and Harry H Corbett, and Three Hats For Lisa (1965), with Sid James and Una Stubbs. That same year came the West End, starring in Charlie Girl, with Anna Neagle. “I was told to do it,” he says. “As soon as I met Anna I thought, ‘What a lovely lady’ – but I was the star of the show, not Anna. I was top billing. I was a bit mbarrassed about that.”
Also in the show was comedy actor Derek Nimmo. “Hmm, I had problems with him – but I sorted it out. There was a little bit of upstaging – he had a bunch of balloons and I was singing and he’d dance in front of me. Everyone was horrified.
Then I stuck my foot out and over he went.
Didn’t do it again!”It might not have been Chuck Berry but, says Brown: “I loved the business and just adapted to whatever was going on.
At the end of Charlie Girl, after two-and- a-half years, it was the time that all the posh nightclubs came along, so I started doing them. And I had a proper nightclub band with a saxophone section, nothing to do with rock’n’roll. There were places like Batley Variety Club starting up – at one point I was working on a play for the BBC by day, driving to Yorkshire at night. It was a nightmare.”
By the early 70s, Joe had decided that he wanted to be himself again and formed the band Brown’s Home Brew (with wife Vicki and later solo hitmaker, Joe Fagin), with two albums on the progressive Vertigo label.
“I had to deny I was Joe Brown, which I did to the extent of growing a big beard,” he says. But the beard didn’t disguise Brown’s light entertainment reputation, and Home Brew went flat: “We did country-rock stuff, but my management was still sending me out as Joe Brown & The Bruvvers, so we never had a bloody chance.” The albums can be heard for the first time on CD as part of a new box set.
“Then I did 20 years of clubs, pantos and summer seasons – Blackpool, Yarmouth, Brighton, about 12 weeks each – as a result of which I developed a hatred of British seaside resorts,” he continues. At one point, there was even a return to Charlie Girl. “Twenty years on, I was asked to fill in for Paul Nicholas. I didn’t want to do it and asked my agent to price me out of it. I asked for an enormous sum of money, to which they said, ‘Of course.’ They’d arranged
a week’s rehearsals with the other stars – Cyd Charisse, Nicholas Parsons, Mark Wynter – but I went on holiday to Greece. By the time the plane landed I knew every word of the script because they’d never changed anything. In the early days, you weren’t even allowed to change the intonation of a line.
I used to alter a couple of lines and would get told off for it but it kept me going. Paul was doing lines I’d invented in the early days, didn’t know what they meant – but when I did them people roared.”
The real Joe Brown didn’t start to emerge until the mid-90s. Vicki – who tragically died of cancer, in 1991, after a later career as a backing singer, touring with groups such as Pink Floyd – had been managed by John Taylor, bassist in Freddie Mercury’s pre-Queen band, Ibex. A man of music as well as business, he helped Joe shut the door on the clubs and find a place in the theatres. And there was a move to make real records – with 1997’s Fifty Six And Taller Than You Think being a turning point. It was airy, intelligent and thoroughly likeable, produced by son Pete (who’d produced Sam’s 1989 hit, Stop!), his own memorable songs alongside covers by Nick Lowe, among others.
“When we started, we were getting about 80-90 people in and now we’re doing the same places, three nights on the trot,” he says, justly proud. “You can’t get a seat. Fifteen years ago, I used to look through
the curtain and there’d be a sea of blue and pink, all these old ladies with their hairdos, but now the audience is mainly in their 50s.”
There has been a string of impressive records, such as On A Day Like This (1999), produced in Nashville by Brit ex-pat songwriter, Roger Cook, using country’s finest, and The Ukulele Album (2011),
using one of Brown’s favourite instruments in a band setting and combining historic songs, and numbers such as Motörhead’s Ace Of Spades (!).
The ukulele holds many memories for Brown, who was a good friend of George Harrison’s, another fan of the instrument – and who played and sang I’ll See You In My Dreams at the 2002 Concert For George tribute.
“After The Beatles became big I didn’t see him for years. Then one day I got a call: this voice said, ‘Hello? Joe Brown? I don’t know if you remember me but it’s George, George Harrison.
Why don’t you bring your guitar and we’ll have a little play? … Oh, don’t bother, I’ve got loads of guitars here.’
“We used to play ukuleles together,” he explains. “And, one time, Scotty Moore and DJ Fontana from Elvis’ band were on my radio show and George heard I was interviewing them and said, ‘Oh, I’d love to meet them, bring them round.’ So, I did, and he played them George Formby records all night: ‘Listen to this one, it’s called My Little Stick Of Blackpool Rock.’”
In 2000, Brown married long-time friend Manon (former partner of Steve Marriott, and mother of singer, Mollie), with George as his best man. Life with the extended family is sweet, Brown having both a home studio in his barn and
a workshop, where he is still busy with his woodworking hobby, making rocking horses – one of which gazes across the studio. It’s a place where it would be easy to put up one’s feet (either there or in
his other place, in Nashville). But the road calls…
“Our programme this year involves some old songs – very old songs – but no rock’n’roll,” he says. “For a bloke my age, I think it’s a bit undignified – leather waistcoat, showing your chest.
“I could quite easily book myself an opening act, then go out in the second half, do my old hits, tell a couple of stories and come home with the money,” he says. “The reason I do a full two hours is because I want to play music …”
The limited-run, career-spanning Joe Brown 60th Anniversary Collection is available as a deluxe box set on Absolute/Universal
