Dave Woodhall talks to Arthur Brown, not quite as crazy after all these years.
If you first came to fame as the self-proclaimed God of Hellfire you’re probably never going to live it down. Even into his seventies Arthur Brown is still performing, although these days he takes life a bit easier and has settled for a much quieter existence when he’s off stage.
“Things are good. I’m sitting by the river and the sun’s shining. There’s a lot to smile about. I’m keeping myself busy working with a band and getting ready for the new shows.”
This is the tour Arthur’s just starting, where he talks about his chequered life with the help of longtime companion Angel Fallon and a host of stories.
“A lot of people had said I should write a book, and that’ll happen one day but what iu wanted to do was put it into a different form. It invlves projections, some dance, a bit of singing and storytelling, all the things that have happened to me since I hitch-hiked to Hamburg in 1959, right at the birth of rock’n’roll although I didn’t know of it then. I was more into, well, you can find that out in the show. Angel, my dancer, is helping. There are so many stories that the hardest thing is to work out which ones to include each night. It’s a balance between laughter and joy and the darker things.”
Most of it from the sixties, a decade of incredible contrast between love, peace and a much darker side.
“Oh yesss. The same people who were involved in the nasty side did their best to get rid of the hippy stuff. Interesting, interesting times which I’ll talk about. I won’t be doing Fire as such, it gets talked about but everybody knows that song so why not leave it out for a change? When I come back with the band we’ll do it but in the meantime you can listen to it at home”
You’re touring regularly again. Was that a conscious decision to start again, or did you just start off and find yourself busy almost without noticing?
“I’d done what I set out to do and I’v e still got all the energy left so I thought what I should do next? It’s got to be music so I came back from Portugal and I started this band about four years ago, there’s thousands of bands wanting gigs and it’s taken a while but we’re back on the major stages now, playing some of the big festivals in Europe.”
There does seem to be a lot of gigs around now for you and your contemporaries, with promoters seeming to be risk averse.
“Well, the industry has shrunk. There isn’t the money that there used to be from record companies to promote tours and it’s reckoned that most semi-pro musicians earn more than the full-timers although that’s always been the way. Back in 1964 when Chris Farlowe was having his hits he was on Top of the Pops then the next day he was going to work as a carpenter and he explained to his workmates that it was about security – he was getting a guaranteed wage packet. Then you have Iggy Pop and hs talk about music, saying that insurance ads is his job, music isn’t his job because he doesn’t earn from it.”
It doesn’t help that many people believe they shouldn’t pay for music.
“Yes, because it was turned into a commodity. Music is a language, it has energy but it can become like packaged food, it might look and taste like food but it’s not really food. Music became like that. I’m for everybody doing music, in the sixties we used to say it would be great if a hundred thousand bands could earn a few pounds rather than few bands earning millions, then when that came about in such a huge way there weren’t enough bands for the money to go round.
“Music isn’t seen as a thing of great value. A lot of the messages given out in the sixties were from the experimental lifestyles of the bands of the time. Now you don’t need a band to come to town, it’s all over the internet and you can do all the experiments on your own.
“We’ve done the same with everything. We find a plant that cures something but that’s not enough, someone has to make money out of it. They can’t copyright the plant so they take the chemical out of it and copyright that. We take music which in most societies is a bridge between people for social occasions, but we’ve take it stuck it on stage and said ‘Pay sixteen quid to come in’. I’m not against people getting free music, if they come to festivals they pay, fine, but it doesn’t bother me if they don’t pay for recorded music.”
You’ve seen a lot of your contemporaries come and, sadly, go. The God of Hellfire seems to have survived unscathed and happy.
“I wake up and of course, it’s another day, beautiful. I don’t think there’s anyone alive who doesn’t have some irritations but every moment’s a gift isn’t it? I haven’t exactly come out unscathed, I had a brain hemorrhage and it was uncertain whether I would be able to sing again but I was lucky. It does mean that at that time you look at life and everything, every tiny thing becomes very important.”
An Evening with Arthur Brown is at the Robin 2 on Thursday 12th March. Tickets £ 12.50, from www.therobin.co.uk or tel: 01902-401211.