Gary James' Interview With
Arthur Brown



He was sometimes referred to as "The God Of Hellfire." His song, "Fire" was a number one hit in Canada and the U.K. He played shows with Jimi Hendirx, The Doors and Frank Zappa. The gentleman we are speaking of is Mr. Arthur Brown.

Q - Mr. Brown, your show was billed as The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown. But when you think about it, you weren't so crazy, you were just ahead of your time.

A - (laughs)

Q - Where did the "Crazy" part come from? You?

A - Yeah. That named happened in 1965 when I was playing a club called Ange Rouge, which means the Red Angel, in Pigalla, where The Moulin Rouge is. It was a crazy, crazy period and the audience used to go completely wild, and so when it came to an end and I went back to England, before I set off I was having an evening with the sax player from that band. We were talking about I was going to go back to England and start up a band. So he said, "What are we going to call it?" I said, "We'll call it The World Of Arthur Brown. And he said, "No. That's tame. You need something more." We talked and added Crazy. So, it happened that way. I was going back to England and I'd been playing around France and did some Spanish concerts and in clubs. They were very surreal. They had stalactite lights coming from the ceiling and through the floor, which ever way. So, I wanted to do a multi-media club with art, paintings, statues, all the media that were around in those days, but I didn't get to raise the money. So, I started a band with the same principle. That's why it had lots of props and theatre and costumes. A lot of the ideas began in Paris, or some of the ideas, because the Ange Rouge was a club we played every night for three hours and then Sunday we played the afternoon and the evening. With us playing so much there was no time for rehearsal and so we started to improvise in between numbers 'cause you get a bit bored playing the same stuff. So, it's nice to bring something new in. I started doing some skits, some theatrical things. One was about President De Gaulle didn't like long haired people so he was in the process of issuing an edict that when long haired people crossed the border the French officials could legally cut off their hair. (laughs) I did a skit with General De Gaulle cutting The Pope's hair off. Of course the people wore robes or whatever you could find around the club really. Then one night a young mother came in with her son, who was about seven. He just looked at me and came into the dressing room and said, "You should black out your teeth." And so I thought, "What?!" The next day I thought, "I wonder what that would do?" I went out and got some grease paint, blacked out my teeth. That was quite effective on the audience. Then a few nights later at the hotel where we staying there was a crown left outside my door from one of their parties and it had candles on it. I went down with my teeth blacked out and wore this crown with candles, flames coming out of it and that was a great success with the audience.

Q - Did you write "Fire"?

A - I co-wrote it with three other people.

Q - How long did it take you to write that song?

A - It's interesting. I was composing a piece that was to do with an end of a journey. That was going to be the whole album. In the end we just used that concept on side one. The "Fire" piece is different from the other music on that side if you listen to it. It was kind of more Pop if you like in a certain way and a good tune. So, it was the last song of the piece that we put together. We couldn't find anyone to do it. Two of my friends upstairs where we rehearsed were rehearsing and played me the tune and I thought we could use that and mutate it and add and change, and that became "Fire".

Q - Before "Fire" was a hit, you played shows with The Doors. Did you get to talk to Jim Morrison? And, how many shows did you play with The Doors?

A - We came over and did shows for Bill Graham and he had the two Fillmores. We also were on festivals. We opened a 10,000 seat show. My managers, Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp arranged for me to meet him. He came over to England to play at, I think it was The Road House. They decided, "We should have a meeting between Arthur and Jim." And so they invited him down to this after hours drinking place, but we met in the morning at about 11 o'clock. I came in. I was standing there. He came in. My managers went off and left us alone. So, we were just standing there. We didn't say much at all. Nothing for about twenty minutes and then there was a radio playing and Jim said, "Hey, who's that on the radio?" "I don't know, man." And that was all we said to each other. (laughs)

Q - I was expecting more. That's strange. Both you guys were into theatrics.

A - Yes.

Q - That's too bad he wasn't more talkative.

A - Yeah. Well, I met some other guys who supported him on a gig. It was in some big, industrial place. He came into their dressing room and his conversation on that occasion was; there was a big roll of barbed wire, so he wound the barbed wire around them, made a big circle of it, closed it, and then said, "Night fellas." That was it. It depended on what his condition was and what was going on.

Q - Those are some strange stories. I don't know if he was deliberately trying to act mysterious or he was mysterious.

A - I think both. I mean, he was a great artist and his form of theatre was method acting and he was great at it.

Q - Jimi Hendrix was instrumental in getting "Fire" airplay. Now, what did he do to make that happen?

A - He was on the same record label and we played concerts on the same stage. The album came out and it was picked up, firstly picked up not by the FM stations that you would think, the underground, it was picked up by the AM stations as a novelty record. Then because a lot of people started to want to hear it, the FM stations picked it up. Jimi went 'round all the Black stations and said, "Hey! Play this!" And they did.

Q - Jimi Hendrix was doing a theatrical show. He had no problems with you opening the show?

A - We opened for him before "Fire", but the record was number one and we were booked up in the top three or four acts of the big festival circuit and it wasn't so much opening for him. There was a point where Lambert and Stamp, who were also his record company, were going to get him to do a tour with us. It was fine until he saw the photographs of our stage act and then he said, "No. I ain't doing it." Then he started to set his guitar on fire. We enjoyed playing around each other and there was a point in 1969 where we were forming a band together. He used to come down to Steve Paul's Scene, a club in New York, and we used to play onstage together and jam. So, from that came the idea of starting a band together. So we got to know each other a bit and playing with him was pretty much a delight.

Q - What would the band's name have been, or did it ever come to that?

A - The name we didn't come up with, but what he wanted was the keyboard player from The Crazy World, Vincent Crane, and then the guys from The Experience 'cause I'd got to know them and we got along well. So that was going to be the lineup. Me singing and Jimi playing guitar. He wanted to have tapes of Wagner in the background and huge visual projection screens. He was going to be more theatrical.

Q - I'm guessing that didn't happen because his management was against it.

A - No. He did break up The Experience. Rather than go much bigger, which is what he was going to do with the band I was in with him, he went back down to his little trio with Buddy Miles. He came out without The Experience but doing much more basic Blues. This was going to be very experimental and he was ready to do something reaching out. In the end he headed in the other direction, back to his roots.

Q - When "Fire" became such a hit, were you approached by either management or the record company to come up with a follow-up that sounded just like it?

A - Well, you know the record company were the same people who put out Hendrix, The Who and managed The Who. So they were into experimentation, art and music. Also, if you look at those bands they all put out completely different pieces each time they recorded. For instance, with The Who you could tell it was The Who. "I Can See For Miles" doesn't sound like "Substitute" or any of the other songs. So, Lambert used to encourage you. He'd say your audience would expect you to have moved on. So, we didn't get pressure to do the same thing at all.

Q - How fortunate for groups. That situation doesn't exist today.

A - It's partly to do with the writers. If you think of The Who, Townshend was their writer. He produced the demos for our album and helped us get it together. I didn't know anything about recording when we went with Track (Records). Pete Townshend came in and helped us formulate the thing. So, it was always an urge to do something experimental, new and good.

Q - What happened with your original band? Did they break up after "Fire" became a hit?

A - Well, when "Fire" became a hit we did a tour. The drummer basically went crazy and started to destroy a stage act as we were performing. I could deal with that and find a way to incorporate it, although it would be difficult, but the keyboard player couldn't. And (Vincent) Crane said one night, "Hey! This drummer is crazy, and not only that, in most bands the drummer lays down a rhythm and the keyboard player improvises over the top. In this band I have to hold the rhythm down while he improvises over the top. I'm not going to play with him anymore." It was about that time we discovered the keyboard player had something put in his drink and it spiked his mental condition and it manifested itself into what we would now call bi-polar. Further down a few concerts into the tour he had to be sent to a mental home.

Q - Did he recover?

A - He did recover. He came out for one further tour and the the whole thing broke up. By that time Carl Palmer was the drummer with the band for about a year and a quarter and he and Vince went off and formed Atomic Rooster, which had four Top Ten hits in England. So, they were successful. Of course Carl went off to E.L.P., (Emerson, Lake And Palmer) and Asia. So, Carl had a very successful career.

Q - This club, UFO, in London, where Pete Townshend saw you, I've never heard of that club before. What kind of a place was that?

A - Well, it was in a strange location. It was down in the center of London, Soho. For all but one night a week it was an Irish club. The Blarney is what it was called, playing Irish music. This one night Joe Boyd, who was a Canadian fellow who'd been around the whole American underground, came over and started up this club with Fran and Jay Landesman, who were from New York, and John Hopkins, who was kind of the leader of the English underground. It started out with a few hundred. It's capacity was about 1,200 people and gradually, over a period of about four months, it became absolutely packed and because of the American underground scene the English press took it all up, got it pushing hippies. In fact, the club was a great multi-media experiment place with lots of political ideas, ideas about education, all the new technology at the time which was sort of like oil slide projections. You could have a wandering man spouting poetry. It was a place where new ideas about living and systems had a form on what society should take and what form should art take. So, it was also in that period that leaps forward in electronic musical presentation with synthesizers just teeming to come forward and pedals did strange things to make music that hadn't been there before. In the club was Pink Floyd. The Soft Machine were there. They did their early stuff. Daevid Allen. Everybody in the English clubs went down there. Most bands tried to become psychedelic. Everybody went down there. That's why he brought me on to his show. Maria Callas, the great Opera singer came down. I had a good conversation with her. Everybody who was anybody went down there at least once to see what was going on. There were headlines in papers, "What is a Hippie? We'll tell you what a Hippie is!" Soon it became very popular because it was the most experimental stuff, and it was new.

Q - Did any of The Beatles ever show up at the UFO Club?

A - Yeah.

Q - Did you ever see them there?

A - Yeah. We'd go from there to the Speakeasy Club, which is where anybody who was in town and wanted to jam would go in and eat. I remember one of the popular bands in the underground was Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band and he was sitting at the table with The Beatles. They were putting together "The Magical Mystery Tour". Hendrix came down and played there.

Q - How about Janis Joplin?

A - I never saw her there. If you were from the American underground you'd have to come there. Then there was a popular English band, Family, with Roger Chapman. That was a brilliant band. And of course Marc Bolan, David Bowie. They all played there and drew later ideas. The good thing about that place is everybody watched you and everybody else and sometimes you might land onstage with them. So everybody was being influenced by everything. Bowie later obviously started his own scene in the '70s.

Q - When someone like John Lennon was in the club, could you have approached him and started talking to him?

A - Oh, yeah.

Q - If you were visiting London and you walked into the club, could you talk to someone like Lennon or Bowie or whoever else was there?

A - Yeah. You'd talk to people if you wanted. If you didn't, you'd just sit down and didn't talk. It didn't matter. Nobody got upset. Whatever you wanted to do, you did.

Q - I suppose if I had been in London at the time and seen those people in the club, I would've wanted to talk, but I probably would've been tongue-tied.

A - (laughs)

Q - At one point you were working as a painter and a carpenter. You painted houses?

A - Yeah. I went over to America, Austin (Texas) to get a record deal and that one fell through. So, I had to decide whether to go back to England or would I stay in Texas. I was married and had a young son and wanted to bring the family so I decided I'm going to do (it) and just get a job. At this stage I'd stopped touring. I'd never had one. I had no trade. First of all I became a carpenter.

Q - How'd you learn to do that?

A - My brother-in-law put me straight on to the big saw machine, cutting oak for stairs and floors and so I learned by doing it. I had a growing family so I needed money. I started house painting for a time, but I was also doing music.

Q - That brings us up to now. Are you still active in the music world?

A - I am still doing music. This year (2018) being the 50th anniversary of "Fire", the album is being re-released and last year I did Rockin' Rio which is one of the biggest festivals in the world. Alice Cooper invited me along to do three songs in his set. So, I performed and now it looks like I'm going to do some concerts in Chile. We play around Europe and we've got new material coming out. I'm still writing. I've got an English band and an American band. When I'm playing in Europe I do it with the English band. When I'm playing in America I do it with the American band.

Official Website: www.Arthur-Brown.com

© Gary James. All rights reserved.